by Rachel Mason
I came back to Kodiak two months before the March 1989 Exxon
Valdez Oil Spill to do ethnographic fieldwork for my dissertation on the
occupational culture of commercial fishing. I had been going to graduate school
in Virginia. When my Kodiak friends, who knew me as a cab driver and before
that a cannery worker, heard that I had obtained an NSF grant and another grant
to study fishing and drinking in Kodiak, they thought I must have pulled off a
wonderful scam.
My plan, in the spirit of participant observation, was to
work briefly on several different boats and fishing operations. I had a little
bit of experience fishing halibut and hoped I could convince some open-minded
skippers to take on a working anthropologist observer. I first heard about the
oil spill while inexpertly helping a seiner crew prepare their net for the
upcoming herring season. When the oil spill curtailed most of the Kodiak
fisheries, my research plans had to change. In fact, though, the summer of the
oil spill may have provided me with an even better understanding of fishermen’s
occupational identity than I would have gotten by actually fishing—because I
saw what they missed when they were not allowed to fish.
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| Photo credit: www.eoearth.org |
The Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred in March 1989, but the
oil didn’t reach Kodiak until several weeks later, first only spotting the
beaches of the northern part of the archipelago, then advancing south,
plastering the coasts of northern Kodiak Island. The city of Kodiak had an
Emergency Services Team in place to respond to disaster, and in the month
before the oil hit, there were public meetings with representatives of city,
state, and federal agencies. Exxon representatives arrived after the oil hit to
take control of the response effort. Thus began a summer that one resident
described as a “foreign occupancy.”
As the oil spill began to dominate their lives, many people
in Kodiak thought this was a qualitatively different crisis from “normal”
fishing crises, or even from the larger natural and man-made disasters of the
past. The spill made fishermen see that despite their efforts to preserve a
lifestyle, their lives were controlled by the actions of big corporations. They
thought Exxon's handling of the cleanup, even more than the oil itself, had a
damaging effect on the Kodiak community. One man said that the Exxon’s presence
and behavior during the cleanup effort made the spill different from a natural
disaster because “here the guy who did it throws salt in the wound.” There was
little trust in the scientific studies conducted by Exxon or government
agencies to test whether seafoods were contaminated, or whether beaches were
clean enough.
Kodiak residents were angry that the cleanup was not
directed by people with local knowledge. “All Exxon knows how to do is write
checks,” one person said. With the appearance of an Exxon Command Center, with
uniformed security guards, and hundreds of Veco (Exxon’s employment contractor),
and government agency personnel swarming in the community, Kodiak seemed to be
under foreign occupation. Some attributed the chaotic cleanup operation to
Exxon's calculation rather than to incompetence.
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| Protest march against Exxon, summer 1989 (Kodiak Maritime Museum) |
Some in the Lower 48 were skeptical about the hardships
suffered by fishermen during the oil spill, especially since Exxon “poured
money on the spill” by chartering fishing boats at absurdly high rates and paid
unskilled workers $16.79 an hour to clean up the oil. Outside Alaska, more
public concern was focused on the damages to subsistence lifestyle in the
Alaska Native villages affected by the spill than on damages to the lifestyle
of commercial fishermen. Even in Alaska, there was little sympathy for people
who made a lot of money by working for Exxon during the oil spill. Kodiak
residents commented that some fishermen had the “best season ever” in 1989,
becoming “spillionaires.”
Salmon seiners were not allowed to fish in the summer of
1989 because of the possibility of salmon contamination. They waited for weeks
as several implausible scenarios were suggested for dealing with salmon unfit
for harvest; one idea was to shred the oiled fish and dump them three miles
out. Finally, the whole salmon season was closed except for a few set net sites
and a terminal fishery around a hatchery. Exxon chartered some of the seine
boats after that, but many seiners resented being in this position. These
fishermen felt that the deprivation of their freedom to fish represented a
general loss of autonomy. Even when Exxon gave compensation to salmon fishermen
for not fishing, they felt they had been made into a subject people, waiting
for Exxon to give them a handout. Fishermen whose boats were chartered also
felt dependent on Exxon, transformed from independent competitors into
time-clock employees.
During the summer of 1989, the spill was all that anyone in
Kodiak talked about. It was considered the definitive event that brought people’s
heads out of the sand regarding their lack of autonomy in relation to the
corporate world. Community meetings, daily at first and then less frequently,
continued to be well attended and to include public testimony. Fishermen and
cannery workers were politicized by the spill. There was a protest march
against Exxon. The Seiners Association formed that summer and agitated for a
fairer system of chartering vessels. There was a short-lived Crewmen’s
Association, whose meetings were always in bars and were usually disrupted by a
few outspoken members with specific concerns. The Crude Women began as a group
of female fishermen and fishing spouses, displaced by the spill from their
usual summer work and evolving into a local environmental advocacy group.
Two years later, however, interest in the spill itself had
diminished in Kodiak. With characteristic resilience, Kodiak fishermen had gone
on to face other crises. In 1991, the major issue facing local fishermen in
Kodiak was the impending individual quota system for halibut and sablefish.
The oil spill was a particularly dramatic arena for demonstrating
commercial fishing’s transition from a lifestyle to a business that has been playing
out in Kodiak since the beginning of frontier exploitation of resources. The
community has thrived on cycles of crisis, resisting a progression toward
regulation and efficiency. The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, a bigger crisis than
most, showed fishermen the enormous power of the corporation.
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