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

The transformation of the salmon fishery in southeastern Alaska from an aboriginal resource to an industrial commodity was 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.