'Ooligans Run

This is Bob, a Canadian Native in Ketchikan, Alaska, here to sell his village's product at our town's Celebration of the Sea. His village is Nass Bay in British Columbia, and his product is Ooligan Grease, or oil extracted from eulichan fish. Eulichan (Osmeridae family) has been used for centuries by Native Peoples, also known as smelt and candle-fish. An old wive's tale says they're called candle-fish because they're so oily, you can literally light one and use it for a lamp!

Bob's got boxfuls of the quart jars of opaque fat-globuled oil, and they're going for $20 a jar. He only sells quart jars, he says you don't need any other size. Any less wouldn't be enough and more could never be too much, unless you don't have the room. So a quart's perfect. As I stand there I can see he's much too busy to spend time talking with me; he's busy taking orders for pick-up of large quantities and trying to keep his math all straight. He writes slowly and precisely on his notepad, taking names, amounts of cash and oil, and numbers, and double-checking everything on his Casio calculator. No matter how many people gather around his end of the table he doesn't get flustered or even hurry a little; he just takes his time, pleasantly methodical and not speaking much.

We walked around the celebration for a while and I happened to glance back and see that he was alone at his table, and I went back. He was glad to talk to me, and spoke in the slow, syllabic manner of his Tribe, which I'm sorry, I couldn't understand (or reproduce) the name of. He explained to me that this oil is the result of the entire village's efforts.

First, there's fishermen and boat-hands who go out and catch the eulichan in nets and bring them in. Then, there's the guys who process (clean) and transport them to the cooking house. At the cooking house, there's a home-made copper pot spanning 16 feet long and three feet wide that took several men to set up. A huge fire has been built under it, and there are two men tending the fire, round the clock. Several others find, chop and gather the firewood for these men. Two people are assigned to paddle during each shift, stirring and moving the fish around. After a day of boiling the oil out of the fish, the meat is then strained out and the water is boiled off the oil for a minimum of twenty days, so these people work a long time making the oil pure. During the whole time, there are people making and delivering food for all these workers, and yet others are doing the same with water and beverages. Somebody's watching everyone's children and they're all keeping their jobs and going to school, too. It's a very active team effort for three weeks!

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