The Fishermen's Frontier

People and Salmon in Southeast Alaska

David F. Arnold

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780295989754
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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.

1 First Fishermen

THE ABORIGINAL SALMON FISHERY

Aboriginal people lived with the fish for centuries, respectfully catching what they needed and taking care of the streams that produced a harvest essential to their way of life.—EDWARD C. WOLF AND SETH ZUCKERMAN, Salmon Nation: People, Fish, and Our Common Home

Our culture teaches us to take what you need, and never to waste.—HORACE MARKS, Tlingit fisherman

[Tlingits] inhabit the country only to extirpate everything that lives and moves upon it. At war with every animal, they ... are precisely on the earth what the vulture is in the air, or the wolf and tiger in the forest.—JEAN FRANÇOIS COMTE DE LA PÉROUSE, A Voyage round the World

In pleading with industrialists to conserve the dwindling stocks of Alaska salmon, Charles D. Garfield, a member of Alaska's Territorial Fish Commission, described Native Americans wantonly slaughtering spawning salmon with little concern for the future. In his visit to the Chilkat and Chilkoot rivers during the summer of 1919, Garfield apparently witnessed Indian fishermen “dragging every salmon they could possibly get out of the lake and stream.” The Indians he spoke with did not seem the least bit concerned that by “going up into the spawning streams and taking those fish out,” they were “preventing the spawning for the reproduction of the species.” He asked one Chilkat Tlingit fisherman, “What do you suppose is going to become of your birthright, your heritage?” The Indian replied: “Maybe I dead then when they all gone.” Garfield lamented that he found Native fishers throughout the region that told him “practically the same thing”: “They didn't care anything about their children, they didn't care anything about the future of the industry, all they cared was about themselves.”¹

In stereotyping Indian fishermen as wasteful, opportunistic, and myopic, Garfield was engaging in a long-standing Euro-American tradition of depicting Native Americans in self-serving ways. Since the time of European contact, Native American history and identity have been bound up with caricatures—the “idle savage,” the “barbarian savage,” the “noble savage.” Each stereotype expressed more about Euro-Americans than it did about Native Americans. The “idle savage” portrayed Indian peoples as lazy and undeserving of the vast “wild” territories that surrounded their villages. To a people like the English, who believed that land ownership carried with it the legal and moral responsibility of “improvement” (indeed, God had admonished humankind to “subdue” the earth), “idle” Indians therefore had no legitimate claim to the land. The ruthless and heathen character of the “barbarian savage” justified the military dispossession of his lands. Even the more romantic notion of the “noble savage,” which associated primitiveness with virtue, was used by Euro-Americans for their own purposes to critique modern society and, in the twentieth century, to promote conservation and environmental concerns.²

Garfield drew on a variant of the “idle savage” stereotype—that of the Indian as lazy, improvident, childlike, and helpless without the guiding hand of civilized whites. His use of Indians to convey the opposite of conservation is ironic, given that Indians were already being used as emblems of an emerging conservation ethic. By the turn of the twentieth century, a generation of Boy Scouts was learning to live like the “ideal Indian,” who “condemned accumulation, waste, wanton slaughter” and “held land, animals, and all property in common.”³ The icon of the “ecological Indian,” as historian Shepard Krech III has labeled this stereotype, gained ground in the post–World War II period as the environmental movement used images of nature-loving Native Americans to critique the greedy, materialistic, and wasteful character of modern American life. Increasingly, popular culture conveyed “the Indian in nature who understands the systemic consequences of his actions, feels deep sympathy with all living forms, and takes steps to conserve so that earth's harmonies are never imbalanced and resources never in doubt.”⁴

The nature of Indian ecology became a lively academic debate after the 1967 publication of anthropologist Paul Martin's “overkill hypothesis.” Martin argued that Paleo-Indians “exterminated far more large animals than has modern man with modern weapons and advanced technology,” causing the Pleistocene extinctions of numerous “megafauna.”⁵ The questions that form the heart of this ongoing discussion cut to the very essence of Native American cultures: Were they careful stewards of their natural resources? Were their societies sophisticated enough to overexploit their resources? Did they engage in wasteful and wanton destruction of the natural world? Were they “rational” economic actors who maximized productivity and material gain? Did their religions prevent them from destroying the natural world?

In his book The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, Krech contends that Native peoples could and sometimes did overexploit their environments; they did not always act in ecologically sound ways; and they had religious systems that posited an intimate relationship between humans and nature, but those beliefs did not always foster ecologically sound practices. If measured by modern definitions of “environmentalist,” “ecologist,” and “conservationist,” indigenous peoples in North America, even in the period before European contact, Krech suggests, were not the nature-loving Indians of popular mythology. Indians are humans, endowed with the same myopic capacity to destroy the landscape as other populations. The ecological Indian stereotype, he contends, is “ultimately dehumanizing” to Native Americans because it denies “both variation within human groups and commonalities between them.”⁶

This chapter examines the question of Native American resource conservation with regard to the salmon fisheries. The intention is not simply to use the ecological Indian stereotype as a straw man, but to use the concept as an invitation to ask serious questions about the nature of Indian environmental stewardship on the Northwest Coast. Did Native salmon fishermen have the technological capacity or the cultural inclination to overexploit salmon populations? Did they manage their fisheries with an eye toward the sustainability of the resource? Did they ever waste or overexploit salmon populations? What was the source of aboriginal salmon management—was it driven primarily by spiritual or ecological knowledge, or other factors?⁷

The Native peoples of Southeast Alaska—the Tlingit and Haida—believe that their ancestors were conservationists and ecologists. Indian fishers, in their view, did not waste salmon, as whites did when they arrived. Native fishers had an intimate relationship with salmon, in both the modern sense of ecological knowledge and the traditional sense of spiritual affinity, which has continued to the present. Sam G. Davis, a Haida Indian who was born in 1865 and had witnessed “traditional” salmon fishing as a child, testified that his ancestors “didn't try to clean those creeks out ... the same as they do today.” He continued: “They simply dried [salmon] until they thought that they had enough, and then they just opened it ... so that the fish could go on their way up to the lakes.”⁸

In 1944 proceedings on whether to establish reservations that would protect traditional Indian fishing sites in southeastern Alaska from further commercial intrusion, Davis and other Indian witnesses painted a picture of Native salmon fishers who understood the biological necessity of allowing a certain amount of fish to ascend to the spawning grounds. Like Krech's ecological Indians, Natives “used [salmon] as it came, as nature brought it to us,” and refused to “hoard,” “grab,” or “pile up the fish, the same as they do in America.”⁹ Sha-Ta, a Tlingit fisherman who likewise witnessed the preindustrial aboriginal fishery and the twentieth-century commercial one, explained that Natives “never made a practice of taking all the fish, or whatever it was from a certain area, because it was the custom always to leave some behind for seeding.”¹⁰ Tlingit elder George Dalton, interviewed in 1979 as part of a U.S. Forest Service study to record the “subsistence lifeways” of Indian peoples in Southeast Alaska, claimed that Indian fishermen only caught what each family required. “They were conservationists,” he recalled, “that's why there were so many fish in those days.”¹¹

Another Tlingit elder, Nelson Frank of Sitka, was interviewed by former Canadian Supreme Court Justice Thomas Berger in the early 1980s to document the importance of legally protecting Alaska Native subsistence rights in the wake of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, which had extinguished the aboriginal rights of Native peoples throughout the state. Frank described to Berger how “the relationship between the Native population and the resources of the land and the sea is so close that an entire culture is reflected.” He continued: “The Traditional law ... was passed from generation to generation, intact, through the repetition of legends and observance of ceremonials which were largely concerned with the use of land, water, and the resources contained therein. Subsistence living was not only a way of life, but also a life-enriching process. Conservation and perpetuation of subsistence resources was a part of that way of life, and was mandated by traditional law and custom.”¹²

Certainly these Native voices convey the unmistakable message of conservation and deliberate resource management. However, oral testimonies, like all primary historical sources, need to be placed within their proper context. Many of them are drawn from twentieth-century land and fishing rights hearings meant to legitimate aboriginal land claims, or from interviews intended to highlight the distinctive relationship between Native peoples and their lands. The land claims hearings are especially problematic, as non-Native judges were in the business of defining what constituted “authentic” Native American land use. The moral legitimacy of these claims often rested on Indian people's ability to highlight “traditional” relationships with the natural world, which in the twentieth century came to mean—quite unfairly—that Native Americans were only authentic when they acted as so-called ecological Indians. For Native peoples, appropriating the image of the ecological Indian could yield tangible results. This does not mean that their oral testimonies do not convey essential truths about Native American relationships to nature. But it does make uncritical acceptance of such sources problematic.

Is it true, as Native writer Nora Marks Dauenhauer has claimed of her ancestors, that “Tlingit people historically practiced subsistence hunting, fishing, and logging without dominating or destroying the natural resource”?¹³ Or did salmon peoples in Alaska have the technological capacity and cultural inclination to sometimes overtax their resources? Did they ever waste salmon? Did aboriginal salmon fishers practice a conservation ethic? Before addressing the question of Native resource management, however, we must first examine the nature of salmon populations and then the characteristics of the human populations that exploited them. Then we will find out if Native peoples in southeastern Alaska had the population density, technology, and motivation—in other words the potential—to overexploit their supply of salmon.

THE NATURE OF SALMON

How large were salmon populations on the Northwest Coast before the arrival of Europeans—or even before the arrival of humans altogether? One answer is certain: however large, salmon runs in the North Pacific fluctuated dramatically as they adapted to a multitude of geologic and climatic transformations. A quick history of the development of the Pacific salmon species is a case study in natural flux, and an admonition to anyone who would think of nature unaltered by humans as stable and balanced.

It is not known when the earliest ancestors of the salmon branched off from the larger family of ray-finned fishes, but the earliest salmonidae fossil found on the Northwest Coast dates back to around forty million years ago.¹⁴ Between forty and twenty million years ago ancestral salmon, who most likely lived their entire lives in freshwater systems, experienced a global warming trend that saw their food supplies decrease in terrestrial water bodies—streams, rivers, and lakes—while productivity increased in the cooler Pacific ocean. Unable to survive and prosper solely in their freshwater environment, early salmon responded by developing their distinctive anadromous life cycle: birth and early development in freshwater, migration to more fertile oceanic feeding grounds (where they gain more than 90 percent of their body mass), and return to their natal streams to spawn and die.¹⁵

Between twenty and six million years ago Pacific salmon adapted to the dramatic reformulation of the western American landscape, as geologic cataclysms created the coastal mountains that run from northern California to Alaska. These upheavals created a new waterscape of rivers, streams, and lakes, inducing the Pacific salmon to branch into five distinctive species, each equipped to take advantage of a unique ecological niche. Pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha), the most abundant species in southeastern Alaska, spawned in the lower reaches of short coastal streams; silver salmon, or coho (O. kisutch), preferred shallow tributaries or narrow side channels; red salmon, or sockeye (O. nerka), returned to the gravel shoals of lakes; king salmon, or chinook (O. tshawytscha), spawned in the main channels of large streams and mainland rivers; and the spawning habitat of chum salmon (O. keta), the second most abundant species in the region, ranged from the tidal flats of short coastal streams to springs in headwaters of large river systems.¹⁶ As geologist David R. Montgomery has explained, “The salmon and the topography of western North America appear to have evolved together in response to tectonic forces that drove mountain building along the West Coast.”¹⁷ If the emergence of mountain ranges was not enough, Pacific salmon also weathered at least ten glacial advances in the period between two million and ten thousand years ago, before experiencing another five thousand years of instability, as sea levels rose and coastal areas flooded in the wake of the last ice age.

Not all species of Pacific salmon made it through these cataclysms. At least one became extinct: the gigantic “sabertooth salmon,” for example, which grew up to ten feet long and 350 pounds, did not survive the ice.¹⁸ The five species that persevered had to deal with still further hardships: volcanic eruptions that smothered salmon habitats; earthquakes that collapsed entire mountainsides into streams and rivers, causing obstructions as great as modern dams; forest fires that decimated vegetation alongside stream beds, leading to warmer water temperatures and triggering erosion that dramatically altered spawning grounds; droughts that diminished water flows and stranded young salmon in isolated pools. If salmon made it through such biblical-scale disasters, they still had to deal with more quotidian dangers, like natural predation from eagles, bears, and marine mammals, and cyclical swings in ocean temperatures, which altered feeding areas and introduced warm water competitors into northern waters. For salmon the “stabilization” of the North Pacific coastline around five thousand years ago did not mean “stability.” There never was a golden age of ecological “climax,” where salmon populations maintained a state of balance and abundance. The numbers of salmon rose and fell. They faced temporary extinctions due to catastrophe in certain streams, only to recolonize those streams when conditions improved. A dynamic nature ensured the variability of salmon populations.

Since Pacific salmon, in the words of biologist Jim Lichatowich, “had to survive millions of years of cataclysmic habitat disruption,” they developed amazing survival mechanisms that allowed them to adapt to such adversity.¹⁹ First, their breeding patterns are profligate. Spawning salmon produce thousands of eggs. Even though most of them never make it out of the spawning grounds to begin their journey to the ocean, and very few of them make it through their entire life cycle and return to their birth streams, salmon still produce enough offspring to ensure that salmon populations will grow until they push up against the limitations of their environment. Second, the anadromous habits of salmon ensured that even when terrestrial ecosystems failed due to natural disaster, salmon populations at sea were saved from catastrophe. Finally, the small percentage of salmon who “strayed” from their birth streams served as pioneers in the colonization or recolonization of new waterways.²⁰ Salmon were “pioneers” or “ecological imperialists” (depending on one's perspective) long before humans arrived on the scene.

So what does this “prehistory” of Pacific salmon tell us about the size of salmon populations before human occupation of the far Northwest Coast? One conclusion is that prehistoric salmon runs were so variable that they are impossible to predict. Another interpretation might be that the salmon's extreme adaptability, resilience, and fecundity ensured that, even though erratic, ...