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

2. The Industrial Transformation of the Indian Salmon Fishery, 1780s–1910s

2 The Industrial Transformation of the Indian Salmon Fishery, 1780s–1910s By and by they began to build canneries and take the creeks away from us . . . and when we told them these creeks belonged to us, they would not pay any attention to us and said all this country belonged to President, the big chief at Washington. . . . We make this complaint because we are very poor now. The time will come when we will not have anything left. . . . We also ask [the chief at Washington] to return our creeks and the hunting grounds that white people have taken away from us. —kah-du-shan, Tlingit chief The Indians of the Territory are not dependent upon Uncle Sam as are those of the States. They do not live upon reservations. The government provides native schools, and helps in every way possible to the natives’ best development, but the Indians are self-supporting. They have quickly adapted themselves to the changes which the opening of the Territory has brought. They have their cooperative stores, their canneries and sawmills, their power launches, their neat, pretty homes. —agnes rush burr, Alaska: Our Beautiful Northland of Opportunity I n Alaska contact and colonization occurred in three overlapping phases: the maritime fur trade (1785–1825), Russian colonization (1795– 1867), and American settlement and industrialization after 1867. For Native peoples these developments paralleled those experienced by American Indians further south. Newcomers arrived in their midst, armed with deadly microbes and charged with the desire to transform natural resources into quick profits. Tlingit and Haida fishermen maintained their control over the salmon fishery during the fur trade but were supremely challenged by the rise of salmon canning in the late 1870s. The industry commodified 40 an animal whose value, in the view of Native fishers, was more than purely economic.Takentogether,theprocessesof contact,colonization,commerce, and industrialization transformed the social and environmental landscape of southeast Alaska forever. From the perspective of Native peoples, these developments heralded change but not cultural annihilation. In California and Oregon the vectors of diseaseandcivilizationwerefarmorecatastrophic,sweepingNativepeoples to the margins and leaving behind a landscape almost unrecognizable as a result of mining, farming, and the growth of cities. Alaska’s remote location and northern climate meant that farming did not take hold on a largescale basis, population growth did not occur rapidly, and the related processes of white settlement—damming, deforestation, urbanization— were not conducted with the same swift and destructive force experienced further south. Moreover, the cultural characteristics of Tlingit and Haida peoples allowed them to creatively adapt to changes, maintaining their cultural footing on uncertain ground. For the Pacific salmon, the story was more destructive, but it did not culminate in the kind of crisis and collapse that occurred on the Sacramento and Columbia rivers. The much sought-after sockeye, with its eminently marketable rich red flesh, was aggressively pursued by an ever-growing and increasingly mechanized fleet of commercial fishermen. The abundant pink salmon was largely neglected until the 1910s, when declining sockeye harvests and increasing demand for canned salmon fueled by World War I led to the proliferation of canneries throughout the region. The life cycle of wild salmon—already challenged by the natural dangers of environmental instability—wasnowthreatenedbyoverfishing.Theresultwasthatthelivelihoods of certain salmon runs and the humans that depended on them— especially Native Americans—were increasingly jeopardized, although not altogether ruined. Indian peoples actively responded to such developments . Salmon, however, had little room to maneuver. Although not technically passive objects of human exploitation, the salmon increasingly depended on human actions for their survival. the maritime fur trade and russian settlement: balancing trade and subsistence Contemporary historians have often searched for ways to acknowledge that at certain times and certain places, Native peoples wielded power over their The Industrial Transformation of the Indian Salmon Fishery, 1780s–1910s 41 European invaders. They argue that indigenous peoples were not just “passive victims” of imperialism and colonization but active agents of their own destinies. Given the extent to which Native populations in North America were devastated by disease and forced from their lands and lifestyles by Euro-Americans,thisviewof NativeAmericanempowermentcanbegreatly overstated. It is not overstated, however, with regards to the maritime fur trade that developed between Tlingit and Haida peoples and Euro-American traders. The fur trade was one of the few instances in the history of IndianEuropean relations where both sides essentially got what they wanted and where...