By: Katherine Ringsmuth
We all know that
salmon have fueled Alaska ’s
commercial fishing industry for over 100 years.
So, if salmon fed Alaska ’s numerous salmon
canneries, what fed Alaska ’s
numerous cannery workers? Believe it or
not, the answer is not salmon! Although
salmon was eaten on occasion, it was not the primary source of nutrition
fueling the industry’s workers. Over the century, cannery workers’ diets have
consisted of rice, powered milk, coffee, canned goods, doughnuts, salad bars,
and prime rib.
I was five years
old the first time that I experienced cannery life in Alaska . Eating in the cannery messhall was one
of my clearest recollections of that time.
Perhaps because each meal was punctuated by the loud shrill blow of the
steam whistle, which halted the deafening chug of the cannery machines and
peace, if only for 15 minutes, returned to the Naknek River China
plates. The blue room was reserved for
the superintendent, the office workers, crew supervisors, and the occasional
fish buyer or other VIPs. But, I remember wandering beyond the blue room and
into the main hall where the cannery crew ate.
The large rectangular room seemed as if it could contain a football
field. It had hard wood floors, which
supported the twenty or so picnic-style tables, each supporting eight
individual seats. The air clinked with
the sounds of forks and spoons scrapping the faded green and yellow cafeteria
trays and buzzed with the sound of languages a five year old seldom
heard—Scandinavian, Italian, Croatian, Filipino, Spanish, and Japanese. I especially loved to wander into the aroma-filled
bakery where the head baker—Devona—made fresh doughnuts and cookies by the
hundreds. The oven in the bakery was
eight feet long and rotated three racks—you could easily bake several hundred
cookies or dozens of pies at once.
In those days, the
messhall was literally at the center of cannery life. A cannery worker’s day began and ended with
the welcomed smells of the messhall. A
monotonous, usually wet, and strenuous day of cleaning guts and canning salmon
commenced with a 7 am breakfast, at which workers gobbled down eggs, bacon,
sausage, toast, pancakes, coffee. At 10
am the whistle blew, announcing the first mug-up of the day. The slime line stopped and workers in yellow
rain slickers consumed coffee, doughnuts, turnovers, and other pastries. At noon, workers wandered the boardwalk to
the messhall to gulp down fresh made soups, salads, homemade breads, and a main
dish such as pizza, burgers, and always a fresh dessert. The goal was to eat in ten minutes and sleep
for fifty. At three o’clock came the
afternoon mug-up and workers washed down chocolate chip, oatmeal, sugar cookies,
macaroon, and even ginger snaps with gallons of fresh made coffee. Five o’clock brought dinner, which often
times served as a cannery workers calendar—pork chops on Mondays, steak on
Tuesdays, roast beef on Wednesday, fish (usually not salmon) was served on
Fridays. At nine o’clock the messhall served the third mug-up of the day, which
consisted of deli sandwiches and left over desserts. Finally, if the cannery was operating during
the peak of the Bristol Bay salmon run, then
there was a midnight meal, at which tired and weary workers ate generous
portions of eggs, bacon, sausage, pancakes and French toast in the warmth and
comfort of the messhall.
I always remember
my father, Gary Johnson, who was superintendent at the South
Naknek cannery, saying that his cook was one of his most important
employees. He understood that the
cannery workers’ trip to the messhall was “the social event of the day.” In
fact, he would say that he hired (and fired) his baker depending on how well he
or she made maple bars. And indeed, my
dad was not the only cannery superintendent that felt this way.
Throughout his
many years as superintendent at the Snug
Harbor cannery, Joe Fribrock learned
that the best workers were content workers, so after World War II, he hired
Ralph Havestein, a chef from the Seven Gables restaurant in Seattle to run Snug’s messhall. In fact Joe’s young wife at the time, Dorothy
Fribrock, was a bit threatened by Snug’s messhall cook:
“It wasn’t until I tasted the noon day meal, did I agree wholeheartedly
with all of the praise Joe heaped upon Ralph’s cooking. His gravy was delicious. I silently noted I’d have to really out cook
myself to even get in his league. Every
meal was better than the last. Our first
night we had individual sirloin steaks over an inch thick, cooked to
perfection, O Brian potatoes, two vegetables, cabbage and carrot salad, plus
three varieties of homemade bread. Four
kinds of cake, tea and coffee. Never in
all my life had I seen food in such abundance at one meal. It was like every day was Thanksgiving or
Christmas.” [1]
Interestingly, academic
studies that discuss the historical significance of the canned salmon industry
rarely mention the role of the messhall. They tend to focus on economics,
technology, even ethnic and environmental perspectives. But if we listen carefully to the interviews
and stories told by people who worked at Alaska canneries, we can conclude that
what they ate was important to them and seems to be a common denominator that
in many ways, bonded people together. According
to Ray DePriest, who worked at Snug Harbor in the 1940s:
“Every Sunday [Havestein would] have these Boston cream pies, and then the cream puffs
with Chocolate tops.” Not only did Ray
and his buddies receive three square meals, but during the salmon peak Ray
remembered the nightly mug-ups and a midnight meals that fed the hungriest of
growing boys. “We just about ate the
cookhouse out of eggs,” recalled Ray, “you really ate like a horse.”[2]
Still, when cannery
life is viewed through the lens of food and the messhall, it can illuminate one
hundred years of cannery segregation.
For years, canneries were segregated by upper echelon of workers and the
lower echelon of workers. No one really
knows why the Blue Room was called so, but as one cannery foreman suggested,
because “the Blue Bloods eat there.” Furthermore, most canneries in Alaska were segregated
by race. As Dorothy Fribrock noted about
Snug Harbor
when she first arrived in the 1940s, there was a China mess, Filipino mess, and native
mess, each with a separate cook.
Indeed, how,
where, and what cannery workers ate not only reflects the social milieu of
cannery life, but also illuminates exploitive hiring practices, the
appropriation of Alaska Natives into the American system of capitalism, gender
relations, and finally, racial integration—all aspects that shaped the
commercial fishing industry in Alaska.
CHINESE WORKERS
Between 1892 and
1935 the Alaska Packers Association employed a cannery work force that came to
be known as the “China Gang.” The Asian cannery workers lived in “Chinatown ,” the quarters assigned to them at the
cannery. In the legers of the Alaska Packers Association, the
details of cannery labor force accounting was summarized under the caption,
“Chinese Contracts.”[3]
To fill short term
labor needs with cheap labor, salmon cannery operators negotiated with Chinese
contractors to hire thousands of Chinese cannery laborers, almost exclusively
young male who had little knowledge of English or the customs of a foreign
culture. The Chinese contractors hired
the crews, supervised them in the canning operation and paid them off at the
end of the season. As one historian put
it, “The cannery owners divested themselves of having to supervise, bargain, or
be concerned with what they perceived as a completely alien work force with a
culture which could not be understood.”[4]
Besides hiring and
supervising the China
crew, the contractors supplied their food and hired their cook. In return, they received a daily per capita
sum from the cannery owner for provisions.
As historian Chris Friday points out in his study Organizing Asian Labor: The Pacific
Coast
To supplement
their meager diets, Chinese cannery workers responded by keeping gardens, they gathered
plants and shellfish in their spare time, and bartered with the local Alaska
Natives living near the cannery. For
example, at the Alaska Packers Cannery at Chignik Lagoon the local Alutiit
managed to resurrect familiar practices of exchange by developing a kind of
underground barter system with the exotic cannery workers. Chignik resident, August Pedersen, remembered
selling bear feet and bear gall bladders to the Chinese workers in exchange for
leftover food from the cannery’s messhall at the end of the summer:
My old man [Marius “Pete” Pedersen] …He
used to give the Chinamen the feet and the gall. They used it for medicines, and in the fall,
they would be pretty decent. [In]Them years, you packed live animals. Pigs.
They’d give you a pig, a live pig.
Maybe old canned salmon. They’d
give you them “dents” they called it, ten, fifteen cases, though, and maybe a
couple hundred pounds of rice.[7]
Because contractors
seldom provided more than a basic subsistence, an important part of Chinese
workers’ activities involved gathering additional food. As Friday notes, “Food and its preparation
carry much cultural importance for all Chinese, and each dish supposedly has
its own special medicinal qualities.” Thus, in the canneries, where the food
varied little and was often inadequate, it is no wonder that Chinese workers
went to great lengths to keep gardens, harvest local berries, fish, and clams,
and trade with locals to supplement meager diets.[8]
Like the Chinese, Alaska
Native workers were positioned at the bottom of the cannery’s social ladder. In
the cannery pecking order, the highest paid were the Scandinavian fishermen, or
the “white crew.” The Italian and Greek fishermen, or “dagos,” as they were
called, were paid less for basically the same work. For cannery work such as soldering the tins,
cleaning the fish, and packing the cans, Chinese laborers (and later Japanese
and Filipino) were paid the least.[9]
At
the Alaska Packer’s Ugashik cannery, employers hired a mix of twenty European
and American workers in 1889, but no Natives. A year later, twenty Natives were
hired to assist one hundred forty Chinese workers in the Fish House.[10] A decade later, a few Alutiit were hired to
process fish, but were still excluded from fishing and fish trapping jobs.[11] The reason primarily had to do with
food. Canners complained that Native
laborers would work only as long as needed to secure a few possessions, then
abruptly quit and return to their more traditional food gathering activities.[12] Even a government observer reasoned, “Why
should he [the Native] work? Hunger no
longer worries him, his immediate wants are satisfied, and he has no others!”[13] Still, as canneries began to experience a
shortage of cheap labor due to the Chinese Exclusion Acts passed in 1882 and
1892, they began to hire Native workers, who replaced the Asian crews as the
lowest participants in the cannery organizational structure.
Cannery life was
an entirely different world than life along the river at fish camp. The industrialized plant was generally
dreary, damp and noisy. Belts whined,
flywheels whirled and narrow pipes dropping from overhead brought a ceaseless
stream of cold water to the work stalls.[14] At
Bristol Bay canneries, a combination of Alutiiq,
Dena’ina, and Yupik men and women worked in long rows as “slitters” “washers” or
“slimers.” In 1910, a group of Inupiaq
from the Seward Peninsula seeking cannery jobs migrated to the Alaska Peninsula , where they carved out a life among the
mixed Native/Euroamerican population living and working there.[15] Hence, the place name “Eskimo Town
In 1917, when Pete Koktelash, a Dena’ina from Nondalton, was 12 or13 years old, he worked downriver, at the Bristol Bay Packing company located at the mouth of the
“When
we got to Bristol Bay ,” recalled Koktelash, “there
were people who had come from everywhere.
There were Chinese, Mexicans, Italians, Filipinos, Norwegians, Dutna,
Eskimos from other places like the Kuskokwim
River
Besides the different people who
worked at the cannery, Koktelash also remembers the segregation that separated
people:
Cannery workers stayed in bunk houses
with other people from their own area.
The Dena’ina had their own bunk houses.
So did the Dutna, the Eskimos, the Chinese, the Filipinos, and all the
other groups. We called the Chinese bunk
houses “Chinatown ,” and they had their own
mess halls.
With out doubt,
canneries drastically impacted Native life in terms of increasing ethnic
diversity, affecting movement of local settlements, offering wage-paying jobs,
advancing systems of credit, disease, and ultimately, change in the reciprocal
relationship with the salmon. As
ethnographer James Vanstone suggests, “Of all the agents of change…none had a
greater or more lasting effect…than the commercial fishing industry.”[18] And indeed, what Alaska Native ate in the
messhall contributed greatly to their appropriation into an American
capitalistic system. Again, Pete
Koktelash recalls eating in the cannery messhall:
The rest of the cannery workers ate
together in mess halls separate from those of the fishermen. Meals were good, and we had plenty of food
served family style. Sometimes we got
homesick for our Dena’ina food, however.
The first year I went, I wasn’t used to Gasht’ana [Whiteman] food, and
it tasted funny. In time we got used to
what they served us and to working with people from all over the world.[19]
WOMEN
As you can
imagine, cannery work was even more restrictive for women. Because cleaning fish was considered “women’s
work,” such conditions belied the identity of Native men, the traditional
fishermen. It was also the reason why
cannery employers referred to their Asian crews as members of a “feminine
race.”
Moreover, although Native women held highly respected positions as the
“salmon processors” at fish camp, at the mechanized canneries, the knowledge
and skills wielded by Native women to preserve salmon throughout the winter
went unappreciated. Indeed, Native women received the guts, but little glory in
the industrialized world of the salmon cannery.
Still, the messhall was an avenue through which many women could get a foot in the door of the male-dominated fish packing industry. Although most cannery cooks were men, women were hired as waitress to serve in the Blue Room and to help prep by peeling carrots and potatoes.[20] At the
In fact, the cannery messhall provided women a place to bond. Dorothy Fribrock recalls that during the early part of the 1947 season, the waitress Inga and house keeper Florence Holt were the only other women in camp. As a result, Dorothy often spent the time after dinner in the messhall, hemming her Swedish napkins while the women cleared and set the tables for the next day.[21]
Claiming a
“woman’s touch” in recollections, most cannery people agree that the messhall
provided them a bright spot in what might be considered a cannery worker’s
gloomy day. When the first fresh fruit
of the season arrived by barge everyone in the messhall enjoyed the treat. Others remember the wild flower bouquets the
waitress placed at the center of the messhall tables. More than a few cannery romances blossomed in
the messhall. Dorothy Fribrock recalls
such a story:
“Diane Strasberg replaced Inga the next
year in Snug’s Kitchen. Diane sang folk
songs in her small sweet voice as she helped Ralph in the kitchen. She lived upstairs over our quarters and
painted two of the rooms, one in pastel stripes and the other with a rose
flowered border. Clem Tillion, with his
derby hat who came calling much to Ralph’s annoyance. These flirtations continued through the
summer. The third year Diane didn’t
return. Later she marred Clem and they
settled in Halibut Cove. She became a
famous Alaskan artist, first with her sepia colored octopus ink drawings and
later with her sculptures. Clem went on
to the Alaska Senate and became a member of the North Pacific Fisheries
Commission.”[22]
FILIPINOS
Throughout the early twentieth century, Filipinos cannery workers replaced Chinese workers excluded from working in the
And, in spite of separate bunkhouses, messhall, even
separate foremen, one thing American and Filipino workers shared equally was
the Fourth of July, for the Philippines and the United States both celebrated
their nation’s independence on that day.
“At the canneries in Alaska ,”
then “it was THE holiday.”[24]
According to numerous recollections, “The Filipinos would prepare for the
festivities all through June, drying fish and getting things ready for the big
event. There were games in the afternoon of the Fourth, followed by dancing in
the evening, with sun dried fish for all and many other foods.
Despite all the social interaction that occurred in
canneries, Filipinos were still officially segregated from other groups, and at
too many Alaskan canneries, they were made to feel like second class workers.[25]
For the most part, they held the undesirable jobs, slept in the worst
bunkhouses, and endured derogatory remarks from the Euro-American crews. In 1982, cannery workers from Kenai and other
canneries brought a class action suit against the plant’s owners, Wards Cove
Packing Co., alleging employment discrimination on the basis of race. After
spending years in the Court of Appeals, the case finally concluded in December,
2001. As much as the court disapproved
of employment practices that existed at the canneries, the plaintiffs could not
prove that these practices violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
that prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex
or national origin. Thus, the judge dismissed the complaint.[26]
CANNERY WORKER
Still, by the 1970s most canneries maintained integrated messhalls. At
By the 1970s, a generation of college students began to
work at canneries throughout Alaska . Thanks to bi-pass mail, they drank fresh milk,
enjoyed fresh fruit, and ate fresh veggies from the messhall salad bar on a
daily bases. And most significantly, these
self-proclaimed vegetarians also sought out more integrated relationships with
their coworkers than the more segregated meat and potatoes generations of the
past.
In 1981
“On the occasional night off…the egg house
crew spends time in the Japanese’s bunkhouse exchanging friendly ethnic songs
and sprits. There are private parties
whenever time allows, but the three recognized during the season are the
Italian fishermen’s barbecue around the Fourth of July, and the Japanese and
Filipino parties near the end of the season.
All three groups prepare ethnic foods and the celebrations provide a
means of letting off steam as well as enhancing a feeling of camaraderie among
us all.”[29]
The last time I visited South Naknek, I walked around old
dilapidated buildings that comprise of China Town Alaska . It’s strange, but you feel as though
something—or someone is watching. Indeed,
Food for Thought.
[1] Dorothy Fribrock,
Sockeye Sunday and Other Fish Tales
(Kasilof: Fribrock Kistler Publishing, 1999), 159.
[2]
Katherine Johnson Rigsmuth, Snug Harbor Cannery: A Beacon on the Forgotten Shore,
1919-1980 (Anchorage :
National Park Service, 2004), 116.
[3] Robert
A. Nash, “The China Gangs’
in the Alaska
Packers Association Canneries, 1882-1935” Economic
History, 257.
[4] Jack
Masson, “Chinese Tongs in Alaska ,”
Alaskana, vol. 7 no. 3, 1979, 44.
[5] Chris Friday,
Organizing Asian American Labor: The Pacific Coast
[6] Jack
Masson and Donald Guimary, “Asian Labor Contractors in the Alaskan Canned
Salmon Industry: 1880-1937,” Labor
History, 379.
[7] August
Pedersen, interview by Lisa Scarbrough, Alaska Department of Fish and Game, in Patricia
Partnow’s Making History: Alutiiq/Sugpiaq
Life on the Alaska Peninsula (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2001),
210.
[8] Friday,
54.
[9] Partnow,
136-137.
[10] Jefferson Moser, “The Salmon and Salmon Fisheries of Alaska
Salmon Investigations of the United States Fish Commission Steamer Albatross
in the 1900 and 1901,” Bulletin of the US Washington
D.C.
[12] Howard Kutchin, Report
on the Inspection of the Salmon Fisheries Document #618 (Washington: GPO Department
of Commerce and Labor, 1906), 48.
[13] Moser,
186.
[14] Huge W. McKirvill , The
Salmon People (Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 1967), 57-58.
[15]
Morseth, 141.
[16] Nuvendaltin
Quht’ana: The People of Nondalton “Pete Koktelash Dena’ina Perspective:
Memories of a Bristol Bay Fisherman”
(Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 260-261.
[17] Ibid.
[18]
Vanstone, 63.
[19]
Koktelash
[20]
Fribrock, 161
[21]
Fribrock, 192.
[22] Fribrock,
194.
[23] Barbara
Kistler, interviewed by Katherine Johnson Ringsmuth, June 11, 2003.
[24] Ibid
283
[25] Thelma Buchholdt,
Filipinos in Alaska :
1788-1958 (Anchorage :
Color Art Printing Co.), xi.
[26] Wards Cove Packing Co., Inc. v. Atonio, 490 U.S. 642,
109 S.Ct. 2115, 104 L.Ed.2d 733 (1989); Atonio v. Wards Cove Packing Co., Inc.,
275 F.3d 797 (9th Cir. 2001); Atonio v. Wards Cove Packing Co., Inc., 10 F.3d
1485 (9th Cir. 1993); Antonio v. Wards Cove Packing Co., Inc., 810 F.2d 1477
(9th Cir. 1987); Antonio v. Wards Cove Packing Co., Inc., 703 F.2d 329 (9th
Cir. 1982).
[27]
Fribrock, 285.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Kristen
Kelly, “Cannery Workers, We Come and We Go” Alaska
