:The Fishermen's Frontier: People and Salmon in Southeast Alaska

In this ambitious and multifaceted work, David F. Arnold provides a sweeping history of the southeastern Alaska fishery and the people who oriented their lives around it. This book breaks down conventional boundaries by incorporating Indian, labor, and environmental history, all the while addressing some of the most important themes in western scholarship. This is no simple story of declension. Arnold is alert to nuances of historical development, and he is particularly attentive to the persistence of cultural values amidst wholesale economic and political change. Although salmon are the source of all value in this account and the author is mindful of ecological problems, this is a book primarily about the people who came to know salmon, as Richard White would put it, through labor. Arnold provides lots of food for thought. For instance, he argues that it was less religiosity than a cultural embrace of exclusive property rights that “served as the basis for Tlingit and Haida resource management” (p. 37). This assertion of clan-based property, connected to Native people's penchant for appropriating wealth to maintain status hierarchies and gift giving, sets up much of the story that follows. With an appreciation for irony, Arnold points out that non-Indians brought a different construct and struggled to impose it on local people. Once Alaska came into the hands of the United States, attempts by Tlingit and Haida to force newcomers to pay for access to their fisheries were crushed by the deployment of military force. By the point of a gun, liberty and property-loving Anglo-Americans dissolved Indian property rights and imposed an “open-access” commons.