Jeanne Shepherd
West Side Stories
These oral histories chart the personal stories of individuals with a longtime connection to the west side of Kodiak Island, defined for the scope of this project as the area buffeted by the Shelikof Strait that stretches from Kupreanof Strait south to the village of Karluk. The project endeavored to create historical primary source material for a region that lacks substantive documentation and engage west side individuals in the creation of that material.
Jeanne Shepherd was interviewed by Anjuli Grantham on June 20, 2015, at Uganik Bay, Alaska, as part of the Kodiak Historical Society’s West Side Stories project. Jeanne was born in 1955 in Seattle but moved to Kodiak in 1978. She describes the heady times at the tail end of big-money fisheries in the area and beginning a career of fishing after one summer in a cannery. She describes many memorable village characters and her love of a lifestyle of subsistence and self-sufficiency. She recalls the different fisheries in which she engaged, the difficulties of living year-round in her house before it was renovated, and touches on her concern about the status of fish stocks, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and the impact that the closure of the local cannery had on the local lifestyle.
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