Salmon and the Shape of Everything

Five species of Pacific salmon return to Alaska rivers every year, and they have been returning for longer than anyone has been keeping records. Chinook, sockeye, coho, pink, and chum salmon migrate from the open North Pacific, find the rivers where they were born, and die in them after spawning. Their decomposing bodies fertilize the riverbanks. The forests of Southeast Alaska carry measurable nitrogen isotopes from the North Pacific in the wood of trees that grew on salmon that came upstream and died in the shade.

For Alaska Native peoples, salmon were not a resource in the commercial sense. They were a calendrical event, a cultural practice, a spiritual relationship, and a food supply that shaped where villages were built, when people moved, and what defined a good year from a bad one. Every Alaska Native group with river or coastal access developed sophisticated technologies for catching, processing, and storing salmon: fish traps, weirs, drying racks, and fermentation practices that extended the harvest across the winter.

The commercial cannery industry arrived in Alaska in eighteen seventy-eight, first at Klawock and Sitka. By nineteen seventeen, there were more than three hundred canning facilities operating across the territory. The canneries imported cheap labor, first Chinese workers and later Filipino workers under an exploitative labor contractor system, rather than employing the Alaska Native communities beside whom they operated. The profits went to San Francisco and Seattle. The fish went to markets the people catching them would never reach.

The commercial fishery eventually damaged itself. Overfishing reduced sockeye runs in Bristol Bay dramatically by the nineteen thirties. Alaska pioneered sustained-yield fisheries management after statehood in nineteen fifty-nine, and the recovery of Alaska salmon runs since then is one of the genuine conservation success stories of the twentieth century. Today Alaska produces roughly sixty percent of the United States commercial salmon harvest.

The salmon are still returning. In most of the rivers, they still arrive on time.