Tracking Historical Changes in a Fishing Community

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Tracking Historical Changes in a Fishing Community
The Alert Bay Commercial Salmon Fishery, 1940s to
the 1960s Miriam Wright Department of History,
Acadia University
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1940 to 1970 A Critical Transition in the BC
Salmon Fishery
The years between World War II and the late 1960s
saw profound changes in British Columbia's
commercial salmon fishery. Structural changes in
the industry included the introduction of new
harvesting technologies (which greatly increased
the efficiency and mobility of the fleets),
centralization of canning operations and the
consolidation of capital. Harvesting innovations
also led to the rise of a mid-Pacific salmon
fishery, carried out mainly by vessels from Japan
and the Soviet Union. Competition for the
resource intensified, and access to the
commercial fishery became more difficult, as the
costs of fishing rose. As well, the growth of
land-based resource development in this period
-specifically logging and hydro-electrical
development - put even more pressure on the
already struggling salmon populations.
Meanwhile, the state actively supported the trend
toward consolidation in the industry, and
introduced the 1968 Davis Plan to reduce the
number of small-scale fishers involved in the
fishery. While we have a general understanding of
how these changes affected the fishery at a
province-wide level, we still have much to learn
about how these larger changes had an impact at
the community level.
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Tracking Historical Changes in a Fishing Community
This presentation comes from a larger project
that I have begun on fishing communities in
British Columbia. The value of looking at the
history of these communities is that we can get a
glimpse into how larger economic, industrial,
management, ecological and environmental changes
are manifested at a community level. As well, we
can learn something about the particular ways
that people have dealt with these changes. While
it is not possible to present a full community
study in this format, I will show some of the
ways that the commercial salmon fishery was
changing in one community, Alert Bay, which is
located in Johnstone Strait, British Columbia.
The federal Department of Fisheries began
collecting data on salmon landings in a more
comprehensive way in the early 1950s, but we
still have little information on landings at the
community level. By using other historical
sources, including records of the Anglo-British
Columbia Packing Company, which maintained an
operation in Alert Bay, annual reports and other
studies produced by the Fisheries Research Board
in this period, The Native Voice, a newspaper of
the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia, as
well as other secondary sources, I have been able
to provide some information on landings and
earnings of the commercial salmon seine fleet in
this community.
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Commercial Salmon Fishery at Alert Bay
The commercial salmon fishery in the area began
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, when canneries were established at
Alert Bay and Knight's Inlet, as well as Rivers
Inlet to the north. In this area, local
Kwakwakawakw people were the main labour force
for this fishery. Pacific coast native peoples
have always been involved in the industrial
salmon fishery in British Columbia. When the
first commercial salmon canneries were built on
the rivers and inlets of the B.C. coast in the
late 19th century, families made the seasonal
trip to these centres. Men caught the fish for
the companies, while women and children worked in
the canneries. Throughout the first half of the
20th century, the commercial fishery remained the
single largest employer of native people in the
province, despite growing competition from
non-natives. By the 1940s, Alert Bay was a
community of approximately 700 European Canadians
and 700 Kwakwakawakw. Two fishing companies
operated in the area - B.C. Packers and the
A.B.C. Packing Company.
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Alert Bay Seine Fleet, 1945-1968
Alert Bay was the home base of a large seine
fleet. Seiners were vessels typically between 50
and 65 feet in length, requiring a crew of 5 to 7
people. Historically, access to the commercial
salmon fishery was through the fishing companies,
which rented vessels to fishers. In the post-war
period, Alert Bay's seine fleet was primarily
owned by the fishing companies, although a few
people had managed to buy their vessels from the
canneries. Alert Bay was one of the few areas
where native peoples came to dominate the seine
fleet. In most areas of the province, people of
European descent dominated this sector (native
peoples were generally barred from obtaining
seine licences until the 1920s). In Alert Bay,
native people had slowly getting a foothold in
the seine fleet, and by the late 1940s, made up
the majority of people involved in this fishery.
There was also a gillnet fleet (vessels
typically under 40') which fished for the fishing
companies. Many of these fishers, however, lived
across Johnstone Strait on Guildford Island, or
in Vancouver.
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Trends in the B.C. Salmon Fishery, 1950 to the
late 1960s.
While in Alert Bay, native people had been able
to maintain a strong presence in the commercial
fishery, the fishery itself was undergoing some
significant changes. Overall, despite increased
technology, the total salmon catch declined from
a yearly average of 181.4 million pounds from
1951 to 1954, to just 129.4 million pounds from
1963 to 1966. Chum, a commercially important
species because of its abundance and suitability
for canning, experienced a particularly severe
decline from 1955 to 1965. The federal
government responded to these changes in the
traditional ways tightening regulations,
shortening the fishing season and reducing weekly
fishing times. The Canadian government, however,
had no jurisdiction over high seas fishing, and
had no control over the fleets in the
mid-Pacific, nor over Americans fishing off the
coast of Alaska.
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Changes at the Local Level
How were these changes affecting Alert Bay? We
see changes in a number of areas -salmon
landings, as well as earnings from fishing. The
following graphs suggest some of these changes.
In particular, catch per boat fell significantly,
from the 1940s to the 1960s. Chum landings, in
particular, fell by 84 from the early 1950s to
the mid-1960s. Overall, seine crew members were
earning less money from fishing in the 1960s than
they were in the late 1940s. Smaller catches and
smaller returns also affected the successful
operation of seine vessels. Studies and surveys
done on the British Columbia fishery at the time
noted that it was getting harder to make a profit
in the seine fishery by the late 1960s. While we
do not have a complete set of records for the
seine vessels operating at Alert Bay, a
comparison between the summaries from 1954 and
1961 suggest that operating expenses remained the
same, but average earnings had fallen by 20. As
well, in 1961, the average boat and net shares
were 31 lower than they were in 1954, and 28
lower than in 1947.
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ABC Packing Company, Alert Bay Average seine
landings (in pounds) by four-year periods
(source City of Vancouver Archives, Add MSS1,
A.B.C. Packing Company Cannery Returns, file 2)
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Area 12 (Johnstone Strait) Average seine
landings (in pounds) by four-year periods
(source B.A. Campbell and R.F.A. Roberts, A
Review of Recent Trends in the British Columbia
Salmon Fishery 1951-1966,, (Vancouver Economic
Branch, Pacific Region, Department of Fisheries
of Canada, 1967), 48).
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A.B.C. Packing Company, Alert Bay Average
number of pounds of salmon (all species) landed
per seine boat (source City of Vancouver
Archives, Add MSS1, A.B.C. Packing Company
Cannery Returns, file 2)
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A.B.C. Packing Company, Alert Bay - Average catch
per seine boat by species, 1950-1965 (source
City of Vancouver Archives, Add MSS1, A.B.C.
Packing Company Cannery Returns, file 2.)
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A.B.C. Packing Company, Alert Bay Number of
seine vessels fishing for the company, 1945-1965
(source City of Vancouver Archives, Add MSS 1,
A.B.C. Packing Company, Cannery Returns, file 2.)
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A.B.C. Packing Company, Alert Bay Seine
landings (in pounds) by species, 1950-58 (source
City of Vancouver Archives, Add MSS1, A.B.C.
Packing Company Cannery Returns, file 2.)
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A.B.C. Packing Company, Alert Bay Seine
landings (in pounds) by species, 1959-1967
(source City of Vancouver Archives, Add MSS1,
A.B.C. Packing Company Cannery Returns, file 2.)
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A.B.C. Packing Company, Alert Bay Average
fishing earnings of seine crews (includes
captains earnings for fishing, but not earnings
for net or boat owners) (source University of
British Columbia, Special Collections, A..B. C.
Packing Company Records)
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Community Responses
Although the Johnstone Strait area was one of the
top-producing salmon areas of the province in the
1950s, and local fishers experienced some strong
fishing years (the extraordinary sockeye run of
1958, for example), there were growing concerns
in the community about the future of the fishery.
The fishers of the Alert Bay area had a long
history of involvement in fisheries unions, and
several prominent fishers in the community also
served on the executive of the Native Brotherhood
of British Columbia. The Native Brotherhood
began pushing the government to address both the
immediate and longer-term problems in the
fishery. During the particularly poor fishing
seasons of 1960 and 1965, for example, the
Brotherhood pressed for government employment
programs so that local people would not have to
rely on the Indian Agencies for support. While
these proposals were not successful, in 1965, the
government did introduce a one-time relief
payment for people who had not earned enough
money to collect unemployment insurance.
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Community Responses (2)
The Native Brotherhood also pressured the federal
government to address the issue of offshore
fishing by Japanese, American, and Soviet Union
vessels. In 1964, Native Brotherhood President
Guy Williams, and Vice President James Sewid (an
Alert Bay seine vessel owner and captain)
travelled to Ottawa to make their case. As Sewid
explained in his 1967 autobiography Guests Never
Leave Hungry, they were concerned that the
federal Department of Fisheries management
practices penalized local people who fished close
to shore, yet did nothing to control fishing
taking place outside Canadas 3-mile territorial
limit. Sewid said Many of the Japanese boats
were catching salmon out in the North Pacific and
we felt that this was reducing the number of
salmon returning to the spawning grounds._at_
Despite these arguments, Canada did not fully
establish a 12- mile fishing limit until 1969.
International conflict over the salmon
populations, however, continued.
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What we still need to learn
While we have a clearer picture of changes
occurring in the commercial fishery at the
community level, we still need to know more about
how people responded to these changes. For
example, how did these changes affect peoples
fishing strategies? Did relations between the
fishing companies and local fishing people
change? How did people deal with changes in
earnings from fishing? Did the reliance on the
Ainformal economy_at_ - hunting, fishing for
eulachon etc. change? Did growing concerns about
the future of the commercial fishery contribute
to the growth of native politics in the 1960s and
1970s? We also need to know more about what was
happening to the salmon populations themselves in
this period. What were the local impacts of the
rise of mid-ocean fishing on salmon populations,
increased logging and hydro-electric development?
When and where did people notice these
changes? Clearly, however, tracking historical
changes in the fishery is only a first step in
gaining a broader understanding of the complexity
of fisheries and fishing communities in the past
and present.
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Further Reading
Philip Drucker, The Native Brotherhoods Modern
Intertribal Organizations on the Northwest Coast.
Washington Smithsonian Bureau of American
Ethnology, Bulletin 168, 1958. Percy Gladstone,
Native Indians and the Fishing Industry of
British Columbia, Canadian Journal of Economic
and Political Science 19 (February 1953) 20-34.
Dianne Newell, Tangled Webs of History Indians
and the Law in Canadas Pacific Coast Fisheries.
Toronto University of Toronto Press, 1993.
James B. Spradley, ed. Guests Never Leave
Hungry The Autobiography of James Sewid, a
Kwakiutl Indian. Montreal and Kingston McGill-
Queens University Press, 1969.