Review: The Fisherman’s Frontier: People and Salmon in Southeast Alaska By David F. Arnold Reviewed by David Jenkins Roundhouse Institute for Field Studies, Maine, USA Arnold, David F. The Fishermen’s Frontier: People and Salmon in Southeast Alaska. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2008. 296pp. ISBN 9780295987880. US$35.00 cloth. Acid-free paper. Ecosystems change quickly and dramatically with the introduction of humans, new technologies, or new ways of organizing labor. The problem for historians interested in how humans actively engage the natural world, as David Arnold demonstrates in this compelling book, is to remain focused on not only nature and culture, but the relationships between them. In this way, social history and environmental history become as entangled in analysis as they are in fact. Arnold agues that, prior to the arrival of Europeans, indigenous peoples’ (specifically, Tlingit and Haida) forms of exploiting Pacific salmon had the potential to damage salmon runs. Simple technologies—spears, wooden weirs, stone tidal traps—were remarkably effective for capturing salmon. Cultural practices, like ritual exchanges in the form of potlatches, and supernatural beliefs about animal spirits, mitigated long- term damage to salmon populations. Yet it was indigenous notions of property and territory that were the most significant factors for management of salmon fisheries. Ownership of specific territories limited fishing access to clan-owned rivers and streams. The maintenance of sufficient salmon resources ensured a clan’s prosperity and enhanced a clan leader’s prestige. Control of construction and use, fish weirs and traps allowed a leader to indicate who should fish, with what, and where. Even if the long-term result was sustained salmon yields, these sorts of goals “were not ‘ecological’ in nature, but rather social and cultural” (p. 37). Although native peoples doubtless overexploited salmon under certain circumstances, their defense of property rights and the environmental effects of territory ownership provided the social and ecological context for successful salmon management. This conclusion, Arnold notes, contradicts the commonly held stereotype of indigenous peoples living in harmony with the natural world. Tlingit and Haida resource management was founded upon a profound sense of ownership—of water, fish, land animals, plants, and specific territories. As Arnold points out, the importance Euro-Americans ascribed to property ownership was directly contradicted by their notions of an “open-access” fishery, which, in contrast to indigenous beliefs, promoted the idea of common property, open to exploitation by any and all. With European arrival in southeastern Alaska, an open-access ideology coupled to a frontier mentality undermined local values of territoriality, allowed for new forms of industrial exploitation of salmon fisheries, and set the scene for prolonged conflict over salmon which continues to the present day. The open-access fishery, however, was shot through with power relations, constrained by racial and ethnic identities, infused with gender inequalities, and, ultimately, failed. From Russian involvement in the late eighteenth century to American involvement in the nineteenth century to solidification of Alaska state control in the mid twentieth century, open access meant the diminishment of Indian exploitation of salmon resources, increased harvests, declining salmon populations, greater investment of capital in the form of canneries, boats, and fishing gear, and novel forms of human migration into the region. Arnold describes the social and cultural consequences of the complex mix of social, economic, and environmental relations, as the definition and use of the fishery shifted.
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Jun 11, 2014
Kaarina M Valer Jaime 
