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

Introduction: The Fishermen's Frontier in Southeast Alaska

Introduction the fishermen’s frontier in southeast alaska Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that grey vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is history. —derek walcott, “The Sea Is History” The idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history.—raymond williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture S urveying the literature on the Pacific salmon fisheries, one notices a distinct trend. It is primarily about decline. It echoes a larger narrative about the destruction of the natural environment under the forces of colonization, capitalism, and industrialization. It is a story of the mythic natural abundance that existed in North America before the arrival of Europeans —“of flights of passenger pigeons so numerous they darkened the sky, of herds of bison that shook the earth as they passed, of forests so dense that a squirrel could walk from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River without touching the ground”—and of the propensity of humans to transform those natural resources into individual wealth.1 It is about the myopic inability of Americans to see any limits to their own exploitation of the natural world until, inevitably, the resource is destroyed. It is a story about fourteen species of Pacific salmon that are extinct or reside on the endangered species list, with more teetering on the edge of the same fate. The storyline is suggested in the titles of studies that speak of “abundance to extinction,” 3 “salmon without rivers,” “the Northwest fisheries crisis,” the “decline of the Alaska salmon,” and “the fisherman’s problem.”2 This is also a story about the Pacific salmon fisheries, but it is not a tale of environmental decline. In Southeast Alaska* there is still an ecologically healthy—if not economically sound—salmon fishery. No variety of wild Alaska salmon is considered o‹cially “endangered” by the Environmental Protection Agency. In the 1990s, while salmon fisheries on the Columbia River and throughout the Puget Sound dwindled to all-time lows, commercial harvests in Alaska reached all-time highs. The year 1995 saw the largest recorded salmon catch in Alaska’s history; ten years later, in 2005, the commercial harvest was the third biggest on record.3 In other words this book is not a postmortem. The salmon fishery in Alaska is still alive, entangling salmon, fishermen, industrialists, scientists, and consumers in a living web of biological and human activity that has continued for thousands of years. While this study is not a jeremiad on the fate of salmon in Alaska, neither is it an uncritical celebration of the progress of an industry under scienti fic resource management, for the story of salmon fishing in southeastern Alaska has its share of winners and losers. Animals, humans, and the inanimate natural world alike have all shared roles as heroes and villains in a drama that has seen the fortunes of fish and fishermen rise and fall. As in the declining fisheries further south, southeastern Alaska has seen the impact of colonization, capitalism, industrialization, scientific management, and globalization. Unlike those southern fisheries, however, the salmon fishery in southeastern Alaska is not currently in a state of ecological crisis. The fishery—although its stability is threatened by many factors, including long-term climate shifts and the rise of global salmon farming—is still alive. Salmon fishermen, although their livelihoods are seriously imperiled by market forces, can still scrape a living from the sea. My objective with this book was to write a history of a living salmon fishery—and salmon fishermen—from precontact to the present. For landlubbers unfamiliar with the term “fishery,” it refers simply to the act of catching and processing fish. A fishery, however, is also composed of laws, economic and social relationships, cultural attitudes, and even religious systems . I use the term to refer to a wide-ranging set of social and environmental relationships among the environment, humans, and fish that emerged in Alaska when humans began to catch salmon and use it for their 4 Introduction: The Fishermen’s Frontier in Southeast Alaska *Native Alaskans use “Southeast Alaska” whereas writers and scholars from outside the state tend to use “southeastern Alaska.” I use the terms interchangeably throughout the book. own purposes. In this book the environment is Southeast Alaska—a long, narrow strip of coastal range and archipelago that extends northward along...