Dissertation Information for David Francis ArnoldNAME:
DEGREE:
DISCIPLINE:
SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: MPACT Status: Fully Complete Title: "Putting up fish": Environment, work, and culture in Tlingit society, 1780s-1940s Abstract: This dissertation examines the Tlingit struggle to maintain cultural stability, resist environmental destruction, and assert themselves as marketplace participants in the midst of unprecedented cultural, ecological, and socioeconomic change. Between the 1790s and the 1940s, southeastern Alaska was transformed from an aboriginal maritime subsistence society to a modern industrial state. Ethnographic and anthropological sources, Tlingit oral histories, tribal records, travelers' narratives, government documents, company and labor union records, and newspaper accounts reveal that Tlingit fishing communities resisted economic dependency and social marginalization during these transformations by carrying on old traditions and adapting in new ways to the forces of change. Precontact Tlingit society balanced individual achievement and wealth accumulation with social responsibility and reciprocity. Environmental and economic relationships (fishing, hunting, and gathering) were organized by clan households and imbued with social and spiritual significance through clan ritual and mythology. From the 1790s to the 1870s, throughout the maritime fur trade, Russian settlement, and the early years of American rule, Tlingit culture remained intact. The Tlingit were expert manipulators of European commerce. They maintained their lifeways by using the fur trade to enrich indigenous cultural structures (such as the potlatch) and by protecting their salmon fishery from overexploitation. However, in the 1870s, largescale salmon canneries challenged Tlingit cultural, economic, and environmental control. Industrial fish traps threatened environmental and economic destruction, Euroamerican commercial fishermen disregarded Tlingit property rights, and the market transformed salmon from an animal of invaluable social and spiritual significance to a commodity bereft of social value. In the twentieth-century, the Tlingit responded to industrialism by successfully engaging in the labor market while fighting to protect their subsistence lifeway from total despoiliation. Through intertribal organizations and labor unions, Tlingits promoted their interests as marketplace producers and subsistence harvesters, challenging the right of canning corporations to dictate the labor process of fishing. By the mid-1940s, when labor tactics and assimilationist strategies proved ineffective, Tlingits initiated aboriginal rights litigation, culminating eventually in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (1971) which gave over two-hundred million dollars in capital, land, and mineral resources to Sealaska, the Tlingit regional corporation. During one-hundred and fifty years of interaction with Europeans and Americans, the Tlingit did not move inevitably toward dependence. Instead, they became important participants in Alaska's market economy and struggled, often with great success, to retain control over their environment, work, and culture. |
MPACT Scores for David Francis ArnoldA = 0 Advisors and Advisees Graphgenerating graph, please reload |
Students under David Francis Arnold
ADVISEES:
- None
COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None