Corporate Colonialism, Class, and Conflict in Southeastern Alaska’s Canneries

Abstract

The salmon canning industry has dominated territorial Alaska ’ s economy and politics. And, as historian Diane J. Purvis shows in the new book, Ragged Coast, Rugged Coves: Labor, Culture, and Politics in Southeast Alaska Canneries , cannery workers, especially thousands of Alaska Native, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino workers, made that industry possible. The product of vast and ambitious research, Ragged Coast, Rugged Coves is a fascinating intersectional social history of Southeast Alaska, one that rightly places colonialism, migration, class, and conflict at the center of the region ’ s history. Stretching from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, Ragged Coast, Rugged Coves focuses on three overlapping subjects. First, it explores Native Alaskan history and social structure and European and American settler-colonial projects in what, after 1867, became a United States property and a major site of investment for absentee cannery owners. Purvis depicts the profound changes brought by canneries: “ The Southeast Alaska Natives, who had fished in a wilderness setting from time immemorial, were now part of an industrial environment that was divorced from their ancient rapport with the water and land ” (23). As the author makes clear, it was the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian women who performed much of the paid industrial labor in Southeast Alaska. Without them, “ there is no story ” of Alaska ’ s salmon canneries (7). Second, Ragged Coast, Rugged Coves looks at Alaska ’ s business history, examining the introduction and expansion of industrial capitalism in nineteenth-century Alaska, a period which saw canneries grow “ from small businesses to conglomerates in a short period of time, influencing every aspect of Alaskan life ” (24). Third, as the book ’ s subtitle