The Fishermen's Frontier: People and Salmon in Southeast Alaska

1. First Fishermen: The Aboriginal Salmon Fishery

1 First Fishermen the aboriginal salmon fishery Aboriginal people lived with the fish for centuries, respectfully catching what they needed and taking care of the streams that produced a harvest essential to their way of life. —edward c. wolf and seth zuckerman, Salmon Nation: People, Fish, and Our Common Home Our culture teaches us to take what you need, and never to waste. —horace marks, Tlingit fisherman [Tlingits] inhabit the country only to extirpate everything that lives and moves upon it. At war with every animal, they . . . are precisely on the earth what the vulture is in the air, or the wolf and tiger in the forest. —jean françois comte de la pérouse, A Voyage round the World I n pleading with industrialists to conserve the dwindling stocks of Alaska salmon, Charles D. Garfield, a member of Alaska’s Territorial Fish Commission , described Native Americans wantonly slaughtering spawning salmon with little concern for the future. In his visit to the Chilkat and Chilkoot rivers during the summer of 1919, Garfield apparently witnessed Indian fishermen “dragging every salmon they could possibly get out of the lake and stream.” The Indians he spoke with did not seem the least bit concerned that by “going up into the spawning streams and taking those fish out,” they were “preventing the spawning for the reproduction of the species.” He asked one Chilkat Tlingit fisherman, “What do you suppose is going to become of your birthright, your heritage?” The Indian replied: “Maybe I dead then when they all gone.” Garfield lamented that he found 13 Native fishers throughout the region that told him “practically the same thing”: “They didn’t care anything about their children, they didn’t care anything about the future of the industry, all they cared was about themselves.”1 In stereotyping Indian fishermen as wasteful, opportunistic, and myopic, Garfield was engaging in a long-standing Euro-American tradition of depicting Native Americans in self-serving ways. Since the time of European contact, Native American history and identity have been bound up with caricatures—the “idle savage,” the “barbarian savage,” the “noble savage .” Each stereotype expressed more about Euro-Americans than it did about Native Americans. The “idle savage” portrayed Indian peoples as lazy and undeserving of the vast “wild” territories that surrounded their villages. To a people like the English, who believed that land ownership carried with it the legal and moral responsibility of “improvement” (indeed, God had admonished humankind to “subdue” the earth), “idle” Indians therefore had no legitimate claim to the land. The ruthless and heathen character of the “barbarian savage” justified the military dispossession of his lands. Even the more romantic notion of the “noble savage,” which associated primitiveness with virtue, was used by Euro-Americans for their own purposes to critique modern society and, in the twentieth century, to promote conservation and environmental concerns.2 Garfield drew on a variant of the “idle savage” stereotype—that of the Indian as lazy, improvident, childlike, and helpless without the guiding hand of civilized whites. His use of Indians to convey the opposite of conservation is ironic, given that Indians were already being used as emblems of an emerging conservation ethic. By the turn of the twentieth century, a generation of Boy Scouts was learning to live like the “ideal Indian,” who “condemned accumulation, waste, wanton slaughter” and “held land, animals, and all property in common.”3 The icon of the “ecological Indian,” as historian Shepard Krech III has labeled this stereotype, gained ground in the post–World War II period as the environmental movement used images of nature-loving Native Americans to critique the greedy, materialistic, and wasteful character of modern American life. Increasingly, popular culture conveyed “the Indian in nature who understands the systemic consequences of his actions, feels deep sympathy with all living forms, and takes steps to conserve so that earth’s harmonies are never imbalanced and resources never in doubt.”4 The nature of Indian ecology became a lively academic debate after the 1967 publication of anthropologist Paul Martin’s “overkill hypothesis.” Mar14 First Fishermen: The Aboriginal Salmon Fishery tin argued that Paleo-Indians “exterminated far more large animals than has modern man with modern weapons and advanced technology,” causing the Pleistocene extinctions of numerous “megafauna.”5 The questions that form the heart of this ongoing discussion cut to the very essence of Native American cultures...