Ragged Coast, Rugged Coves: Labor, Culture, and Politics in Southeast Alaska by Diane J. Purvis

Abstract

For many centuries, successive waves of humans have tried to claim Alaska’s natural bounty. Like other locations in the global history of settler colonialism, this corner of North America has produced untidy stories. Close study of class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sexuality in other places has revealed the circumstances of settler colonialism, how Indigenous Peoples were displaced and dispossessed, but also how subalterns, including Indigenous people, contributed to dispossession.1 Alaska’s past also contains these topsy-turvy stories, but its historiography has usually overlooked the messiness in favor of narratives that pit victimized locals against evil outsiders. Purvis’ Ragged Coast, Rugged Coves is the most recent example of this simplifying tendency, which is unfortunate because she uses a clever methodology to pursue themes often marginalized in previous works, even if the result is worn and unsatisfying.The book’s greatest achievement is also, paradoxically, its greatest weakness. Purvis has mined secondary studies and oral histories to foreground women and Indigenous people in southeast Alaska’s salmon industry. Canneries, she correctly argues, “were a historical test tube filled with distant elements, capable of producing an observational study of multidimensional ethnocentrism and racialization, inherent conflicts, and class warfare” (283). She draws from previous works about Alaska, salmon, and cannery workers to show how Chinese, Filipino, Haida, Japanese, Tlingit, and Tsimshian men and women battled capital, each other, and themselves. Her ability to build new stories from old studies is admirable. Marginal figures in previous publications move center-stage to foreground gender and race. Her information-mining operation could even leverage a historiographical critique about these lacunae, but instead it is merely a bypass of the archives. The results are lifeless renderings of key actors. Individuals and groups serve as heroes—especially the Paul family, the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood, several white politicians, and unions—or villains—including a faceless federal government, the Puget Sound- and California-based packing companies, and a severely under-analyzed Winton Arnold, head of Alaska Salmon Industry, Inc.These flaws are symptoms of a shortsightedness plaguing the book and the field more generally. The insider–outsider structure of Alaskan history reflects real asymmetries in political and market power. The federal government and corporations did dictate how Alaska's natural resources were managed and who enjoyed the benefits. Public and private administrators did systematically marginalize Indigenous Peoples and smallholders. Salmon traps—an incredibly efficient, heavily capitalized fishing technology that monopolized streams to the detriment of local interests—did function as an engine of colonialism. These traps did capture salmon while blocking Indigenous and non-indigenous smallholders from access to the resource, and the Commerce Department and Fish and Wildlife Service did back trap users even beyond the moment of statehood. Purvis, following the lead of nearly every previous historian, deploys traps as a literary shorthand for colonialism, but she never explains how the traps worked or why they were so resented; nor does she note the irony that the loudest opponents of traps were white settler colonials.Similar blind spots affect the portrayal of industry and nature. Although Alaskans and their historians regularly condemned the packing companies that invaded every spring to exploit the salmon runs, locals lacked sufficient capital to enter this global market on their own. They needed the infiltrators in ways that neither Purvis nor other historians have acknowledged. Native and non-native communities may have hated the big packers, but those employers were often their best source of hard currency in an otherwise extremely peripheral economy. Most problematically, the nature upon which this story rests lacks agency. Oceans go unheeded despite a wealth of scientific and historical research showing how atmospheric and marine systems shaped cycles of abundance and dearth. Salmon are merely the objects of human avarice rather than dynamic biological colonizers, relentlessly repopulating streams despite intense fishing, development, and even volcanic and glacial disruptions. Purvis uses these frameworks to build an internally contradictory declensionist narrative: Salmon runs collapse, in one case to “unrecoverable” levels, only to rebound inexplicably on the very next page (281); Indigenous people suffer an “inevitable” loss of culture, only to become significant economic and cultural players through native corporations (36). The effect is bewildering and unsatisfying.Ragged Coast, Rugged Coves succeeds, however, in foregrounding the role of women and Indigenous people in shaping the laboring experience inside Alaska’s salmon canneries during the early twentieth century. But even at its strongest, the book tends to tell, rather than show, and the paucity of archival research produces flattened portraits of people, places, and nature in a tale that should live and breathe.