Approaching Leviathan: Efforts to Establish Small-Scale, Community Based Commercial Salmon Fisheries in Southeast Alaskan Indigenous Communities

Abstract

In the wake of neoliberal reworking of Alaskan fisheries beginning in the 1970s, Tlingit and Haida village residents in southeast Alaska rapidly lost rights to commercial salmon and halibut fisheries, primarily through the sale of the property rights awarded to them when the programs were initiated. At the same time, the lack of capital, financial qualifications (collateral, credit history), and basic knowledge about the operation of bureaucratic systems of finance and property rights, prevented young village residents from purchasing the state-created permits needed for commercial fishing. While commercial fishing as an economic foundation of village life has virtually disappeared, nevertheless village residents maintain strong ties to the customary and traditional salmon systems which have sustained their communities – culturally and nutritionally – for thousands of years. Villagers acquire salmon using small-scale technologies consisting of open skiffs and nets pulled by hand, operated typically by crews of two or three men. While conducting their subsistence fisheries, they have identified numerous cases of unharvested surplus salmon at stream mouths which the permitted commercial purse seine fishery directed by the biological managers have failed to capture. They have perceived and advanced the possibility of develo** local, community based small-scale fisheries to make use of the foregone harvests. The neoliberal regime has tightly aligned six sectors – legal practitioners (politicians and lawyers), resource managers (biologists), commercial fishing permit holders (producers), processing firms (capitalists), financiers (bankers) and policing agents (enforcement personnel) – into an assemblage I refer to as “Leviathan”. This hybrid alignment presents itself and acts as an impregnable entity protecting the interests of its collaborators from the establishment of new fisheries or the entrance of new practices into its alignment. This paper will (1) describe the components and construction of “Leviathan” as it operates to protect itself, (2) demonstrate how an “optimizing” logic of cost minimization in management results in underutilization of salmon available for harvest and (3) present two case studies of salmon stocks that are presently not being utilized that could become community-based, small scale commercial fisheries that would be of substantial economic benefit to village residents for whom “Leviathan” makes no provision.