Fourth of July, 1915: Looking Back at One Filipino Cannery Worker

rodill_and_husband.jpgDiane Rodill and husband / research assistant, Paul Lewis. Photo by Anjuli Grantham

Kayla Desroches/KMXT

Canneries in Alaska grew in the beginning of the 20th century, and many Filipino immigrants found work there. Diane Rodill’s father was one of the men who went to Larsen Bay to work in the canneries.

Rodill, who lives in Seattle, says her father traveled all over the world to locations including Alaska, but she had no idea before she started researching his life.
    
“He knew about all these places and he knew all these languages and of course, because he never told us why, I never understood that, and I used to ask him questions and he would say things like, oh, you ask too many questions,” says Rodill. “I didn’t stop asking, but I didn’t get a lot of answers either. So, he was very complex. He was intimate and yet at the same time distant.”

And then about four years ago, she spotted a familiar face in a Baranov Museum photo. Anjuli Grantham is Curator of Collections and Exhibits at the Baranov Museum and she describes the picture as depicting cannery workers putting on a pageant at a Larsen Bay July Fourth parade. Some are dressed in drag.

“These photos are really spectacular,” says Grantham. “One thing that makes them special is that they’re the oldest photos that we know of depicting Filipinos in Kodiak. So, we ordered these photos for this project and a couple of weeks later out of nowhere, I get an email from a woman who at the time was living in Washington D.C. and she is researching her father. She has a photo of him dressed as a woman in Larsen Bay, Fourth of July, 1915.”

As it turns out, the shared subject of the photo was Rodill’s father Denis.

Rodill describes him a rascal who broke ship rules and lied about his age on his marriage license.

“He was always bending the rules to his favor. Whatever he had to do, he was willing to break the rules,” says Rodill. “He felt the world was his oyster.”

“And I think he had to in many ways. Because, really, being a Filipino in this day and age, it was very restrictive,” says Grantham. “He had no rights to citizenship, he had no right to even own a house when he first arrived in the U.S., legally, so I think that not only was he a rascal, it was his way of being able to survive and even thrive in what was a legally and socially racist nation.”

You can hear more about Denis Rodill and how his story connects to Filipino history in the early cannery years of Alaska tonight at 7 p.m. at the Baranov Museum. You can also tune in to hear KMXT’s full conversation with Diane Rodill on Tuesday’s Talk of the Rock at 12:30 p.m.

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