Billy Budd, Choker-Setter: Native Culture and Indian Work in the Southeast Alaska Timber Industry

Kirk Dombrowski John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Abstract This article discusses the effects of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 on the timber industry in Southeast Alaska from the perspective of Alaska Native “choker setters.” Choker setters form lowest wrung on the logging production hierarchy, providing much of the labor involved in deep woods harvests. The argument that emerges from this material highlights the importance of a distinction between the relations of work and the relations of production in advancing anthropological notions of culture, while em- phasizing the continuing importance of culture and meaning for understanding class- based social processes. The primary material for the article is based on fourteen months of ethnographic ﬁeldwork in Southeast Alaska by the author.

The man I will call “Billy” stopped by while Joe and I were working on fish in the yard.1 He had heard we had some king salmon, and he was hoping for a ride to Craig, if we were going. He was a little drunk though it was only about ten o’clock in the morning. It was the first time I had met Billy though I had seen him around Hydaburg,2 and he was very friendly—which is not always the case for me when I am in Southeast Alaska, particularly in the native villages located on the outside of the archipelago. Joe asked him if he had been working. He said he had not, not for a few weeks, but that he was going back now and that was the reason he was going to town, to see if there was any work around. Joe seemed to think he would have no trouble finding work and said so, more as a known fact than a compliment. Billy did not respond. Joe said that we would come get him if we were going to town and gave him some fish. After he left I asked about the work. Billy is a choker-setter with one Alaskan logging outfit or another, which means that after a tree has been taken down, he climbs up the side of the mountain, over the other felled trees, with a (roughly) thirty foot long, three-quarter-inch-thick steel cable that he puts around the tree and cinches up tight by passing the cable through a metal noose like fitting on one end—called a “choker.” The cable is then attached to a hook from a tower crane and the tree is hoisted up and maneuvered to the road. There it is put on a truck and taken down the mountain to a sort yard and eventually sent to Korea or Japan. Joe, like Billy, is an Alaska Native, and he also once worked in timber. He

International Labor and Working-Class History No. 62, Fall 2002, pp. 121–142 © 2002 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 122 ILWCH, 62, Fall 2002 is now well past forty, the father of several children and a family man. He worked as a heavy equipment driver in the past, a skill he learned in the boom days of labor back in the 1970s, working on the pipeline. He did “road work” for a while, after his return from Fairbanks, but he doesn’t any more. He set chokers only briefly, when he was young, and took advantage of work available outside the region to get out of choker setting and get trained. Now, when there is little work even for someone with his skills, he prefers to go fishing or hunting and depend on the income of his spouse rather than go back into timber work. This is not entirely his choice. Very few logging outfits would hire someone his age for a la- boring job anyway. Even if he wanted to (which he says he does not), it is unlikely that he could get a job as a choker setter. Choker setting is the lowest rung on the logging production hierarchy. It is physically grueling and few can or do stay at it past their late twenties. Billy is in his mid-to-late-twenties, I would guess, and getting toward the point where he will not be able to do the work anymore. The cable that the choker setters work with weighs about forty pounds. The ground they move over is recently logged and usually a contesseration of felled trees up to six feet in diameter and over a hundred feet long, interspersed with the limbs of previously felled trees and bushes and small trees not worth cutting. The real ground is often ten or more feet below the surface on which people work, and the cracks and holes between the logs are just as deep, more dangerous with the constant rain which makes the logs slick. In Southeast Alaska, choker setting is a job commonly worked by Indians, like Billy, and it is often the only job that Indians hold in an Alaskan logging outfit. “You have to be part animal to do that job,” Joe said. Embedded in this phrase is a dense mixture of admiration and denigration, pride of self (for having once been able to the do the job), and ethnic pride coupled with the realization that such work is debilitating and thankless and brings with it a host of prejudices that mock the very attributes required. For Joe, older and more in touch with the sorts of politics that make possible jobs like choker setting and simultaneously the Indians needed to fill them, this ambivalent compliment is made alongside the realization that even the difficult life offered to natives by labor in the logging industry is itself coming to an end. It is under- mined by cheaper and more compliant labor from “Mexico,” by the ecological devastation of years of clear cutting, by the politics of making and unmaking native claims in Alaska, and by the gradual diminution of subsistence hunting and fishing as an alternative to the industrial labor prescribed by development ex- perts.

Work and Production in Marxist Anthropology Anthropology’s relationship with Marxism continues to provoke important con- siderations for both sides, although this relationship has been intermittent at best and, at times, virtually subterranean. In part, its uneven history derives from Native Culture and Indian Work in the Southeast Alaska Timber Industry 123 anthropology’s early primitivism, such that for a long time anthropology looked to Marxists like source material illustrating contemporary examples of pre-capitalist economic formations rather than a discipline contributing to sociological sorts of Marxist study.3 In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, however, anthropological interest in work and workers reintroduced anthropological fieldwork material (rather than just anthropological concepts, like “culture”) back into the Marxist discussions, beginning with June Nash’s influential We Eat the Mines.4 Since this time, anthropologists have participated more directly in Marx- ist and work-centered discussions, particularly as global capital has looked further abroad for labor.5 Yet throughout, the distinction between the relations of work and the relations of production has been less critical to anthropology than it has been to mainstream Marxist sociology.6 In many anthropological accounts of the labor process the focus remains on the experience of work, framed most frequently as the experience of a whole new system of production. This emphasis on experience has brought to bear anthropological fieldwork rather than just anthropological concepts, but has often involved, implicitly or explicitly, a problematic merging of work and production, as William Roseberry discusses in his Anthropologies and Histories.7 One result of this tendency is that anthropological studies of work have shifted their focused away from questions of property and political economy per se, and centered mainly on questions of ideology (an emphasis that began short- ly after Nash’s book, with a reassessment of her material by Michael Taussig).8 This focus on ideology has raised useful problems for conventional notions of culture within anthropology, while raising equally troubling questions for the notion of experience in Marxist circles, and has thus been, on balance, a very pos- itive move.9 But the blurring of work and production remains problematic, mainly because experience and ideology have been treated as particularly individual processes—class-based only in the sense that they are sometimes thought to be common to many people. Here I follow Gerald Sider in seeking to rein- troduce a distinction between the relations of work and the relations of production in ways that draw attention to issues of ideology, subjectivity, and those things that anthropologists have usually called culture, while trying to avoid be- coming entangled in questions of individual experience and without falling back on a notion of culture as simply the cognitive/symbolic background from which particular people meet and resist capital.10 In what follows, I frame this argument against a reading of Raymond Williams’ notion of “structure of feeling.”11 Williams’ structure of feeling is familiar to Marxist and anthropologists alike for its explanation of the relationship between ordinary experience and class- consciousness. By shifting his discussion into a vocabulary of work and production and then countering this with a set of discussions and stories, I hope to high- light what I think to be the promise still present in anthropological notions of culture and in the material normally discussed by anthropologists (i.e., the daily lives of non-Western folks) to those more concerned with questions of class relations and working class processes.12 For Williams, structures of feeling emerging in work (and elsewhere) link 124 ILWCH, 62, Fall 2002 diverse and dispersed individuals through “felt” connections—connections that are unaccounted for in available vocabularies and institutions, and that existed only in the most hazy, most tentative form. Coming to terms (quite liter- ally) with and for these connections is, in fact, the way in which actual historical classes come into being, as people come to articulate to each other these same feelings and thereby discover/create (and later institutionalize and structure) a host of ideological and social links that existed in only latent, potential form in their previous work and life. For Williams, the asynchronous fit between emerging structures of feeling and those prior ideas and representations already institutionalized as property becomes apparent historically as workers struggle to find new media, new words, new methods, and new institutions that better describe both the felt realities of their lives at work and the disjunction between these new terms/ideas/lives and the ideological and material contexts in which they emerge. This struggle between new and more adequate ideas/institutions and less adequate but institutionally established ideologies provides both the basis for and actual content of historical class struggles and, for our purposes, the critical importance of the continuous assertion, reassertion, and redefinition of self in historical class processes. One obvious virtue of this ap- proach is to see the conflict between the relations formed in work and the relations that underlie the organization of production more broadly as funda- mental to the question of subjectivity: how and under what circumstances people come to think of themselves as the particular, peculiar things that they do (individually, existentially, or in terms of the various collectivities to which they claim/feel kinship).13 For anthropologists interested in work and class struggle, Williams’ ideas were critical, for the possibilities involved in his view of emerging subjectivity are sufficiently vast and dramatic to account for the varied life of culture that is the basic material of the discipline. And for that reason, Williams has functioned as the medium through a great deal of Marxist thought has been assimilated into anthropological circles. Central among these ideas is Williams’ own idea that issues of culture and subjectivity remain closely tied to the very different material and historical realities in which people find themselves. Again, for anthropologists this idea is critical. In the story above, it is at least possible that some of what was invoked by Joe on that afternoon was a quite different idea of “animal” than would be likely were I talking with a non-native timber worker. Both Joe and Billy grew up and now live in a village where the supernatural abilities of animals was/is a common notion (as it is for many Northwest Coast, and in- deed many Native American families/villages). Overlaying this is the general conceit among natives that the ability to move better through the woods is somehow intrinsic to their nativeness that this supernaturalism is something they too possess, by virtue of kin/clan links with particular totemic figures.14 Yet there are problems with the sort of distinction between work and production implicit in Williams’ discussion. Foremost is the idea that work and production are somehow structural equivalents—similar sorts of things that differ mainly in content: work as current, experiential, inchoate and emerging; pro- Native Culture and Indian Work in the Southeast Alaska Timber Industry 125 duction as institutions, languages and vocabularies set up to deal with past work experiences and situations. By arguing that production is institutionalized in specific ways at specific times in forms as various as accepted modes of speech, historically specific vocabularies, established social institutions, customs, but nev- ertheless in specific, identifiable forms and institutions, Williams hoped to reveal the specificity of historical struggles without losing sight of their human origins or the structures in which people function. The result, however, is that for Williams the relations of work confront the relations of production as the present confronts the past, such that the presentness of production is lost sight of. The experience of the relations of production gets displaced onto the experience of particular institutions or the guardians of the institutional status quo. Work and production, in this view, are asynchronous, but they are not unalike, and the relations of production are experienced directly as the particular disjuncture between circumstances and available explanations at work and in those places where an emerging critical consciousness faces the resistance of institutionalized explanations and relations. In contrast, I want to argue that such an understanding misses a critical asymmetry between the relations of work and the relations of production, and that this asymmetry has important implications for the peculiar sorts of subjectivity that anthropologists usually call culture.15 At the heart of this idea is, I think, the question of what, specifically, the relations of work must face or confront: what is it that emerging subjectivities— again formed multiply, in work and elsewhere, but for our purposes those formed in work will suffice—what are such things formed against? As above, for Williams, elements of daily life that remain unsatisfactorily accounted for by established rhetorics, relations, and institutions take their shape historically, di- alectically, against those rhetorics, relations, and institutions whose inadequacy they reveal. Yet for anthropologists, the notion of direct, unmediated experience (experience that precedes or exceeds culture) is difficult to fathom, and the seemingly mechanical production of subjectivity from circumstances, its closeness to the situation in which it is created, seems too simple, given what we know to be true of the varied life of culture/cultures.16 In place of this, I want to follow Gerald Sider and argue that what emerging subjectivities confront is not that which leaves aside the unaccounted remains of the day-to-day world, but rather a different sort of entity altogether: the overwhelming fate of circumstances and events whose immensity and immediacy make whole ideologies/cultures/subjectivities impossible without of- fering something to replace them with.17 This is the point of the story about Bil- ly above and also the parallel with Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd, Sailor” intended by my title.18 In Melville’s story, Budd, the handsome American sailor, is “impressed” by a British Man-O-War during the Napoleonic Wars. Circum- stances, including the institutional memory of a recent mutiny aboard another British war ship and the unearned enmity of a junior officer, place Budd in ar- rest for fomenting mutiny—a charge he is innocent of, but which, due to a speech impediment, he is unable to deny. Instead, beyond himself, he strikes his accuser, 126 ILWCH, 62, Fall 2002 accidentally (if such a notion can be admitted in the story, which I am doubtful) knocking him dead on the spot. Budd is tried for murder, found guilty, and hanged. The point of the parallel is the overdetermination (in an older language) of the contexts in which we struggle. The relations of production are, I think, another word for this kind of overdetermination. In such circumstances, culture and subjectivity struggle mainly against their own impossibility rather than against the dead hand of past cultures, as it were. The struggle is not symmetrical, one ideology competing with another, winning, and taking its place until another worthwhile challenger comes along.19 Culture may just as likely be forced to struggle against annihilation, the sort of annihilation that is apparent in jobs that are scarcely compati- ble with humanity or subjectivity in any form (and hence, which necessarily make one “part-animal”). The remainder of this paper lays out the specific asym- metries that figure in the struggle between work and production and that are confronted by native timber workers in Alaska.

Choker Setting The relations of work for choker setters in Southeast Alaska remain dominated by questions of race, even as they are surrounded and dominated by relations of property. As above, many of the choker setters in Southeast Alaska are Alaska Natives: Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian natives in particular, but others as well. Likewise, most work for small timber companies owned and managed by non- natives.20 Harvest practices by the large and small timber producers are fairly uni- form throughout the Southeast archipelago and have remained the same for the last few decades. Much of the timber in the region is harvested for one of the two large timber/pulp mill owners—Ketchikan Pulp Corporation and Sitka Pulp Corporation—by small to mid-sized timber companies.21 The men (most logging crews are entirely male) who do the actual work of these outfits are drawn from timber operations all along the West Coast of the United States. Most of the employees are ethnic whites, including virtually all management and higher status positions. Those who actually fell the trees and prepare them for transport may be drawn from any number of groups, including, more recently, growing numbers of workers from “Mexico”(meaning from Central America more generally). In Alaska the choker setters are a mixture of whites, “Mexicans,” and Indians as well. The hierarchy within these companies is mostly the same throughout the logging industry. Heavy equipment operators—those who drive the cranes, pickers, excavators, and other road building equipment, and the crane and tower operators—are at the top of any job, just below management. Their work, and primarily their potential to do damage to the machines that constitute almost the entire capital outlay of many small firms, requires that they have special training. They also tend to do some of the maintenance and most of the worrying over the machines they operate.22 This carries over onto the handling of other posi- Native Culture and Indian Work in the Southeast Alaska Timber Industry 127 tions as well. Below the heavy equipment operators are the logging truck drivers. Like the heavy equipment operators, truck drivers control important pieces of equipment, often as expensive as an excavator or loader. Their status is below that of the other operators, though, because truck driving is considered a more common skill. Though difficult, and often more life-threatening given the precariousness of the logging roads, truck driving is considered a job that virtually anyone can be trained to do. In the end they are paid better than choker- setters or longshorers (usually part-time workers hired to raft and load logs onto timber ships for transport), but they have neither the wages nor the prestige of the other machine drivers. In many firms this is the highest position that a non- white (or at least those without special training gained outside the outfit) can hope to achieve. Natives who work as heavy equipment drivers receive unusual deference in many timber companies, owing to a combination of the prestige of their positions and the special ideological status of natives in general, discussed in more detail below. Below the drivers are the cutters, choker setters, and longshorers. The first two are full-time employees, the latter, after the breaking of Southeast Alaska’s two stevedoring unions, are most often part-time. As with many West Coast logging firms the cutters are the highest paid laborers. The work is extremely dangerous and rigorous, and like choker setting, few remain at it beyond their late- twenties or early-thirties. The cutters are themselves internally ranked among several different specializations like buckers (those who cut the tops and large limbs off of still standing trees) and fallers (who do the work of actually taking down the trees). Despite their high pay, cutters do not carry the influence that the machine operators do. As mentioned before, when an area is logged, almost all of the trees will be taken down before any are cleared away. This follows the road-building phase of the harvest and precedes the set-up of a tower: a large, stationary crane perhaps ninety or one hundred feet tall with long horizontal cables run out from the top of the tower itself, like the spines in an umbrella, and anchored on strong stumps across an area of felled logs. These long cables serve the dual purpose of stabilizing the tower and providing the runners along which a second cable and pulley can be extended to pick up the felled trees from anywhere in the area and return them to the base of the tower. Here they are loaded on trucks and taken down the mountain. By the time the choker setters are brought into an area the access roads have been built, all of the trees have been felled, the tower has been set up, and all that remains is the collecting and loading of the logs. The choker setters work under the coordination of a rigging slinger who sometimes sits near the crane with a pair of binoculars but more often moves around the hill, coordinating the pick-up of the trees. His job is to spot and announce a target tree. One of the two or three choker setters then moves around and over the felled logs to set the harness or “choker” around the specified tree. Mutual relations among choker setters are tense and sometimes violent. Pushing, shoving, and fistfights are seen on some jobs, especially where the contractor has turned up the pressure and 128 ILWCH, 62, Fall 2002 pushed for a faster harvest schedule and where ethnic/racial tensions play a role in expected promotion or job retention. The latter deserve special comment. Indian/white relations in Alaska, as in much of the West (though my sense is that California remains an exception, see Field 1999), are conditioned on both sides by 1) a history of displacement and mythologized struggle, 2) general notions of race and biological difference, 3) ongoing native claims for redress, and 4) related to all of these, a sense of a special link of Indians with “nature.” These issues are configured differently by whites on the one side and natives on the other, and all are interrelated, but there remains relative agreement between whites and natives that these remain the central issues at stake in the ongoing construction/negotiation of their relations at work.23 The history of struggle in Southeast Alaska is perhaps the most agreed upon of the four issues. Both whites and natives agree that Alaska was colonized violently by the US, including a series of armed conflicts that whites “won,” as well as by a series of legislative maneuvers that are considered underhanded by both sides. Every white timber worker I spoke with agreed that the entire South- east Panhandle was once native land, and that today’s native had had legitimate claims on lands not obviously sold or given up, at least up to the 1970s. For many natives, the only major difference was that many disagreed with the idea that ANCSA, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, had extinguished all native claims in the area. This latter point leads to the biggest disagreement between whites and natives, the issue of ongoing claims by natives. Most whites see this as a boondoggle and evidence that natives will never be satisfied until they get back everything (which they see as impractical and, to some, unjustified given “wars” fought for territory and previous agreements like ANCSA). Many natives point to problems with ANCSA or other past decisions, and many of the more marginal village residents continue to resent the fact that ANCSA was primarily the product of urban groups able to work closely with the oil companies that sought the original settlement. On issues of race there remains surprising agreement as well, though there are important differences. Whites tend to view their fellow workers as among a very special group of natives. As I was told by one, “these were the strongest natives on the coast, and they used to raid down into Washington and Oregon and bring back only the strongest, leaving the weakest ones there.” The implication was that there remained critical differences between Southeast natives and those elsewhere—owing to a combination of their warlike nature and selective breed- ing. For natives the process is more local and more cultural, but the results re- markably similar. “Always,” I was told by one Tlingit villager, “the uncles used to get the boys up early and force them to go down into the freezing cold water, and then when they came out, they would hit them with spruce branches to toughen them up.” The implication here, similarly, was that theirs was a history of physical training resulting in a unique physical nature. For some natives, this was reinforced with the idea, also held to be true by many whites, that natives’ long association with “nature” lent them special abilities. For others this associ- Native Culture and Indian Work in the Southeast Alaska Timber Industry 129 ation was as practical and immediate as the fact that many grew up doing con- siderable hunting and fishing for subsistence foods and thus did spend consider- able amounts of time in the woods in which they now worked. For some the connection was thought to be much older. “Our ancestors live in these trees,” I was told. This required treating the trees with special veneration (though it did not necessarily prevent harvest, if the forest was “taken care of”) and resulted in the fact that “we can hear them talking to us sometimes, about things about the forest.” For whites this idea was merged with the sense that being closer to nature meant also a sense of savagery, of being “part-animal” in the most derogatory sense—of being incompletely human. Admiration for physical prowess was tinged with notions of racial inferiority, which aimed to explain natives’ physical abilities and the closeness to nature. Yet even where such ideas were openly acknowledged to me, they remained problematically coupled with a sort of admiration, marking the highly contradictory manner in which the whole ideology of indianness was organized by whites.24 One final point on this ideology. Both whites and natives in the timber industry tended to differentiate between natives from the villages and those from the cities. Urban natives were generally thought by whites to be degenerate, manifesting more clearly the negative side of the savagery imputed to all natives. Some natives agreed, speaking of their urban counterparts with derision and skepticism at times. Some of this may have carried over into other sorts of decisions, especially those that figured in promotion to managerial positions, which take natives out of their “natural” setting, the woods. This last point, I will note, was never clearly articulated to me, but remained implicit in the ideology of urban degeneration I found in Alaska. Notions of purity and contamination figured in native discussions of other natives as well and often blurred urban living with interbreeding with non-natives (the so-called “indipinos” of Juneau— as they were referred to by many more marginal village members). Both the actual relationships on the job (i.e., positions, like choker setter or cutter) and the ideas through which individual behavior was organized and understood (by both white and native—differently at some times, similarly at others) are what I mean by the relations of work involved in choker setting in Southeast Alaska. Taken together, they both promote and limit a host of peculiar subjectivities, defined for whites and natives by themselves and by each other, for themselves and for each other.

Timber in Southeast Alaska To see more clearly the relations of production that frame these work situations, we must step back in time and outside the villages in which most timber work happens. Prior to late 1970s and continuing in diminished form up to the present, timber harvests in the Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska have been dominated by the long-term contracts of the region’s two large timber processors: Alaska Pulp Corporation (APC) and Ketchikan Pulp Corporation 130 ILWCH, 62, Fall 2002

(KPC).25 These two operations, in one form or another, have been working in the area since the early years of the post-war boom in Alaska that began in the late-1950s. Both harvest timber through road building contracts under a system in which the US Forest Service allows the harvest of a certain number of acres of timber in exchange for roads built by the harvesting companies through the forest. The roads serve no practical purpose other than to access future timber harvest areas and thus are essentially a timber industry subsidy. The end result is that the two large companies are able to obtain timber from land they do not own for little more than the cost of harvesting it. Harvest levels were set early on with the awarding of long-term, fifty-year contracts for road building to each of the pulp companies: 192 MMBF (million board feet) annually for KPC and 104 MMBF for APC, or two-thirds of the total allowable harvest in the Tongass. Since 1980, the annual harvest levels have been determined year-by-year, though the current law governing harvests, ANILCA, specified that at least 4.5 BBF (billion board feet) would be harvested forest-wide per decade.26 The US Forest Service, APC, and KPC justify past and current high harvest levels by alleging that a pulp mill must work continuously to avoid near complete breakdown (due to the use of highly corrosive materials) and thus must be guaranteed a constant supply of wood. The two pulp mills in the region, one in Ketchikan and one in Sitka, did operate virtually around the clock for years until the Sitka mill was closed in the early 1990s. Since this time logging has continued apace, with a greater percentage of the logs being sold, unprocessed, in Korea or Japan. Southeast native village residents have been affected by politics of timber for more than a century. Many share a sense of alienation that followed the an- nexation of the entire archipelago in the first decade of the twentieth century.27 But large-scale, village-wide immersion in commercial fishing from this same pe- riod forward into the 1970s insulated most residents from day to day involvement with questions of ownership over the forests of the region.28 The issue of forest ownership remained central to native organizations (like the Alaska Na- tive Brotherhood, and later the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida), but most residents remained more closely tied to questions of fish-trap ownership and fishing rights, and the long term trends of the canned salmon industry tended to figure more significantly in the lives of many.29 It was not until the collapse of the commercial fishing industry in the early 1970s that ordinary village residents turned to questions of forests and timber harvest. Several issues precipi- tated this shift: the move to a limited-entry fishing system where the right to fish was licensed and licenses were made salable (quickly draining most villages of their commercial fleets);30 the vast expansion of the pulp industry in Southeast Alaska and thus the vast increase in timber employment at a time of shrinking fishery employment; the discovery of oil on the North Slope of Alaska and hence renewed interest on the part of the Federal government to settle Native Claims in Alaska; and, finally, the first signs of the ecological devastation that would follow large scale industrial timber harvests at a time when increasing numbers of marginal families were turning to subsistence harvests (out of choice or for lack Native Culture and Indian Work in the Southeast Alaska Timber Industry 131 of other means) as a result of the massive economic shift caused by all of the above. All of these factors led to a significant shift in ordinary people’s sense of and involvement in questions of property in the region. The single most significant element of this shift for natives was ANCSA.31 This act settled native claims throughout the state by creating a host of for profit corporations in which natives alive at the time were given stock and to which were granted large tracts of (in the, Southeast Region, anyway) commercially valuable stands of timber near the villages in which the corporations were formed. Since this time some of the most aggressive timber producers in the region have been the village-based, native owned corporations.32 The corporations created by the Act were allowed to select land around the villages and were awarded cash funds for start-up costs as compensation for the lands and prop- erties taken by the Federal and State Governments from the various tribes and native groups throughout the State. This was also, and not coincidentally, meant to integrate natives more thoroughly into the national economy, to hasten the harvest of Alaska’s dispersed natural resources, and to relieve the government of costly welfare responsibilities for these same villages. Native village residents were made stockholders in these corporations and thus received compensation for lost land and property only indirectly through their participation in a corporation’s development activities. In the Southeast, these villages corporations cut timber—mostly whole logs sold for export—on their own and other ANCSA corporation lands. Their role in the Alaska timber industry is extensive, and by the late 1980s native corporation harvests accounted for more than half of the total harvest in the Tongass. On the job, these timber producers appear little different than the other small operators working in the forest, with the exception that they usually have more (though by no means entire) native representation in management. In these firms, choker-setting continues to be a job commonly worked by natives. The circumstances that lead to this situation—in which people like Billy find themselves working for their neighbors in jobs that continue to be as difficult and dehumanizing as they are when these same workers work for whites—have much to do with the manner in which shares in native corporations were distrib- uted. Two limits frame shareholdership throughout ANCSA communities: 1) the fact that share were issued only to those alive at the passage of the act (leaving those born after 1971, the so called “new natives,” without shares), and 2) the fact that some villages were allowed to form ANCSA corporations while others were not (the latter now referred to locally as “the landless”). Together, these limits have resulted in the fact that fewer than half of those natives now living in the region are shareholders in a local, village ANCSA corporation— and thus half of the region’s natives now live without meaningful claims on the main source of non-government work and income in virtually every native village in Southeast Alaska.33 The marginality of “new” and “landless” natives is magnified by the fact that many shareholders have, since 1971, left the region and now reside perma- nently elsewhere in Alaska or “down south” (meaning, usually, in Washington 132 ILWCH, 62, Fall 2002

State or Oregon). These “non-resident” shareholders now view their ANCSA stock as just that, a corporate stock, and few are willing to see monies that might come to them in dividends being used for village-based job creation. Proxy bat- tles for directorships of village-based ANCSA corporations are unusually divi- sive, with resident versus non-resident shareholders fighting for what residents have come to see as the mere possibility of remaining in the village and what non-residents see as the unjust foisting of government welfare responsibilities onto ANCSA corporations. For many Southeast corporations today, non-resident shareholders outnumber shareholders, and corporate reinvestment in job-making programs is minimal. The emphasis of ANCSA-created native corporations continues to be the bottom line. This insistence on maximized profits and maximized dividends has caused many village corporations to go out of the logging business altogether and instead to sub-contract their harvests to non-native timber harvesters or sell their timber “on the stump” to a large distributor, who then contracts independently for the harvest of the trees. In these situations, outside contractors are under no obligation to promote native hiring and instead operate under essentially the same profit strictures as when they receive a contract from any of the large mills. Ultimately, these struggles have pitted natives against natives and sometimes villages against other villages or the native populations of the larger town. They have also caused the hasty harvest of much timber; forced by ANCSA corporation board members who wish to make good on election promises and to carry out their programs before the next round of proxy voting. They have been en- couraged by industry and state officials in these efforts.34 The end result of this situation is a population of largely disenfranchised marginal workers amid an industry in need of the most raw sort of physical force in corporations whose main emphasis is on profits rather than personal, social, or ecological sustainability. On the job, choker setters work on what is ostensi- bly “Indian land”—meaning at times that it is owned by an ANCSA corporation, or that claims on it were surrendered in the interest of gaining those lands that were awarded natives under ANCSA. This irony turns tragic when choker setters realize that their work is organized around the enrichment of fellow natives. Likewise, the limited amount of land awarded under ANCSA and the hasty harvests that have resulted also mean that most choker setters realize that opportunities for even this sort of work are short-lived, and that the ecological results of their labor are gradually undermining their ability to remain in the villages without wage labor by undermining and perhaps forever diminishing their opportunities for subsistence hunting, fishing, and gathering. Yet beyond the property/economic relations discussed here there are other relations of production that condition the lives and work of choker setters, in particular, the relationship between the choker setter and his own body. Dave, who is now past forty and has not been a choker setter for many years, explained that no white man ever outworked the “good” native choker setters. There were some natives, he noted, that never were any good, and didn’t like the work or couldn’t do it, but these didn’t last. And those that did last could not be beaten. Native Culture and Indian Work in the Southeast Alaska Timber Industry 133

And that was why they never got the chance to advance, he thought. They would outwork all of the whites, and tell them so, and beat them up along the way, and as a result they would be the best choker setters and never promoted. This was furthered by the fact that when any of the victims of their accomplishments did get a job somewhere “up the ladder,” they would be sure never to put in a good word for an Indian who had so badly showed them up. This, for Dave, meant that a job in timber held no future. As soon as choker setting became physically impossible, there was nothing left for him to do. Dave quit setting chokers after he broke his leg a second time. His body gave out on him, he says, when asked. Dave is older than Billy, though not in- capable of doing the sort of work required of a heavy equipment operator or even a truck driver; in fact, either would have done quite well as a rigging slinger—being able to recognize easily the order of the felled logs, their condition and quality. I later asked Billy if he ever thought he might get a job with a logging outfit outside of choker setting. He said that it wasn’t likely, and that he didn’t think about it much. He figured when he couldn’t set chokers anymore he would do something else altogether. When asked about when that would be, Bil- ly rubbed his thighs with both hands as if checking their condition and said that he figured he had three or four more years left. After that, he said with a laugh, he figured he would have to quit and go fishing. It is a well-known fact that the fishing industry is virtually extinct in most villages—and that subsistence fishing (with its much more meager rewards of day-to-day, hand-to-mouth living) is be- coming increasingly impossible as well—so I have no doubt that the comment was intended to be ironic. For choker setters, body limits are as external as the number of trees, which also “give out” at some point. In discussing a group of “Mexican” tree thinners, cutters hired to thin-out areas of natural regrowth to improve the quality of re- grown trees and the speed at which they grow, usually considered among the most “wild” kind of timber labor, Dave once said, “that kind of work will eat you up and spit you out.” Others, like Joe, my host in the story above, noted that after a while you just can’t do it anymore, “even if you still want to.” Central to each of these comments, and central to many discussions on the nature of choker setting in the minds of those who hold those jobs, is the fact that what they confront in work are not simply external factors or formal relations of production per se. The history of ANCSA and the gradual immiseration of native communities in the region, the collapse of the fishing industry, the history of government regulation and subsistence limitations, the ecological devastation that commercial logging has caused around most villages, and the increasingly toadyish subservience of the regions’ leaders to the cruise ship industry all have their effects. In league with these forces are the limits of their own physical stamina, the flexibility of their joints, their ability to work through and recover from injury or from the various drugs used to dull the message of physical limits as they are felt more and more often. And it is perhaps with the latter, with the limits of their own bodies, that workers come to confront the impossibility of their situation. Critically, this is not an ideological battle in any 134 ILWCH, 62, Fall 2002 obvious way. Or perhaps better, it is not a contest of ideologies.35 It is a confrontation with impossibility, from a position of physical powerlessness. Situa- tions like this one are far more common to anthropological situations than anthropological writing would imply, and what seems critical here is that we place some sense of this confrontation at the center of our questions regarding the ongoing production of culture and subjectivity. Because people like Billy and Dave face a crisis of personal as well as social reproduction, such confrontations take place in and around work, in and around those areas of their lives where they attempt to turn labor into a livelihood.36 For this reason, issues of work remain central to subjectivity, to how and why people imagine themselves to be the sorts of things (and to have the sorts of relations to self, kin, and surroundings) that they do. Subjectivities of this sort emerge from work, but not simply as a reflection of work situations or circumstances. Rather, they emerge both within and against these circumstances, as Sider notes.37 One last example provides and illustration of the extent to which both assertions of self and the immediacy of its denial remain central to questions of both work and culture.

Discussion In the summer of 1996 I had gone visiting in a village where I was staying—a primarily native village with one of the region’s most aggressive ANCSA logging operations. My host, John, is an Alaska Native, an ANCSA corporation shareholder, and one of five managers in the village corporation logging operation. He had previously taken an interest in some of my research and showed me around past and present logging sites. John actually had little to do with the day- to-day logging operations or with the loggers the company employed, less than a third of whom were from the village; his management responsibilities were in corporation-shareholder relations. But he had been put in charge of a program of supplemental training that some of the loggers had participated in. Through the program, workers were trained and certified to clean up hazardous spills— oil spills being the most common, but they were also trained for chemical and gasoline spills. The work is dangerous and difficult, working in airtight suits, often with highly combustible and lethal materials. It is work that not many people want, and in some way this appeals to the loggers, especially because the pay is very good—up to several hundred dollars a day in an emergency. After training and certification the names of those qualified go on a region-wide list and in an emergency they are called up. The logging company had offered to pay for the training of those who would go, inspired by a spill in their own operation which had been somewhat mishandled and in the end very costly and by the idea that such a program would supplement the income of their workers whose jobs were essentially seasonal, perhaps keeping some in the village and reducing turnover. Several individuals went through the training, passed, and were certified. On the night I was visiting, Tom, one of those who had been certified, came by. He was back from a Native Culture and Indian Work in the Southeast Alaska Timber Industry 135 three-day cleanup, his first, and he was the only one from the village to go. His announced purpose in coming by was to say thank you for the training and time off to go on the job, which had allowed him to earn a substantial supplementary paycheck that week. Beyond this, though, he had done well and been asked by the clean-up manager to come back whenever he could and was assured that he would get called. Though not obvious at first, and never quite explicitly stated, Tom came by because he wanted to know if he could go when he was called. Working on an accident entailed, obviously, little advance notice and usually required missing some work in his timber job, and Tom realized that he could not afford to lose the logging job. The rule, said John, was that they could go only twice a year. “Oh,” Tom said. He had been looking down most of the time when he was addressing John and was visibly excited when he first walked in. In what followed he never stopped looking and talking directly to the person who was, in this situation, his boss and who was obviously exercising a sort of arbitrary power that in these circumstances there is little means to resist or counter. Yet while he continued to speak, his tone changed from excited to a deep monotone, his stance was still, and his hands were in his pockets. After being told that he was unlikely to be allowed to do the work he had been trained to do or earn the money he would have liked and no doubt needed, he did not leave. Instead Tom began to talk about what he had just done at the cleanup. The work, as mentioned, is dangerous, but this did not enter into the story. Instead, Tom began explaining the intricate and infinitely exacting use of the air-suit and ventilation system that were the critical elements needed to do the job he had just done. The air circulation in the suit is complex. It must provide clean air to breathe and also vent the suit. And because the workers are usually standing in the spill and the air around them is likely to be contaminated, this means that the air must go through elaborate cleaning constantly. The air- flow is crucial to the work and must be adjusted while working, to maximize the life of the filter but also to provide adequate breathing air and ventilation. Yet the pack is carried on the back to allow the individual free hands and room to work, and so the adjustment is difficult. Likewise the suit itself must be airtight to protect the individual from the chemicals of the spill, which means that it is very hot and constricting. Making a poor adjustment means that the individual might become overheated and unconscious while working, or even just disori- ented, all of which are exceptionally dangerous in the context of a hazardous waste spill. None of this was explained beyond the actual manipulation of the suit ventilation system itself—which valve you turn for which sort of circumstances. Nor did Tom ever mention where he had worked, under what conditions or even how hard or easy he might have found it; nor how much money he made or if he thought it was fair. None of his description was what might easily be called “class experience,” yet it was clear that what was being confronted was some aspect of the relations of production that created both his need for his logging job, its limits, and the ability of the manager to deny him this other avenue. All the while 136 ILWCH, 62, Fall 2002 looking intently at his boss, he detailed what amounted to the entire technical process necessary to clean up hazardous waste. What seems even clearer now, looking back at the subsequent work required to figure out what he was de- scribing, was how little effort he made to be understood. He moved from point to point in his description of the suit ventilation procedures without any explanation of their connection, and when his description seemed inadequate to his task, he would move on, apparently unconcerned by the gaps in presentation. Throughout, John, his boss, was somewhat distracted and even dismayed by the description, despite the fact that he had an engineering degree and was very sophisticated in technology. He fidgeted frequently, but Tom just kept talking, talking only to his boss despite the presence of several other people in the room. In all, the description lasted more than fifteen minutes. When done, Tom said thanks and left, now again in high spirits. John was visibly disturbed and ag- itated. It was clear, though I think not consciously acknowledged by anyone at the time, that there had been a confrontation. I asked why it was that he would not be allowed to go back when he was called; most of the land owned by the village corporation had been logged out, and workers were being cut back and laid- off altogether. It would look bad if the same person were going every time, John said. The contrast with Billy, above, is significant: a contrast between being part animal and part machine, between the dehumanization of work and the (partial) rehumanization of turning some element of that work into a reassertion of ones humanity.38 Partial victory is all that is possible here, but again, for Tom, or Bil- ly, or Dave, partial victory may be as simple as survival with minimal dignity— itself perhaps compromised by its source (as is the case of the cleanup suit above, tied as it is to the degree to which industry continues to operate above even minimal concern for the humanity of those it affects most directly), but which nev- ertheless seems among those few sources of subjectivity available. As commercial timber harvests increasingly make even subsistence survival impossible; as work refigures their bodies to the point where not simply the ideology of work is unsustainable, but work itself is impossible; and even as increasing global awareness of the devastation caused by pulp production causes more people to recycle (and thus the profitability of raw pulp production to decrease—to the point where Alaska Pulp Corporation actually shut down their mill in the mid- 1990s), all of these things make prior reasons for hope less and less possible. Get- ting by on ones wits, one’s strength, or even just the possibility of hanging on in the same job becomes less and less likely in the face of the immense weight of the relations of production that make timber harvests sensible for capital at one historical moment and nonsensical at others. In this case, the emerging subjectivity of Tom and the others confronts not the inadequacy of current relations of work, or even the relations of production that leave so many options closed. They confront the real possibility of extinction. As Gerald Sider notes:

At the center of the anthropological vision—our attempt to see the other in un- derstandable ways, and to give voice to our sight—is a profound void, a destruc- Native Culture and Indian Work in the Southeast Alaska Timber Industry 137

tive silence: a silence about suffering. Most of the people we study are frequently hurt—their children die young, from causes many know to be preventable; adults have a large variety of painful and debilitating diseases; people are hungry; people are often frightened of the potential of state power, of the consequences of domination by pervasively destructive elites; people are forced by circumstances utterly beyond their inﬂuence to try to cope with the sorts of ‘economic’ changes that tear them from their history and their kin. All the while we continue to describe and analyze their social structures and their cultures, making our descrip- tions increasingly processual to try to account for the rapid transformations of their world and ours, but still missing the point: we cannot understand social and cultural structures and processes if we ignore the characteristic ways that pain and hurt are attached to them.39

Sider is concerned with the ways that people are made to suffer, usually through processes aimed at undermining their subsistence (in broad terms—those ways they control and attempt to ensure their own well being). My purpose here is to try to connect more closely the way that suffering links the social relations of work to the more conventional anthropological processes of cultural production and the creation of new, often peculiar subjectitivities. The elements of these subjectitivities are frequently drawn from the circumstances of ordinary people’s work and lives, but not in a mechanical sense. Relations of production create such jobs and simultaneously the people who must and will fill them. Those in these jobs struggle against the relations of production that make them, but not simply because they are built on an ideology that is inadequate to the conditions they produce. What ideology could be? The circumstances of their production and reproduction are too complex, too deep, and too painful—to the point that retiring choker setters find their own bodies in collusion with those forces against which they struggle. In such circumstances, it is not an established ideology that people struggle against. At stake in the relations of work, more often than we care to admit, is the very possibility of culture, of ideology, and of subjectivity amid relations of production that remove the possibility of human subjectivity altogether. Anthropologists’ willingness to neglect the material circumstances in which the novel, peculiar subjectivities they describe are formed and reformed and against which these same subjectivities continuously struggle (often in vain) is at the heart of what William Roseberry once called the “unbearable lightness of anthropology.”40 It is most apparent in the old anthropological adage that everyone has culture—a nice leveling mechanism at a time when notions of “high” and “low” culture still resonated among anthropological readers, but an increasingly onerous impediment to understanding contemporary struggles for culture that turn out to be as much about the possibility of meaning as their specific content. On the other side, the failure of non-anthropologists to see in the production of these same subjectivities the impossibility of a notion of ideology that is both in and for itself remains equally problematic. What anthropologists point to with their continuing fixation on the strange and idiosyn- cratic is not the plasticity of human self-construction, but a reflection of the con- 138 ILWCH, 62, Fall 2002 tingency in which even ordinary cultural construction takes place. What seems necessary, viz Eric Wolf, is some sense of the historical conditions of possibility and impossibility that cultures (in the historical sense) and culturing (as performed by people) struggle with and against, not just in the sense of struggling against other cultures but in the struggle for culture altogether. Often, as Wolf shows, these struggles include the creation of cultures that are neither internally continuous nor particularly far removed from the circumstances that inspire their own desperation (though this is quite a different thing from being a product of those circumstances). And most include the creation of what Hermann Rebel has called “culturally necessary victims,”41 whose subjectivity and very humanness is denied and perhaps sacrificed for the culturing projects of others. And beyond this, as people form these new subjectivities, they do so not simply against past subjectivities (in the form of then available institutions and vocabularies or supposed presumptions about the natural world) but also, and perhaps more importantly, against the extinction of subjectivity: of being something, kin to something, part of something itself. These subjectivities are partial in the dou- ble sense of incomplete and interested because they are drawn from technolo- gies, signs, and circumstances created for other purposes. They are hybrid, in the now popular discourse of cultural studies, but not because people’s consciousness is split between rival, competing sets of significations and experiences. Rather, it is because they are drawn from a world already mapped and interwo- ven in ways they are powerless to counter on anything approaching the scale they face. In the end, it is this asymmetry of struggle, not the asynchrony of experience and the vocabulary that seeks to contain it, that introduces culture, nov- elty, partiality, or difference to work and work to culture.

NOTES

1. Since 1993 I have spent fourteen months doing anthropological fieldwork in Southeast Alaska. The majority of my time was spent in Hydaburg, Kake, Hoonah, Juneau, and Ketch- ikan. The stories and examples that follow are based on firsthand research in the area unless otherwise specified. As required by the Human Subjects Institutional Review Board of John Jay College and the City University of New York, the names of those involved have been changed, even in abbreviation. Ten months of field work in 1995 and 1996 was supported by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation (Grant #Gr. 5876), for which special thanks are due. Gerald Sider and Barbara Price both read earlier drafts of this paper and provided several critical challenges and corrections. In addition, much of the thinking that follows was devel- oped in conversation with Avi Bornstein, to whom special thanks is due. The remaining mis- takes and limitations, however, are my own. 2. Hydaburg is the southernmost town on Prince of Wales Island in Southeast Alaska. Prince of Wales Island and the surrounding smaller islands (Dall Island, Long Island) have been among the most heavily logged areas in Alaska. Hydaburg is a primarily native village of about 500 people. 3. On the relationship between anthropology and Marxism see William Roseberry “Marx and Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997): 25–46; Joan Vincent, Anthro- pology and Politics: Visions Trends and Traditions, (Tucson AZ, 1990), and “Anthropology and Marxism: Past and Present,” American Ethnologist 12 (1985): 137–47; Donald Donham, History, Power, Ideology: Central Issues in Marxism and Anthropology, (New York, 1990); Maurice Block, Native Culture and Indian Work in the Southeast Alaska Timber Industry 139

Marxism and Anthropology (New York 1985); James Wessman Anthropology and Marxism (Cambridge, 1981). Notions of culture, at least partly inspired by traditional anthropological uses of the term, figured in social history circles, but usually without an equivalent use of actual anthropological research. See Edward P. Thompson The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1966), obviously [but see his Customs in Common, (London, 1993)]; Paul Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 1985). 4. June Nash, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us, (New York, 1979). 5. See William Roseberry, Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, History, and Political Economy, (New Brunswick NJ, 1989). Good examples of how the focus on labor has continued to reoriented basic anthropological ideas are available in Avram Bornstein, Cross- ing the Green Line Between the West Bank and Israel, (Philadelphia, 2002); Steve Striffler In the Shadows of State and Capital, (Durham NC, 2002). Anthropologists working among Native Americans have been among the most reluctant to examine the place of wage labor in the lives of those among whom they do research. This is now changing, however, and a valuable review as well as a contemporary contribution to the understanding of Native work in the timber industry can be found in Caroline F. Butler and Charles R. Menzies, “Out of the Woods: Tsimshian Women and Forestry Work,” Anthropolo- gy of Work Review 21 (2000): 12–17; and Charles R. Menzies and Caroline Butler, “Working the Woods: Tsimshian Resource Workers and the Forest Industry of British Columbia,” Amer- ican Indian Quarterly Vol. 25 3, (November 2001). 6. For example Michael Buraway, The Politics of Production (London, 1985); Paul Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, (New York, 1977); Har- ry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Cen- tury, (New York, 1974). 7. See note #5. 8. Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, (Chapel Hill NC, 1980). 9. Jean and John Comaroff’s two volume series Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago, 1991/1997) can be read as an attempt to square notions of culture and ideology in the context of capitalist transition, while avoiding the problematic notion of experience. This work has been subject to much discussion which need not be repeated here (see Donald Donham “Thinking Temporally or Modernizing Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 103 (2001): 134–149; and Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff “Of Fallacies and Fetishes: A Rejoinder to Donham,” American Anthropologist 103 (2001): 150–160), but the focus on the problematic nature of experience and the challenge offered to anthropological notions of culture by questions of ideology remains central to this essay. 10. Gerald Sider, “Against Experience: The Struggles for History, Tradition, and Hope among a Native American People,” in Between History and Histories: The Making of Silences and Commemorations, ed. Gerald Sider and Gavin Smith (Toronto, 1997) and Gerald Sider “A Delicate People and their Dogs: the Cultural Economy of Subsistence Production—a Critique of Chayanov and Meillassoux,” Journal of Historical Sociology 2 (1989): 14–40. 11. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, (New York, 1977). 12. Thus this section should be read not so much as an argument against Williams, but as an argument against a figure of Williams, posed by me, for purposes of this discussion. A full treatment of Williams’ work, even on class-consciousness, remains beyond the scope of this paper. 13. Questions of subjectivity are central to Williams throughout his work, though he does not necessarily use the term in quite this way. His use of the term “culture” (including his coin- ing of the term “Cultural Materialism” for his work) actually has much more in common with the way the term “subjectivity” is used today than it does with conventional anthropological notions of “culture,” especially those in favor at the time Williams was writing. Cultural Stud- ies, since Williams, has made much more broad use of the term subjectivity, in ways that continue to resonate in part with his concerns. Anthropologists have, in the meantime, more or less stopped using the term culture to mean what it had before—a term for a unified “way of life”— and where the term is still used it now tends to be in “reintroduced” form, much more close to the way it is used in Cultural Studies (as it is here). In Cultural Studies, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Donna Haraway, and Homi Bhabha have made questions of subjectivity central to questions of social 140 ILWCH, 62, Fall 2002 conflict. This work is too extensive to review here, but a recent review of the connections between these writers, and between them and prior Marxist and psychoanalytic language is available in Nick Mansfield, Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway, (New York, 2000). 14. The romantic potential implicit in such a position is dangerous for both anthropologists and those involved. For natives, it underwrites some of the issues confronted by Billy and those like him that work at jobs that leave them battered and worn by their late twenties. For anthropologists, this sort of romanticism has led to absurd sorts of generalizations about the power of social construction over individual consciousness, and the extent to which people are subject to the received ideas of particular places and particular times. 15. And vice versa—that it is through trying to understand the romantically tempting pe- culiarity of these subjectivities that we see more clearly the limits of the confrontation of equals model proposed by Williams and adopted implicitly by many others. For the subjectivities most likely to attract the attention of anthropologists are never so clear or so obviously rooted in the circumstances in which they are found. 16. For a recent discussion of anthropological and philosophical problems with the notion of experience from outside the Marxist anthropology school, see Robert Desjarlais, Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood among the Homeless, Philadelphia, 1997), 10–17. Also see Sider “Against Experience.” 17. Sider “A Delicate People.” 18. Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Stories, (New York 1986). 19. Or even some more mild version of this in which it is the elements of a particular ideology that move in and out of contention, viz Comaroff and Comaroff Of Revelation, above. 20. This is true even in those areas where native claims have won Southeast Natives con- siderable stretches of timberlands, such that timber harvests frequently now take place on os- tensibly Indian lands). The reasons for this are discussed in more detail below, centering on the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971. 21. Two recent works, both highly critical of Federal management of the Tongass Nation- al Forest are Bill Shoaf, Taking the Tongass: Alaska’s Rainforest, (Seattle 1999); Kathie Durbin, Tongass: Pulp Politics and the Fight for the Alaska Rain Forest, (Corvalis OR, 1999). 22. Often someone beginning a new machine operator position will be given the oldest loader or picker and told that he has a job as long as he can keep the machine going. Likewise much of the cleaning, and routine maintenance performed by the operator is considered after- hours work with some firms. This, of course, is a way of saving money for the logging outfit, playing upon feelings of pride that drivers will have for “their” machine, and turning it into un- compensated labor. 23. An interesting comparison with Native/Euro-Canadian relations can be found in Charles R. Menzies, “Stories from home: first nations, land claims, and Euro-Canadians,” American Ethnologist 21 (1994): 776–791. 24. Questions of race are far too dense to enter into here, except to note that the coupling of admiration with degradation and humiliation is common to patterns of racism in the US and elsewhere, see Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by C. L. Markmann, (New York: 1967); for critical work on the link between race, gender and nature see Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York, 1989). 25. See Shoaf, Taking the Tongass, and Durbin, Tongass. 26. ANILCA, the Alaska National Interest Land Conservation Act was made law in 1980. Section 8.10 of the Act mandated “balanced use” of Federal resources, a term used by conservation and Native groups to argue for the creation of zones within the Tongass that would not be used for timber harvest, but reserved instead for wildlife, tourism, and Native subsistence. These are the so-called “LUD 2’s,” short for “land use designation 2.” The slowdown in road building allotments was begun in 1980 and again in 1992. In part this resulted from the efforts of a growing environmental movement within the voting public nation-wide, and the consequent appointment of environmentally concerned administrators to Federal positions, such as Bruce Babbitt as Secretary of the Interior in 1992. The actual overall harvest levels in the forest have remained at near constant levels, however, with the shift in policy decreasing the road building allotments granted to APC and KPC and increasing dramatically the commercial harvests on Native Corporation lands. Unwilling to purchase native timber at market prices, both of the pulp companies reacted by slowing down production in the late 1980s. Such slowdowns were not entirely in response to decreased supply, though, for pulp prices on the world market have declined steadily (apart from one brief upward spike in 1993) Native Culture and Indian Work in the Southeast Alaska Timber Industry 141 since the late 1980s, largely as a result of consumer demand for recycling, the use of alternative pulp fibers, and the growing supply of bulk fiber on the world market. Gunnar Knapp’s “Native Timber Harvests in Southeast Alaska”(US Forest Service, Pa- cific Northwest Research Station, General Technical Report PNW-GTR-284, February 1992) is a report done in 1992 for the US Forest Service. In it Knapp lays out the role native timber harvest in the Tongass played in the evolution of the timber and pulp business in the 1980s, including the increases in the harvests of ANCSA created village corporations. His account of the rationale for the rapid harvest of native lands is provided via testimony by managers and presidents of the more aggressive ANCSA timber operations, which was born out in my own discussions with ANCSA shareholders some years later. 27. Robert E. Price, The Great Father in Alaska: The Case of the Tlingit and Haida Salmon Fishery, (Douglas AK: 1990); see also Ramona E. Skinner, Alaska Native Policy in the Twenti- eth Century, (New York: 1997). 28. Kirk Dombrowski, “Totem Poles and Tricycle Races: the Certainties and Uncertain- ties of Native Village Life, Coastal Alaska, 1878–1930.” Journal of Historical Sociology 8 (1995):136–57. 29. See Thomas F. Thornton, “Introduction,” in Goldschmidt, W. and T. Haas. Haa Aani, Our Land: Tlingit and Haida Land Rights and Use, (Seattle: 1999); also, still very interesting and relevant is Philip Drucker, The Native Brotherhoods: Modern Intertribal Organizations of the Northwest Coast. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 168, (Washington DC: 1958). 30. Stephen Langdon, “Transfer Patterns in Alaskan Limited Entry Fisheries: Final Re- port for the Limited Entry Study Group of the Alaska State Legislature,” (Alaska State His- torical Library, Juneau AK, 1980). 31. The full extent of the cultural and social politics surrounding ANCSA, as they continue to shape and reshape the Southeast region is the subject of Kirk Dombrowski, Against Cul- ture: Development, Politics and Religion in Indian Alaska, (Lincoln NB, 2001). 32. On ANCSA more generally, its original development and effects on the rest of Alas- ka, see Mary C. Berry, The Alaska Pipeline: The Politics of Oil and Native Land Claims, (Bloomington IN, 1975); Thomas R. Berger, Village Journey: The Report of the Alaska Native Review Commission, (New York, 1985); and Norman Chance, The Iñupiat and Arctic Alaska: An Ethnography of Development, (Chicago, 1990). 33. For a discussion of the Landless see Lee Gorsuch et al 1994 “A Study of Five South- east Alaska Communities.” A report prepared for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service by the Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of Alaska (Anchorage 1994). For local press coverage of the landless issue see Marilee Enge, “Landless Natives stake Tongass Claim,” Anchorage Daily News, February 26, 1995: 1–4. For the issue of new natives see Dombrowski Against Culture, 63–82. 34. Perhaps the greatest single example would be the passage of “net operating loss” legislation for ANCSA corporations in the late 1980s. Briefly, this legislation allowed ANCSA corporations that were losing money to form limited partnerships with more profitable companies (in one case, Disney) through which the losses would be transferred to the parent company. These losses were then deductible from the profits of these parent companies. At corporate tax rates, each dollar of loss assumed saved the parent company more than forty cents in federal and state taxes. In return, these companies paid the ANCSA corporations between twenty-five and thirty cents per dollar loss. The story was covered at the time by a series of articles in the An- chorage Daily News, which did much to influence local, non-native perceptions of native logging. See Hal Bernton, “Tax amendment proves boon for Native logging,” Anchorage Daily News, June 12, 1987; “Logging takes toll on habitat in Southeast,” Anchorage Daily News, August 23, 1987; “Native Groups turn losses into assets,” Anchorage Daily News, December 20, 1987. The situation was made more drastic by a forest industry subsidy that allowed timber companies to count as operating losses the decrease in the market value of their standing timber from the time of purchase to the time of harvest. Since the creation of the ANCSA corporations in 1972 the value of their standing timber had dropped dramatically, and though they did not pay for their timber or land, they could thus show enormous “paper losses,” some as high as 100 million dollars or more. To actualize these losses, however, the timber had to be cut entirely or sold on the stump. This was done and by 1995–1996 most ANCSA village corporations were without significant standing timber. See Knapp “Native Timber Harvests.” Now, because many corporations are without working resources, the federal government has begun a series of land swaps, always for smaller parcels, and always located further from their own villages. 142 ILWCH, 62, Fall 2002

35. As Comaroff and Comaroff Revelation and Revolution seem to suggest. 36. The work of Gavin Smith on livelihood and the role this plays in large scale social re- porduction is critical, see Gavin Smith, Livelihood and Resistance, (Berkeley, 1989). 37. Gerald M. Sider, Lumbee Indian Histories, (New York, 1993). 38. This passage invokes in my mind the image of the cyborg. In a by-now-famous article, Donna Haraway introduces the cyborg as a critical point of departure for contemporary sub- jectifying processes. Her argument is dense and complex, but brieﬂy she pits the cyborg—part human, part machine—against the increasing global “informatics of domination” the rational management of labor as an increasing well understood, well integrated (and thus more quickly rationalized and optimized) element in an overall productive technology, Donna Haraway “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Cen- tury,” in D. Haraway Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, pp. 149–182, (New York, 1991), 172. For Haraway, we are all cyborgs. She is herself a biology-Ph.D. whose presence in the academy owes as much to a revamped Sputnik-inspired US national science- education policy. She notes: “I have a body and mind as much constructed by post-Second World War arms race and cold war as by the women’s movements” (ibid, 173). Yet rather than reject outright the changes in subjectivity created by the dramatic shift in cold war relations of production, she argues that we explore the possibilities opened by such odd, illegitimate children of war technology as the cyborg. After all, what choice is there? “There are more grounds for hope in focusing on the contradictory effects of politics designed to produce loyal Ameri- can technocrats, which also produced large numbers of dissidents, than in focusing on the present defeats” (ibid). 39. Sider “A Delicate People,” 14. 40. William Roseberry, “The Unbearable Lightness of Anthropology.” Radical History Review 65 (1996): 5–25. 41. Hermann Rebel, “Cultural Hegemony and Class Experience: A Critical Reading of Recent Ethnological-Historical Approaches (Parts 1 and 2).” American Ethnologist 16 (1989): 350–65. Eric Wolf (though not using Rebel’s vocabulary) made this a major theme of his ﬁnal work of comparative ethnography; see Eric R. Wolf, Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Domi- nance and Crisis (Berkeley CA, 1999).