Author Mary Dinon spent years researching the history of canneries in the Bristol Bay region. Her book, “The Winter Watchman's Daughter: Memoirs of Life on the Nushagak,” tells the story of her ancestors, who were responsible for maintaining the first canneries of Bristol Bay through the harsh Alaska seasons.
Dinon began working on the book in 2017 and self-published its first edition in 2023. On a recent visit to Dillingham to present her research to the community, she joined KDLG to talk about her personal ties to the region and the stories she uncovered about the area's collective history.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Dinon: Growing up here in Dillingham, as a lot of us know, the fisheries, salmon, summer, when the return of millions of salmon come into Bristol Bay, canneries are just a very common fare. This is who we are and what we do, and my family has been involved in fishing and specifically cannery work.
Sutherland: Tell me a little bit about your book.
Dinon: The book is called “The Winter Watchman's Daughter, Memoirs of Life on the Nushagak.”
It turns out my father, we knew he had a lot of pictures of the old Dillingham, but after he died, we have boxes and boxes of slides, and I just couldn't reconcile with the fact that they were sitting in a box. They had such historic value that should really be shared with this whole community.
So I've been working on this book since 2017 basically gathering information and stories and researching history and finding Red Church registries and census records. I found out that in 1883 the very first cannery that was built in Bristol Bay was built on the east side of the Nushagak River, and it was called the Arctic Packing Company, and it and the native village was called Kanulik.
The person who I'm writing this book about is my grandmother, Ella. Ella was born in 1910 in Curyung, here in Dillingham. Her father was a winter watchman at that very first cannery, the Arctic Packing Company. He was also a winter watchman at the second cannery, built in Bristol Bay, which is the Alaska Packers Association, but it's well known to most of us here in Dillingham as the Scandinavian Cannery. So Ella and her family lived at the Scandinavian Cannery.
Ella, like a lot of the young children born in the early 1900s, was affected by the Spanish flu that came through this area in 1919. Ella was eight years old at the time and her mother died, as well as many of the mothers and native people around here, which left Ella motherless with a two-year-old sister and a six-year-old brother, and she was the oldest girl in the family. Even though she lived at the Scandinavian Cannery she then became the caretaker for two small children.
And after Ella's father died, her first husband became the winter watchman. So she went from being the winter watchman's daughter to the winter watchman's wife. So basically, my grandmother, Ella, lived her entire life on a cannery compound.
The quote that I got from my uncle Harlan Atkinson is that the winter watchman is an oversimplification of the word. Basically, the winter watchman puts the cannery to bed in the fall and wakes the cannery up in the spring. They lived year-round on the cannery compound. Made sure to protect it from the elements, the weather, and the ice flows. And then they also woke it up in the spring by making sure the water was running and the machines and the buildings were operating, preparing the cannery for the busy summer season, including hiring the beach King and the fishermen for the cannery.
And so I wanted to tell that story. I wanted to tell the story and bring to life who lived there. What did they do? What did the children do when the parents are working all hours of the night delivering fish, working in the mess hall and being the laundry lady? Where are the kids? And so I was able to interview some of our now elders, including my uncle Harlan and also his first cousin, Frederick Nielsen, who lives here in Dillingham, and try to capture some of those childhood memories that they had on the docks at Peter Pan.
The time that I spent recording and talking and calling my uncle Harlan and Frederick, his cousin, are very precious times, and we can learn so much from it. So that is my hope, my hope, and it was my dream to come here and share my research and share the pictures and the stories and our shared ancestors.
Sutherland: What would you say is your biggest takeaway from this process?
Dinon: I think my biggest takeaway from writing this book is just the community and realizing how we really are all connected, whether someone can point out a relative in the book or not. But I think if you look at some of what I've written, there's going to be a lot of recognition of “that's my great grandpa,” “That's my aunt who married her grandfather.” And you know, there's a lot of value in us as community and family, and for us to share that history. It just brings people together.
Mary Dinon is the author of The Winter Watchman’s Daughter: Memoirs of Life on the Nushagak. Her book traces the history of Bristol Bay’s canneries through the lives of the people who lived and worked there.
The book is available locally at L&M in Dillingham and online at Barnes & Noble.
