David Arnold may be one of the few people who has jumped ship for a cause--particularly if you consider that he jumped ship while at sea. The whole adventure becomes still more remarkable when you learn that he was hot on the trail of his doctoral dissertation when all this went down.

It all began in 1986, when Arnold's sister found him a summer job working for a cannery in Alaska. He returned to Alaska every summer after that, working in a cannery or on the docks or eventually on fishing boats.

By the summer of 1991, Arnold had finished his undergraduate work at Washington State University and his master's degree at UCLA. Postponing his search for a dissertation topic (or so he thought), Arnold headed north to Bristol Bay.

When salmon prices soared in the 1980s, a host of part-time commercial fishermen descended on Alaska each summer. With no long-term commitment to fisheries--and heavy debts from the expensive boats they bought for the work--these operations wanted no part of a strike that had been called by the fishermen in Bristol Bay. Arnold was working on one of these "scab" boats.

"After about two days of doing that, I couldn't really do it anymore," Arnold said. "I felt that I was compromised philosophically, and it was also really scary to be fishing out there."

It was really scary because the scab boats were constantly harassed by boats carrying protesting strikers. When Arnold "jumped off that [scab] boat and quit, at sea," he jumped onto one of the striking boats and was taken to a strike-friendly fishing camp, where he eventually tied up with another fisherman and went to sea when the strike ended.

But more importantly, he had stumbled onto a research topic. "That experience of the strike was formative," Arnold said. "I realized what an amazing situation it was up there in terms of labor and ethnicity."

As he considered the idea, he saw that "fishing was the kind of economic activity or job where strong cultural continuities and family traditions were carried through. It lent itself to an approach that looked at the larger structural relationships between labor, capital, and industrialism, on the one hand, and, on the other, how different ethnic groups drew on their cultural traditions to navigate the economic changes that transformed fishing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries," the creation of the commercial fishing industry.

Arnold's labor history of Alaska's fisheries "inevitably became a Native American history because the Native Americans, the Indians and the Eskimos, were the original fishermen." That brought Arnold to the American Indian Studies Center, where Duane Champagne, a history professor and director of the Center, provided important assistance in the evolution of the project.

Champagne has done research on the Tlingit Indians of southeastern Alaska, who contrasted well with the Yupik Eskimos of southwestern Alaska during this period. Facing the same economic changes and challenges, the two groups brought to the task cultures that were "about as far apart in terms of social organization as you can imagine," Arnold said. Arnold also noted that not many historians have looked at Alaskan Indians, even though they provide a unique opportunity to study Native Americans who were "never reservationized," and who have been able "to continue, albeit in changed ways, the types of economic activities their ancestors carried out." The project is also unusual in looking at Native Americans from a perspective of work and culture," Arnold said.

Arnold hopes to pursue an academic career, preferably in the Pacific Northwest or Alaska. Although his fellowship expires in June, he suspects that his dissertation may not be completed until fall. After all, summer is coming and Alaska calls.

Published in Winter 1996, Graduate Quarterly