A presentation about cannery culture — a topic familiar to many Kodiakans — highlights Saturday night’s Kodiak Maritime Museum fundraiser dinner, at 7 p.m. in the Kodiak Harbor Convention Center.

Tickets for the dinner are available at KodiakMaritimeMuseum.org, The Rookery and Mill Bay Coffee. The dinner features a full dinner by chef Joel Chenet.

The presentation, “Alaska’s Forgotten Shore: Uncovering Katmai Cannery Culture,” will explore life in the cannery at Kukak Bay, northwest of Kodiak across the Shelikof Strait in the present-day coastal boundaries of Katmai National Park and Preserve. It is presented by Katie Ringsmuth, president of the Alaska Historical Society and a former history teacher at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

Ringsmuth has also done contract work with the National Park Service, including helping with nominations for the National Register of Historic Places.

Ringsmuth — who received her doctorate at Washington State and master’s at the University of Alaska Fairbanks — grew up making the trek from Washington state to Alaska’s Bristol Bay canneries in the summers. Her father, Gary Johnson, was the longest-running superintendent of the Alaska Packers Association and present in Kodiak during the 1964 earthquake. Ringsmuth has significant personal experience with the cannery culture she documents.

“I basically worked my way through school … with first-hand experience in canneries,” Ringsmuth said of her time as a female cannery worker.

She said her role as a historian and expert on cannery workers — whom she claims are arguably the most important in the whole fishing process yet seem to be on the bottom — is difficult given the lack of records on them. There just isn’t often a discernable paper trail for her to chase.

“Very little of that historic narrative remains,” Ringsmuth said. “I have been focusing on examining that culture that was cultivated in these canneries. It was incredibly ethnically diverse: men, women, even children, came to the canneries to live.”

Those men and women from all over the world — including Japan, China and the Philippines — didn’t take a lot of photographs of cannery life, either, she said.

“Cannery workers (also) didn’t write a lot of letters. They didn’t write a lot of journals because they were too busy working.”

Their jobs, however, she said provided dignity and was a way to make a living.

“That resulted in a continuation of generation after generation. What you see are the seeds of modern Alaska society started in these coastal communities,” she said.

Ringsmuth said more have come to Alaska for the fishing industry than other for activities associated with the state, such gold mining, oil production or running the Iditarod. She estimated that for many longtime residents in places like Kodiak, perhaps “five out of seven people have worked in a cannery in their life … these things that people identify so much as being Alaska, the fishing industry has to be right up there.”

She said the result is a fishing industry that has created a diverse cultural narrative in the Last Frontier — a frontier whose workers established a close connection to.

“People certainly connected to their surroundings. We’re not just talking about the industrialization of the north.”

Ringsmuth said the Kukak site, also in the National Register of Historic Places, is very significant for Alaska’s history.

“We can learn a lot from the material culture that was left behind. What might be junk lying around is very important to historians trying to recount the history … it’s important to leave these sites undistributed. As soon as they’re vandalized or looted, we lose the story … not to mention it’s against the law.”

She said Kukak also is a rarity.

“It’s a big deal because very few canneries are listed on the National Register. Considering how important fishing is to Alaska, we have to get more canneries listed in the National Register.”

Mirror writer Bradley Zint can be reached via e-mail at bzint@kodiakdailymirror.com.