In the Field. Prof. George Gmelch
once caused fishermen to abandon their nets temporarily, they returned to find a seal behind each one, driving fish into the net and then eating them.
Another animal predator that competes with the fishermen is the brown or grizzly bear, which is attracted to the caught fish. Bears will wade into the water or haul the nets onto the bank to get at them. Not only are fish lost, but the nets’ webbing is damaged as the bears tear at it to remove the fish. Consequently, fishermen on both rivers pack guns. Over the summer I heard a lot of local lore about bear encounters and the behavior and movements of individual bears. To protect their nets, fishermen use different strategies. One man spread his dirty laundry on the bushes near his nets to give the area a strong human scent; another used a noisemaking cannon, like those used to scare birds from cornfields. When fishing at night, some men kept a lantern or fire burning on the riverbank. And some fishermen shoot bears illegally. One Alsek fisherman claimed to have killed more than twenty bears in his twenty summers on the river.
STRUGGLING TO GAIN RAPPORT
In Dry Bay, like Yakutat, I was again met with suspicion, although of a different sort. The NPS had informed all the fishermen about the research and who I was—an anthropology professor from New York. In this case, I might have gotten a better reception had I been an IRS inspector. The fishermen had been opposed to Dry Bay’s becoming part of the National Park Service. The land had previously been under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Forest Service which, in large measure, had let the fishermen and hunters do as they pleased. Now they feared new regulations would restrict their activities. And they did not want anyone, least of all the federal government, telling them what they could or could not do. As one non-Native fisherman pointedly told me, “I came here to get away from Big Brother.”
Yet my job was to document the very activities—fishing and hunting—they feared might be restricted, or taken away altogether. That I was a college professor didn’t help, and worse, I was from “back East.” “A pointy-headed intellectual,” I overheard one fisherman say. Had I been from the University of Idaho, I might have been more acceptable. I told the fishermen that I was really from the West, having grown up in California, but that seemed to make little difference. During my first week camped at the fish processor, a young, grizzled fisherman named Virgil, high on drugs or alcohol or both, came up to me on his three-wheeler, pistol visibly at his side. “Keep your fuckin’ nose out of my business or there’ll be trouble,” he threatened, looking down at his pistol. I wrote in my journal that night, “Very tense situation. . . . I hate the feeling that people think I’m prying into their personal lives, even though I’m not.” Apparently, Virgil had seen me talking with the backcountry ranger and assumed I was giving out information on them. I had tried to explain to him what anthropologists do and why the Park Service had to conduct this study, but he sped off before I could finish.
A few days later, another unfriendly fisherman asked how much I was being paid by the Park Service. I told him, thinking, “Jeez, I’m asking them all kinds of questions—I can’t not answer theirs.” But it really wasn’t any of his business, and later I regretted having been so forthright. The other white fishermen were not overtly threatening, but they, too, made it clear that they were opposed to the research. It was “unnecessary.” some said, and “a waste of taxpayer’s money.” Some also said I could not possibly learn enough in one summer to make it worthwhile. During the first few weeks in the field, the difficulty of getting a good night’s sleep in the short nights of an Alaskan summer didn’t help my mood. And if that wasn’t enough, I was caught in the middle, between two groups who didn’t like or trust one another.
INDIAN-WHITE CONFLICT
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