The Snow Crab Vanishes
Over the past few years, billions of snow crabs have unexpectedly disappeared from the Bering Sea. What happens to the Indigenous people who depend on them for survival?
Alaska’s history since contact is a thousand stories of outsiders overwriting Indigenous culture and taking things—land, trees, oil, animals, minerals—of which there is a limited supply. St. Paul is perhaps among the oldest examples. The Unangax̂—sometimes called Aleuts—had lived on a chain of Aleutian Islands to the south for thousands of years and were among the first Indigenous people to see outsiders—Russian explorers who arrived in the mid-1700s. Within 50 years, the population was nearly wiped out. People of Unangax̂ descent are now scattered across Alaska and the world. Just 1,700 live in the Aleutian region.
St. Paul is home to one of the largest Unangax̂ communities left. Many residents are related to Indigenous people kidnapped from the Aleutian Islands and forced by Russians to hunt seals as part of a lucrative 19th-century fur trade. St. Paul’s robust fur operation, subsidized by slave labor, became a strong incentive for the United States’ purchase of the Alaska territory from Russia in 1867.
On the plane ride in, I read the 2022 book that detailed the history of piracy in the early seal trade on the island, Roar of the Sea: Treachery, Obsession, and Alaska’s Most Valuable Wildlife by Deb Vanasse. One of the facts that stayed with me: Profits from Indigenous sealing allowed the US to recoup the $7.2 million it paid for Alaska by 1905. Another: After the purchase, the US government controlled islanders well into the mid-20th century as part of an operation many describe as indentured servitude.
Until recently, during the crab season, the Bering Sea fleet had some 70 boats, most of them ported out of Washington state, with crews that came from all over the US. Few villagers work in the industry, in part because the job only lasts for a short season. Instead, they fish commercially for halibut, have positions in the local government or the tribe, or work in tourism. Processing is hard, physical labor—a schedule might be seven days a week, 12 hours a day, with an average pay of $17 an hour. As with lots of processors in Alaska, nonresident workers on temporary visas from the Philippines, Mexico, and Eastern Europe fill many of the jobs.
The crab plant echoes the dynamics of commercial sealing, she said. Its workers leave their homeland, working hard labor for low pay. It was one more industry depleting Alaska’s resources and sending them across the globe. Maybe the system didn’t serve Alaskans in a lasting way. Do people eating crab know how far it travels to the plate?
“We have the seas feeding people in freakin’ Iowa,” she said. “They shouldn’t be eating it. Get your own food.”
