Haines local Marie Rose, co-owner of Pelican-based seafood company Shoreline Wild Salmon, features in a documentary about women in male-dominated professions due out in December.
Marie Rose has done it all. She has caught and bought fish and now she markets and distributes it. Her work, from fishing in Pelican to delivering fish to grocery stores in Michigan, is the subject of one episode in a six-part documentary series, coming out in December, about women in underrepresented industries.
Rose, 29, who lives in Haines, is co-owner of Shoreline Wild Salmon, a Pelican-based company that ships Alaskan salmon, halibut and lingcod to stores, farmers’ markets and households in the Lower 48. Rose has experience with each step of the process, but now her work mostly revolves around marketing and communications-which she does remotely from Haines.
The film, called Wonder Women, was produced and directed by MirrorWater Entertainment, which is founded and operated by Christina and Michael Rose, Marie’s cousins. It will be available to stream online, for a fee, from Dec. 1 to 31.
Women are estimated to account for about 12% of permit holders and 13% to 18% of crew members in Alaska’s fisheries, according to a 2020 paper in the scientific journal “Frontiers.” In 2020, women comprised 35% of the state’s seafood processing workforce in 2020, per Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development data. The department doesn’t have current gender data on fish harvesters or permit holders.
“In the past, it’s been a male-dominated fishery, but over the last 30 years that is slowly changing,” said Joe Emerson, a longtime troller in Southeast and one of Rose’s business partners. “In the last 10 years, there have been even more. But Rose is kind of a trailblazer in that I don’t know very many other women who have gotten into the marketing aspect of fish. She’s kind of unique in that she has been the catcher, the processor, the shipper, the marketer-all of those things.”
Rose moved to Alaska from Michigan in 2015, in part because she struggled to find peace after leaving an abusive relationship in her early twenties and was looking for a fresh start in a place surrounded by nature. “That’s what Alaska was for me-a fresh slate for me to start a life and redefine myself,” Rose said, noting that the film, in addition to highlighting her work, covers her personal history and inner life. “I’m really honored that my story and path with domestic violence are being told,” she said.
Rose became interested in fishing through her work in environmental advocacy. Her first job in Alaska was with the Alaska Center in Anchorage, canvassing for the No Pebble Mine campaign. “I was so inspired by the number of people who had some type of connection to salmon,” she said. “I was determined to work with salmon.”
Rose moved to Juneau to work with Salmon Beyond Borders. Then she found a job as a deckhand. And by October 2016 she had co-founded Shoreline Wild Salmon. From Pelican, her two business partners catch, buy and ship fish.
“We’re a small intimate team. We’re hands on. We control every aspect of the product, from catching it to delivering it,” Rose said. “The film really brings everything full circle, leaving Michigan, coming here, getting into the salmon business, and trying to bring this really awesome, nutritious product back to Michigan.”
The idea for a film came about when Marie visited her cousin Michael in Portland and told him about her company and the underrepresentation of women in the Alaskan seafood industry. Michael called his sister Christina the next day, and “after a couple of days we said this is something we have to do,” Christina said.
Rose’s cousins came to Alaska thinking the film would be only about women in the seafood industry, but they shifted to a wider and global focus after realizing that the gender representation gap extends across many industries. Their film features six women: Rose; a pilot in India; a racecar driver in Hungary; the first female baseball player in a men’s league in Puerto Rico; a conductor who emigrated from China to New Zealand; and an astrophysicist who is trying to become the first female astronaut in German history to go to space.
“We wanted to be able to show the work that they’re doing in their respective industry, but we also wanted to show their personal life,” Christina Rose said. That meant filming Marie for five days fishing out of Pelican on Joe Emerson’s boat, as well as interviewing her at home with her husband Cosmo Fudge in Haines.
Through the filmmaking process, both Marie and Christina said they became closer. “It’s been truly an honor and a joy understanding her business and understanding the work that she does, which I hadn’t been that aware of,” Christina said.
A second series about six other women is in the works. Marie has an idea for one of the episodes: “I keep telling Christina there needs to be a documentary episode about her.”
The film will be available at mirrorwaterentertainment.com. There also will be a pre-recorded virtual panel of Rose and the other five women in the film available on Dec. 12.