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 emphasizes, this is a labor and working-class history. Purvis convincingly demonstrates that over the course of several decades in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Southeast Alaska’s diverse working class forged a culture of solidarity in their workplace and community that enabled them to extract concessions from the cannery owners, the territory’s most powerful group. The result is an original, intensely detailed exploration into the making of industrial Alaska and the resistance struggles waged by Native Alaskans and the wider working class.
One of the book’s main contributions is Purvis’s deep analysis of “corporate colonialism” in Southeast Alaska as the “business interests controlled resource extraction simultaneously with political jockeying for favorable laws, avoiding tax collection, and exerting influence on all aspects of Alaska life” (2). As absentee company owners consolidated control over the Alaskan economy, they eroded Native autonomy. The author takes care to show the deleterious impact of corporate colonialism on Alaska Natives, as “the cannery became a controlling factor in everyday life, and the once communal life was Westernized, drastically altering the Tlingit and Haida’s prestige-oriented society, formerly based on the property and rank” (51). Still, Purvis refuses to characterize Alaska Natives as passive victims of colonial corporate power; instead, the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian peoples of Southeast Alaska fought back using the courts, federal government, unions, and other tools that facilitated their assertions of sovereignty.
Where Ragged Coast, Rugged Coves is at its best is in weaving together the diffuse threads of working-class life and resistance to the dictates of U.S. corporations and their government allies. Worker organizing appears throughout the book but takes center-stage in the chapters “Fighting Back with Unions in the 1930s” and “A Union of Their Own.” Purvis recounts the processes by which cannery workers, frequently led by women, “formed strategies for coping under harsh conditions in a ‘we versus them’ alliance, and in so doing, member roles cut across social and racial lines to generate solidarity” (203).
The history of Filipinos’ work-lives and union organizing occupies a central place in this study. These Alaskeros had been raised on the “American promises of liberty and equality under the law,” but following their journey across the Pacific, came face to face with the oppression of American white supremacy and industrial capitalism. Purvis draws transnational links to Alaskero activism, noting that Filipino workers created strategies to combat capitalist oppression based partly on home-grown resistance to Spanish and American colonization of their homeland. Facing long hours in difficult conditions in the canneries, Alaska’s Filipinos nonetheless formed vibrant working-class communities that provided mutual aid for the community and hosted a wide range of social activities. Relations formed on the job united workers in the community in common cause, as “oppressive conditions” in industrial canneries led to “bubbling outrage” (166). The Southeast Alaska Filipino community provided the core for unionizing the wider cannery workforce, unifying all workers around shared experiences and grievances. Indeed, the diverse working-class coalitions that formed in the 1930s and 1940s often had roots in Filipino communities and Filipinos became the most active union organizers, forming “fighting” unions representing all cannery workers. “As multi-ethnic communities came together,” notes Purvis, “they found reasons to organize for better wages, sanitary working conditions, and a modernization of living arrangements” (11).
Presenting a fascinating narrative, Ragged Coast, Rugged Coves offers a useful resource for those interested in Alaska and Pacific Coast history. Too few general western and labor history texts pay attention to Alaska. Hopefully, textbook authors read and incorporate the findings from Purvis’s book into wider historical narratives. Purvis and the staff at the University of Nebraska Press deserve a great deal of credit for publishing this book, as Ragged Coast, Rugged Coves is a useful reminder of the remarkable history in this important part of the North American West. This book is a substantial contribution to western labor and social history. It will make a strong addition to university library holdings and I encourage instructors teaching upper-division or graduate courses in western and labor history to consider assigning this fine scholarly work.
