Respecting Mother Nature

by Bill Hjort

My grandparents, Steve and Anna Vlasoff, really taught me how important it was to live off the land. They taught me everything I know. They taught me how to respect the land and the sea. You had to work with Mother Nature in order to survive. I remember being at the stern of the boat huddled under a blanket with my cousin, Ray, and my grandmother, while my grandfather took a pair of oars and rowed us to the clam digging grounds, which were around Chenega. It was a moonlit night, and we had a little gas lantern with us. We traveled by moonlight, and once we got to the area where we would dig for clams, they'd light the gas lantern and we'd dig clams by its light.

We did everything seasonally in Chenega. In the wintertime, there was mainly trapping. I remember trapping when I was about eight or nine years old. My grandfather and I used to sit next to the stove and make handmade traps called dead falls. They are made from a piece of wood, and there's a special way to set up them in the weeks to that an animal will get caught in them. We trapped in the winter as well as digging for clams. People also went out in the front of the village and fished by hand-line for whatever they could get. We usually got gray cod, halibut, or snapper. There was a man named Sam Ribaloff, who was kind of like the village fisherman. You would always see him out in the bay. Whenever he caught anything, he usually shared it with a lot of people.

Spring was usually seal hunting time because that's when they had pups. I think it was around May. We'd also gather wild bird eggs, mostly seagull and kittiwake. Once spring rolled around and summer began, then everybody started preparing for commercial salmon fishing. We used to go to Shipyard in the summer. Everybody had their own little site there. The whole village would go over to Shipyard in June because we would start fishing in July.

My grandfather was a commercial fisherman. He and my uncles, Eddie and John Vlasoff, would be on the boat together. I'd go with them. I think I was ten years old when I first started doing that with them. My Uncle Eddie mainly taught me about commercial fishing. My grandfather turned over his boat to my uncle not too long after I started fishing. Being on the boat was very much a part of our lives back then. Once you started fishing, people had respect for you because you were growing up, I guess, even though you were still young. It was a big thing. In those days, we usually fished through July and the first part of August. I think it was five or six weeks of commercial fishing. We caught mainly pink salmon back then, because that's what the cannery wanted for canning. We would also catch chum salmon and other fish, but mainly we were fishing for pinks.

Families were busy in the fall putting away salmon for winter. Each family would smoke a couple hundred pounds of fish at least. They would mainly smoke or dry the fish. Then they would store them in either cardboard boxes or gunny-sacks, left from the sugar and flour we used to get. Back in those days, the climate was quite a bit different. The winters were a lot drier, so the fish pretty much kept all through the winter. Some people went hunting during the fall, but mainly you did all your berry picking and putting up salmon that time of the year. You never got sick and tired of fish, even after eating it all winter long. It was a real staple in our lives. It would start to mold come springtime, but all you had to do was scrape the mold off.

Back in those days, the women did most of the cooking. Living with my grandparents, I would cook breakfast for everybody. It would be my turn to cook, and my Aunt Marge would have to do the dishes or the other way around. We took turns taking care of all the chores. Whenever there was a gathering or anything like that, you always made sure the elders were taken are of first. That's one of the things that bothers me whenever I go to function nowadays. The kids will go up in front of everybody. We never did that in the old days. The elders got taken care of first. I still believe that.

After I left Chenega, I was living in Cordova off and on with my mom and my stepfather and we'd commercial clam dig. We'd start clam digging in April. One time, between me, my mother, and my stepfather, I think we had over twenty-two hundred pounds of clams. That was a lot of clam digging. We used to use a razor clam shovel. Razor clams are really, really good eating.

I started commercial fishing with my uncle and my grandfather. During the time I was in the service, I was away from it for awhile. I came back to it in the sixties, on a part-time basis. After I got out of the service I moved to Seattle, and I came back to Alaska for seining, working with two of my uncles and my step-dad. I eventually got back into it myself, and I've been doing that full-time since the early seventies. Commercial fishing was hard work back then. We did everything by hand. When I started we didn't have any power equipment. You pulled in the fish by hand, you offloaded by hand…you did everything by hand. It was a lot of work. But, it taught you really good work ethics. You were always in good physical shape after the salmon season. You learned how to pull your own weight, as far as taking care of stuff on a boat. We did a lot of what you call round-hauling back in those days. You pretty much went around with what you saw. The techniques are a little different today because of all the power equipment. It's changed quite a bit.

As a fisherman, you pretty much lived in harmony with Mother Nature. Even though there was an abundance of pretty much everything that was around here, you didn't abuse that privilege of taking what you needed. You didn't go out there and kill every last little creature that was around you. You made sure you left some for seed.

My two daughters, Catia and Billie, grew up on a boat like I did. They were pretty much part of my crew during the years they were growing up. They are doing their own things these days. But they spent much of their youth on the boat. They grew up knowing the importance of living off the water. I was living in Edmonds, Washington, when the oil spill happened. I was fishing then. I came up to Cordova two days after it happened, and I was involved in the clean up. The spill changed subsistence and commercial fishing. Exxon will tell you otherwise, but scientific studies have shown results different from what Exxon is telling everyone. For one thing, we used to have a pretty healthy herring fishery in Prince William Sound, but it hasn't been the same since the oil spill.

We moved back to Cordova from Seattle about three years ago. I'm home again. I missed living in Alaska. My family eats a lot of fish now. We eat salmon, halibut, cod—whatever is available. We put up a lot of fish for the winter. We smoke it and can it. It's a big part of our diet. My wife and I still go berry picking. We can the berries and we make jams and jellies. We also freeze a lot of berries so that my wife can bake pies in the wintertime. Subsistence is not what it used to be, but it's still a part of my life. We're not totally dependent on it like we used to be. The times have changed. Back then, if we didn't do subsistence, we didn't have anything to eat. It's not that way today. To me, subsistence not only provided you with what you needed to survive, but it also taught you to live in harmony with Mother Nature. You learned to be respectful and not to abuse the privilege. You took from the land only what you needed, but you didn't over do it. You lived in harmony with Mother Nature because she's more knowledgeable and more powerful than we know.