A Literary Exploration of Gendered Experience in Alaska's Commercial Fishing Industries, 1980S-2010

Tales of well-seasoned women: a literary exploration of gendered experience in Alaska's commercial fishing industries, 1980s-2010 Item Type Other Authors Corso, Deborah Download date 24/09/2021 12:32:24 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/11122/8796 TATES OF WELL-SEASONED WOMEN: A LITERARY EXPLORATION OF GENDERED EXPERIENCE IN ALASKA’S COMMERCIAL FISHING INDUSTRIES, 1980s - 2010 By Deborah Corso APPROVED: _______________ Dr. Jennifer Schell Committee Chair Dr. Mary Ehrlander Committee Co-chair Dr. Eric Heyne Committee Co-chair Dr. Mary Ehrlander Director, Department of Northern Studies DATE i TALES OF WELL-SEASONED WOMEN: A LITERARY EXPLORATION OF GENDERED EXPERIENCE IN ALASKA’S COMMERCIAL FISHING INDUSTRIES, 1980s - 2010 A PROJECT Presented to the Faculty of the University of Alaska Fairbanks in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS By Deborah E Corso, B.A. Fairbanks, Alaska August 2015 ii Table of Contents Signature Page .............................................................................................................................................................. i Title Page ........................................................................................................................................................................ii Table of Contents........................................................................................................................................................iii Introduction.....................................................................................................................................................................1 Notes ............................................................................................................................................................................... 21 The Glass Baitshed....................................................................................................................................................24 Catch and Release.......................................................................................................................................................61 The Boys That Go to S e a .......................................................................................................................................111 Bibliography.............................................................................................................................................................. 153 Acknowledgements.................................................................................................................................................155 iii iv Introduction H isto rical Alaska’s commercial fishing industry has historically been portrayed and perceived by Western culture as a predominantly masculine domain. This nostalgic idealization is embedded in longstanding notions of gender binaries that presupposed particular vocations as being too rigorous for women. These perceptions were often fraught with and bolstered by traditions, superstitions, and socially substantiated barriers that reiterated unspoken rules regarding women’s place in the constellation of the industry. As patriarchal ideals of previous eras have shifted and relaxed, increasing numbers of women have found their way into the business of commercially harvesting fish and shellfish from Alaska’s abundant waters. Reliance on the bounty of the sea has been a way of life for Alaskans since time immemorial. Prior to Western contact, the Indigenous peoples of the region had established complex cultures that revolved around hunting and gathering resources from marine and terrestrial environments.1 Led by Danish explorer, Vitus Bering, on behalf of the Russian tsar, Europeans began foraying to Alaska in the year 1741. Soon after, Russians systematically subjugated the Unangan and Aleut people by force to hunt for the Russian fur trade. Target species primarily comprised sea otters as well as other maritime animals. Beginning in 1848, large-scale commercial whaling by outside interests commenced in the Arctic and Pacific Northwest and expanded to include walrus and seal hunting in subsequent years. The baleen market fell in 1871 and the whaling industry all but evaporated with the growth of the petroleum industry. Russia notoriously sold Alaska to the United States in 1867, and during the first thirty years of American ownership until the gold rush of 1897, Alaska’s non-Native population was primarily composed of soldiers, missionaries, prospectors, and explorers. During this time, the commercial fishing and canning industries began to flourish with more demand for cod and salmon in particular, 1 attracting not only fishermen, but also shore-side cannery workers. According to a recent Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development Report tracking the history of Alaska population settlement, “fishing became the primary source of population change between wars ... Southeast Alaska — with its ice free waters, fishing heritage, and proximity to Seattle fish markets — was the major beneficiary of this change.”2 Alaska achieved statehood in 1959, and for the first time, the State was in charge of managing the fisheries. During the early years, the burgeoning commercial fishing fleets continued to exploit the abundant finfish and shellfish resources found in the ice-free Gulf of Alaska (GOA), and it wasn’t long before target species were suffering great depletions. Increased competition, globalization of business, and rapidly advancing technologies were also probable factors. The State responded by enforcing fishing limits, gear restrictions, and limited entry permits. Thus, from 1972 until the introduction of the Individual Fishing Quota (IFQ) program in 1994, the halibut and black cod (sablefish) longline seasons were conducted in aggressive, derby-style “cowboy” fisheries. While other species such as salmon, crab, shrimp and herring continue to be managed by state and federal agencies, the “wild west” motif of combat/cowboy fishing endures and reflects the rugged, individualistic, frontier American ideal that many folks associate with Alaska. It is noteworthy to consider how this legacy of nationalistic idealization of the frontiersman has continued to flourish over time, despite the fact that America and Alaska both have become more “civilized” and less “frontier.” While the defining feature of Americans may be their tendency to exemplify rugged individualism, why are the associated characteristics deemed explicitly as positive, masculine traits? Maritime scholar Jennifer Schell attributes some of this to the historical literature of post-colonial/pre-antebellum America, whereby certain authors “sought to transform trappers into national heroes” and did so by analogizing them with the highly regarded New England whalemen of the era.3 That American whalemen were seen as highly masculine heroes who 2 conquered nature is not the point of contention, but rather that the Western masculine ideal is so deeply tied to conquest and exploitation should be disturbing - and yet it is quite the opposite. While the early frontiersmen were widely perceived as a mixed bag of racial, ethnic, and culturally diverse men from the lower ranks of American society, Schell contends that the accepted literary narrative on national masculinity was actually a “work-centered vision of American-ness that avoided regional specificity.”4 In choosing this construction, the early writers of western narratives laid the foundation for “others to expand the cultural conversation ever further and immortalize the heroic capacity of cowboys ... and various other manly American physical laborers.”5 Her point is significant; the continuing storyline of our nation and our people is tightly hinged to a concept of hard work exemplifying masculinity, and by extension, patriotism. To illustrate this distinctive facet of Americanism, Frederick Jackson Turner’s biographer, Ray Allen Billington, published a deep analysis in 1958 of how the “American” character was defined and understood by Turner and others of his era. Billington contends that Turner’s “frontier hypothesis” is that the American character is a “unique social organism” which can be directly traced to the experiences of settling the continent from east to west over three centuries.6 He further asserts that characteristics such as mobility, optimism, inventiveness, openness to innovation, materialism, and exploitative wastefulness, were all what Turner considered to be “frontier traits.”7 Based on my experiences in the final years of “gold rush” derby-style commercial fishing, I would concur with Turner’s assertions that the above-described traits are typical of people in frontier contexts, despite the fact that some contemporary scholars might disagree. Are these qualities uniquely American? It would seem likely that they are, based on the premise that the context of any frontier will always be distinctive in its location in time and space. When the American western frontier expands to the sea, the above-mentioned qualities are extended with it. While these traits are evidenced in Alaskan fishing communities, there is also an 3 entire body of literature that explores similar precedent in earlier American seaboard communities. Themes such as heroism, nationalism, and masculinity prevail as linchpins of maritime writing during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Schell reiterates that these literatures bolstered romantic archetypes

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