Fishermen's Frontier

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. The book is about Native and Euro-American fishermen, local fishing communities, industrialists, and resource managers and the ways in which these various groups have imagined, shaped, exploited, and managed the salmon fishery and its resources, arranging it to conform to understandable patterns of social organization and endowing it with cultural meaning. The transformation of the salmon fishery in south-eastern 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 labours, 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 south-eastern 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. David F. Arnold is professor of history at Columbia Basin College, Pasco, Washington.