A History of Commercial Fishing in Glacier Bay, Alaska

Mackovjak, Jim

In the telling of any history there are potentially as many versions of events as there are participants. And unless an effort is made to capture an accurate telling of history in written form – a scholarly work relying on records along with recollections of the participants – experience teaches us that “history” can take on a life of its own. When it is only “oral,” history can change with each telling and eventually devolve into whatever people can recall, or, in some cases, whatever they choose to recall. By the fourth or fifth generation of telling, it can little resemble actual events. But to accurately capture history is a challenge, made all the more difficult by situations like the question of commercial fishing in Glacier Bay National Park. Over the course of several decades the issue has played out at multiple levels – from crews working the decks of fishing boats and fisher families gathered around their kitchen tables in Alaska, to the halls of congress and ultimately the highest court in the land. At its core are conflicts inherent in some of the most basic tenets of our society – the place of Native peoples within their traditional homelands; state’s rights versus federal rights; the ability of people to make a living off the land; the desire of a nation to recognize and protect one of its most treasured landscapes. In a very real sense the Glacier Bay commercial fishing issue pitted natural associates against one another – on the one hand a conservationist-fisherman constituency interested in managing fish populations for “sustained yield”; on the other a conservationist-naturalist constituency interested in managing the same populations as “natural and healthy.” In the middle of this battle, the employees of the National Park Service toiled to fulfill the agency’s mission while living and interacting within the affected communities. Even to this day, it is a history that is not yet finished, but will continue to evolve in the lives of fishermen, communities and park visitors for decades to come as the phase-out of commercial fishing in the bay plays out. By the time the final resolution was coming into focus, the issue had been going on for so long, with so many players and so many complexities, that no one person could really quite grasp it all. But with the departure of each person who had participated in it, a little of the history left with them. That concern was behind Superintendent Tomie Lee’s decision to commission this history while it was still fresh, and while many of the players were still around.