<Begin Segment 14>

FM: Once you get up beyond Queen Charlotte Island, before you get to Ketchikan, which is the first stop for freighters like this, going up to Alaska. And Ketchikan, of course is at the Southeastern, tip of Southeastern Alaska. There is a stretch... funny, I... part of the Alaskan Sea, what was it called? Anyway, it's an area that can be extremely rough and I realize now, then, that as you came out from these channels into this rough area, especially if on a particular trip you got into very rough water, how threatening this sea could be in the Alaskan area. And so, when I read today about fishing vessels which were... on which people drowned because the fish-, boat went under, I can imagine what these huge waves were like that would hit the bow and bring tons of water over the bow into the ship. Then Ketchikan was another sight on this first trip, especially. Ketchikan is like seeing a frontier town in a cowboy movie today, little more heavily populated than those cowboys pictures show, but essentially like that: wooden sidewalks, dirt road, and along the strip where houses of prostitution were mixed in with businesses and shops and whatnot. Ketchikan could be a very attractive town but it's a product of commercialization today mixed in with what is leftover from the previous, earlier Indian days and it's not a very attractive mix, and so it was not very attractive in that sense. But for a fourteen-year-old arriving in the wilds of Alaska, this was very interesting.

On the way up, by the way, this old freighter that we were on would travel along at eight knots or whatever an hour, and we would be passed up by the Canadian boats, particularly Princess Marguerite or Princess Charlotte, going twice as fast and we would stare at these boats that would dash along at a terrific rate beyond us. And there were some other American boats that were going up farther north than we were going, that would pass us up at this, you know, cruiser ship rate. That was the kind of thing that kind of stuck in our minds because you had a sense of how, in a sense, niggardly your life was in the steerage circumstances of traveling on a freighter.

We went from Ketchikan to stop off into other ports at, in southeastern Alaska before getting to Waterfall. One of them was a port called Hydaburg. Now Hydaburg is an Indian village and it is the... and we would stop there because there is an Indian cannery there. But "Haida" is a name that I came to know later when I got to college as the name of the most distinguished Northwest Indian tribe in the area. H, capital H-a-i-d-a, although Hydaburg, the name of the town is spelled, capital H-y-d-a-burg, I think, and I don't know why the name difference exists. When you read in the anthropological literature that the Haida Indians were one of the most highly cultured of the Native American population, it is hard to believe that that is so having visited Hydaburg, because Hydaburg is a terrible, run-down town. And it is run-down because, again, as I said earlier, the Native Americans were never intended to fit into a white man's society and what they had before could have been very well-, functionally well-suited to the setting, but in being transformed in the course of thirty, forty years of association with white people, it came to be a, a kind of an ugly settlement for Native Americans. But it was the one settlement that they had in that area. And one of the main centers for the Haida Indians, I presume, inasmuch as the town's name was Hydaburg, and the only one I know of with that kind of name.

The Indian, Native Americans living there were, in my view, tragic in the sense that they obviously were not living at the level that they had been living before. Previously, the Kwakiutl Indians of the North, the Vancouver Island area and the Haida were regarded as the superior tribes of this whole area and they must have shown the kind of culture that would reflect that status. But what we saw, and what, and the way people regarded them -- white people and the cannery workers and so on -- regarded them, they were, so to speak, the dregs of society, or obvious misfits in some sense, didn't fit into American society. And I have always felt that Native Americans had the terrible misfortune of being inundated by or invaded by a population whose system they simply were not made to fit into. Terrible misfortune. And that was always the situation in the relationship of cannery workers with Native American population. It was as if we were relating to a population that obviously didn't fit. And yet, they were part, part of the scenery. It was alleged, and actually you could see the signs of it, that the Native Americans were afflicted to an extraordinary degree by syphilis or by venereal disease of one kind of another. This is the kind of picture, image that remains with you regarding the Native American population. And yet, if, if I had been smart enough to... or educated enough to try to find out more about them, I'm sure I could have reached a level of understanding of them that would have given me some appreciation for what their culture actually was like. But viewed as part of the cannery system, or cannery scene, or the commercialized industrial scene of American life, they were simply misfits, clearly, and it was a terrible shame that that was so. I just want to bear on that because they played a significant part in the background of what was going on there but, not a significant functional part in that scene; and I wanted to explain why I think that that was so.

So, from Hydaburg we went to Rose Inlet. Rose Inlet was the stopover before getting to... Hyda-, Waterfall and I mention it because there was again an iso-, incidentally, these were all isolated cannery stops, no town, nothing else. There was only the ship coming into a docks where the cannery is and the woods and mountains surrounding it, no other access except by boat or by airplane into this area. Rose Inlet was a stop of significance to me because it was still a Chinese contractor-operated cannery and somehow it seemed a lesser cannery than some of the others that we went to, but nevertheless, the Chinese cannery contractors were still operative in the whole area except that they were now functioning at a lesser level than the Japanese contractors were, who were "taking over," so to speak, the whole system.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.