The Diamond NN Cannery: A Bristol Bay Salmon Cannery and the People Who Worked It

The salmon that jump Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park are part of a story that runs down the Naknek River to a cannery near the sea. Katherine J. Ringsmuth of the University of Alaska Anchorage wrote this account of the Diamond NN Cannery for Alaska Park Science, and the summary below paraphrases her article.

From the bears to the nets

Each summer visitors watch Alaska brown bears catch sockeye salmon at Brooks River. Most do not realize, Ringsmuth writes, that these fish are part of an escapement: the share Alaska fisheries biologists let slip past the commercial fishery to spawn. Bristol Bay gillnetters must wait with dry nets until upriver counts reach the spawning goal. Evidence of the commercial fishery is all around Brooks: a defunct fish ladder, the old Bureau of Commercial Fisheries laboratory and the remnants of a weir used to count sockeye heading for Brooks Lake. The effort to understand how big the Naknek runs once were led to decades of archeological work and the Brooks River Archeological District National Historic Landmark.

A Bureau of Commercial Fisheries biologist counts red salmon at the Brooks weir, fall 1958. National Archives, Alaska, RG 370.

Bristol Bay's salmon crashed in 1919 after wartime overcapitalization and overfishing, and that began a more science-based approach. Managers adopted the doctrine of maximum sustainable yield, calculating the harvest each run could bear and holding back enough fish for the spawning grounds. The weir counts at Brooks let the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries estimate how many fish got upriver.

The cannery

The cannery stands on the south bank near the mouth of the Naknek River, one of five major rivers draining to Bristol Bay. It began in 1890 as a saltery built by the Arctic Packing Company. The Alaska Packers Association (APA), a Del Monte subsidiary, absorbed it in 1892 and converted it to a cannery in 1894. APA gave it the initials NN, likely for Naknek, inside a diamond-shaped accounting symbol, and it became the jewel of APA's "diamond canneries." It grew from a four-building saltery into a 51-building complex, one of the largest and longest-running canneries in Alaska, and canned more salmon than any other cannery in the state. It never burned and was never used for anything but canning. Trident Seafoods closed it in 2015.

The workers

Before 1952, APA mostly hired immigrants from Italy, Croatia, Norway and Sweden to fish with gillnets from double-ended sailboats and to build and maintain the cannery and boats. Asian crews processed the fish, first from China, then Japan, then the Philippines. After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese workers aged out of the workforce, and thousands of young Filipino men, many of them college students, arrived on the West Coast; they became known as the "Alaskeros." Their unionization eventually ended racial segregation in Alaska canneries by 1979. Mexican workers were the largest ethnic group in the cannery before World War II, and Puerto Ricans and Hawaiians also worked there. Their graffiti on bunkhouse walls is one of the few traces they left.

Alaska Native workers came from the Katmai people. After the Novarupta eruption destroyed the village of Savonoski in 1912, villagers moved downriver and founded South Naknek. The Spanish Flu pandemic and the salmon crash pushed them toward cannery work, and they became its caretakers: supplying salmon, forming the crew that readied and winterized the plant, and serving as winter watchmen. The Laundry, where local women controlled the workspace, and the Alaska Native Bunkhouse and "white" Mess Hall, which show segregation, reflect that history. The cannery's longevity, Ringsmuth argues, owes much to their vigilance.

In 1928 APA's president credited the company's success to skilled and dependable workers, and noted that the canning season in Bristol Bay lasts only about four weeks, so crews had to be ready before the run began. Ringsmuth argues that these workers have been overshadowed by romantic stories of fishermen and often ignored, and that the cannery's buildings and machine parts hold overlooked labor and maritime history.

Saving the story

Since the cannery closed, a grassroots NN Cannery History Project has formed. With support from the National Park Service and the Alaska State Historic Preservation Office, it is nominating the property to the National Register of Historic Places as the APA Diamond NN Cannery Maritime Historic District. If listed, it would be the first historic salmon cannery from Bristol Bay on the register. The Project's oral histories, from fish processors to superintendents and fishermen, are online at Project Jukebox.

Sources

• Katherine J. Ringsmuth (University of Alaska Anchorage), "The role of the Diamond NN Cannery in interpreting the history of the Naknek River fishery," Alaska Park Science 19(1), National Park Service, source page; the article is a non-federal author's, paraphrased fully and rewritten in hubnx's own words. Her photographs and the project's pictures are left out.