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REVIEWS
THE FISHERMEN'S FRONTIER: PEOPLE AND SALMON IN SOUTHEAST ALASKA
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by David F. Arnold
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| University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2008. Illustrations, photographs, charts, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 296 pages. $35.00 cloth. |
| Books about fish tend to be tales of decline. This is especially true of the large literature about Pacific salmon, chronicling the destruction of the resource at the hands of people who have not understood, or have refused to accept, what the fish need to survive. A welcome exception is David F. Arnold's portrait of the small-boat fishery and fishermen of Southeast Alaska. It is a fishery that is ecologically healthy, if not necessarily economically sound, and if that seems to be a paradox, that is because it is a fishing culture as varied and changeable as the fish themselves. |
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Arnold, a professor of history at Columbia Basin College who has spent time as a small-boat fisherman, has written "a history of a living salmon fishery — and salmon fishermen — from pre-contact to the present" (p. 4). Inspired by historian Richard White, Arnold has explored the deep connections between salmon and humans — an intimacy fostered largely through work — asking the question, is there anything intrinsically valuable in the continued existence of local, small-boat fishing cultures? In answering the question, Arnold has untangled some of the social and environmental relationships between humans and fish along the Alaska Panhandle and discussed how these relationships have shifted and evolved in response to outside forces. |
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Arnold's is a thoughtful and insightful examination. Take the example of the fish trap: the early Native people used weirs to trap salmon on rivers; the early fishery canneries used traps for the same purpose, until they were outlawed in 1959. But now, biologists are considering bringing fish traps back as a method for sorting hatchery fish from wild fish, using a harvest tool to perpetuate the runs. |
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The most detailed section of Arnold's book deals with the early aboriginal fishery and the three waves of colonization in Southeast Alaska: maritime fur traders, exploitation by Russia, and exploitation by Americans after 1867. Early settlement emerged where the salmon were most easily exploited. Because the runs have often been as concentrated as they have been variable, Native peoples developed efficient systems for capturing fish. They also developed a system of property rights that acted to limit fishing intensity. The goals were not ecological but social and cultural, since abundant resources guaranteed the prosperity of the clan and prestige of the clan leader. |
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It was Euro-Americans who, vested in the ideas of property and ownership, created an open access fishery that allowed industrial-scale development and the near-destruction of many runs. The European fur traders and the Russians did not have the manpower or technology to fully exploit the fisheries, but the Americans did. Local salmon fisheries became global as they passed from Indian to American control, creating a bewilderingly contested terrain — Alaskans versus outsiders, corporations against independent small fishermen, trollers versus gillnetters, state versus the federal government. It was a messy mix, and Arnold devotes only one chapter to the events between 1950 and 2000. That tightly compresses the post-war transformation of the fishery, statehood in Alaska, the rise of Native corporations, and the international development of fish farms for Atlantic salmon — forces that continue to influence the survival of the Southeast Alaskan fishery. An additional chapter would have been welcome. |
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Arnold glides lightly over the role of fisheries science and management, writing that managers were moving toward an ecological approach after 1903, which predates by more than two decades the first enunciation of what would come to be called ecology. While there were early scientists concerned that runs were being overharvested, a systematic investigation of what was needed to perpetuate the Alaskan runs did not begin until after 1945, in the wake of overharvest by the federal government during the war. |
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Still, the focus here is firmly on the small-boat fishermen or, as economists would say, the socially motivated subsisters, who have managed to survive even as they have failed to flourish. When Alaska finally acted to limit the number of fishermen in 1972, it professionalized the fleet — but it also squeezed out many of the small fishermen, both Native and non-Native, who could not afford the increasingly expensive licenses and boats. |
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The continued survival of the fishermen is certainly in doubt, given the global market economy that pressures local communities, fish farms that hurt wild fish prices, and warming ocean temperatures. Arnold's book is about how the Southeast Alaskan fishery has had to react to outside forces; that the fishery has survived at all is a testimony to the variability of the salmon themselves, and to the opportunities that they offer for the people living on the edge of this last vestige of the American frontier. |
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| Carmel Finley
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| Corvallis, Oregon |
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