In The Fishermen's Frontier, David Arnold examines the economic,
social, cultural, and political context in which salmon have been
harvested in southeast Alaska over the past 250 years. He starts with
the aboriginal fishery, in which Native fishers lived in close
connection with salmon ecosystems and developed rituals and lifeways
that reflected their intimacy.
The transformation of the salmon fishery in southeastern Alaska from an
aboriginal resource to an industrial commodity has been fraught with
historical ironies. Tribal peoples -- usually considered egalitarian and
communal in nature -- managed their fisheries with a strict notion of
property rights, while Euro-Americans -- so vested in the notion of
property and ownership -- established a common-property fishery when
they arrived in the late nineteenth century. In the twentieth century,
federal conservation officials tried to rationalize the fishery by
"improving" upon nature and promoting economic efficiency, but their
uncritical embrace of scientific planning and their disregard for local
knowledge degraded salmon habitat and encouraged a backlash from
small-boat fishermen, who clung to their "irrational" ways. Meanwhile,
Indian and white commercial fishermen engaged in identical labors, but
established vastly different work cultures and identities based on
competing notions of work and nature.
Arnold concludes with a sobering analysis of the threats to present-day
fishing cultures by forces beyond their control. However, the salmon
fishery in southeastern Alaska is still very much alive, entangling
salmon, fishermen, industrialists, scientists, and consumers in a living
web of biological and human activity that has continued for thousands of
years.
