Fish Gutting & Processing

I grew up on a trawler here in Southeast Alaska, so my main job as a young'un in the summertime was just gutting, gilling and gutting these fish. So I've done a lot of these in the past, and I start with taking the gills out, and by doing that, I cut in the mouth on each side, and I come around to the side here, flip the fish, go in by the gills, cut the front, and then I take this knife and I guide use the gill— the gill as a guide to come down and just pull that gill right out. Come in back here, right up the belly, you're cutting.

Then you're coming in here, and the attachment on one side here is kind of like a V-cut down. Same thing on the other side, it's kind of like a V-shaped cut down. Then you reach in and grab the guts out. Those all come out. Look at the eggs.

Eggs are nice. That's what we would take and make Indian cheese out of.

And then you've got this, this bloodline in here. You got to cut that and then scrape that.

And that's it. That's it. That's how you gut a salmon. When you show up to a fish camp or to the family smokehouse, everybody has their duties. To gut and gill a fish is probably like one of the most basic duties you can have.

You know, you can be 5 or 6 years old and do just about as good of a job as I would do. But when we're teaching our kids how to do this stuff and we're teaching people how to do this stuff, That's where you start. You start at how to gut a fish, and then you gill a fish. And then as time goes on, you work up to the filleting of the fish or the stripping of the fish. So there's these levels in which you do it.

This is a very basic beginning level. But it's important because if you get around a smokehouse or you get around a family that's dealing with a lot of fish, everybody helps out. And you've got to learn— you got to know how to do that. You know, you got to take the guts out. You cannot let the guts stay in the fish.

For a long period of time because it starts to swell, their bellies get soft. What we would call is like belly rot. Like if you let it, let it sit in there too long, everything starts to get soft and then it's starting to spoil. So you got to get those guts out right away. These cohos were donated to us, so we got a donation of a bunch of fish and we're like, all right, well, what are we gonna do?

We're just gonna go cut it up and put it in jars so that when somebody asks or when when we need it, it's there and it will get eaten. I mean, there's very few things in life I have found that makes you feel as good as giving away food to somebody, especially food that you've worked hard to get or food that you've put so much time and effort into. So anytime that I can work on something and some food and give it away, it's just like it takes sharing to a whole nother level for me personally, and I get great joy from it. And at Tlingit and Haida, I've been able to do that. Majority of my job is, is go and get these, get this food and work on it, put it away, and then we're giving it away.

A lot of elder boxes, we do a lot of donations to school programs, to potlatch events, clan events. That's what we do is we're just promoting that way of life. Get more and more people interested and curious about the process of putting up your own fish or working on your own food, securing your own food for the times to come. Put them in a saltwater brine just to glaze them and clean them off a little bit with the saltwater and then We'll cut them down to size and into the jars they go. For the pressure cooker, once we got them cut up to size, we put a pinch of salt inside the jar just to help with preserving, and then we go with our meat into the jar.

Always try to do, um, skin, like the scales, on the inside. And then the meat on the outside, and you get— turn out with something just like that. You cut them all the right length, size, and they all turn out pretty, pretty consistent. That's what we're looking for is consistency. Anytime you're doing a lot at once, you want to have consistency.

We're just growing our program too, and we're trying to figure out different niches and ways we could, uh, we can fill the gap between people that might know how to do this and might not know how to do this. Trying to just get everybody informed on how to— the simple process of working on fish and jarring and preserving fish. Super important because not everybody was fortunate enough to grow up and live the kind of lifestyles we did. And because we live those lifestyles, we have these skills that a lot of people have, but in the grand scheme of things, not a lot of people know how to do. So we're just kind of making that our job and going about our lives, kind of living the type of life that our ancestors did, just eating off of, off of the land and Getting all of our food and our protein off of the land.