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

4. Work, Nature, Race, and Culture on the Fishermen's Frontier, 1900s–1950s

4 Work, Nature, Race, and Culture on the Fishermen’s Frontier, 1900s–1950s To watch gillnetters at work was to witness an elaborately choreographed dance of fish, river, and men. The habits of fish, the hydraulics of the river, and the organized labor of men all intersected. Labor and nature merged. —richard white, The Organic Machine “You know, Ott, we got to do something soon,” Henry continued. “Something. Else we’ll end up like the purse-seine fishermen with the sardines. When’s the last time you saw a sardine in a salmon’s belly? They caught ‘em all. Wiped out because fishermen couldn’t get together for a price and the canneries knew it. The boats fished nonstop, from sundown to sunup, for years, just to break even. In the end, the fish were all gone.” —michael köepf, The Fisherman’s Son There should exist the condition in which laboring men of one craft would not cut the throats of the laboring men of another. —“the fisherman’s union,” Alaska Fisherman, 1926 T he salmon fishery in Southeast Alaska was nothing if not a landscape of work: salmon labored upstream, fishermen labored to catch them, cannery workers to process them, and fisheries managers to conserve them. The process began with the salmon—but was quickly elaborated by humans into systems of economic organization and webs of social andculturalmeaning.FromtheNativeAmericanfisherytothemoderncommercial fishery, fishermen pulled salmon from rivers and bays and, in doing so, they created economies, cultures, traditions, communities, and identi120 ties. The salmon and waterways were natural, but the fishery was a human construction. This is not to say that fishing was not natural—humans catching fish was as natural as the tides—or that nature was fully contained within human constructions. Indeed, much of what aªected fishermen—the fluctuations induced by climate change, the tides, and migratory habits of the fish—were beyond the scope of human control. In this sense the movements of both salmon and fishermen were “natural.” Historian Richard White, whose book The Organic Machine tries to put nature back into human history by showing how humans have historically known nature through work, has suggested that nature was not only the “salmon swimming” and “the river flowing,” but also “humans fishing.”1 The diªerence between human work and the migrations of the salmon or the shifting of the tides was that the latter occurred without the fanfare of consciousness and culture while the former was organized socially and inscribed with cultural meaning. Fishermen constructed identities as frontiersmen, rugged individualists, subsistence gatherers, and tribal traditionalists; they joined unions and tribal brotherhoods, and they subdivided the fishery by race, ethnicity, craft, geographic location, and occupation. Fishermen shared common experiences: all were aªected by world markets , government regulations, fluctuating fish stocks, and their everyday interactions with wind, tide, and weather. All of them—Indian and white— engaged in a tug of war between the forces of tradition and modernization. But fishermen came to know nature diªerently depending on their culture and the larger context in which they labored. Indians and whites experienced work and nature in distinctive ways, as did trollers, gillnetters, purseseiners , subsistence fishers, and so on. This chapter examines the varied ways that fishermen took the economic necessity of fishing and elaborated it into distinctive work cultures and identities. Three themes are especially important . First, the relationship between work and nature: how did fishermen come to know nature through work, and how did they construct identities born of this relationship between work and nature? Second, the social construction of the fishery: how did the natural act of fishing become demarcated not only by the patterns of fish migrations, but also by the social geography of race, ethnicity, and culture? Third, how did fishermen’s unions and Native brotherhoods reflect both the natural and social dimensions of the fishery? Work, Nature, Race, and Culture on the Fishermen’s Frontier, 1900s–1950s 121 work and nature on the fishermen’s frontier The conventional storyline of modern humans and their relationship to nature is well known. With the Industrial Revolution older ways of knowing nature through work were eliminated. Workers became alienated from the natural world. Industrialization and urbanization dislocated farmers and peasants from rural living, pushing them into urban factories where modern work made them mere tools of industrial capitalism, laboring against nature rather than within it. In America this...