ABSTRACT
The Lady Who Tans Salmon Skins, who is a homemaker in Cordova, Alaska, explains that ‘each animal has enough brain to process its own hide … [Another] way is to take battery acid electrolyte, ten ounces, ten pounds of salt, and ten gallons of water’. She shows off one of her coin purse creations, which is secured with a button and decorated with a few beads, and continues. ‘You scrape the skins, after scraping the skins, and put them in a 5-gallon bucket. Stir it all up, wait a few days, then neutralize the skins by rubbing them with baking soda for twenty minutes’. Pointing, ‘This is the salmon skin with the guts, in the buckets’.
The author is a former Tribal Government Specialist for the Tanana Chiefs Conference in Fairbanks, Alaska, but the opinions expressed here are her own. She is grateful to the many Cordovans and families upriver who shared fish and with her and her children.
Pensley, Danielle S, Subsistence as Resistance: Implications of an Alaskan Cultural Practice to Property Theory (August 21, 2024).
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