Ketchikan, Alaska calls itself the Salmon Capital of the World, and this film goes there to show why. Southeast Alaska's salmon runs remain as heavy today as they have been for generations, and the film follows that abundance through the region's oldest industry and its oldest communities. At the historic George Inlet Cannery, cameras show the mechanics of processing fish that once ran through canneries like it up and down the coast, work that shaped the towns built around it. The Tlingit and Haida, Southeast Alaska's original inhabitants, describe salmon as more than food, a thread running through ceremony and daily life for centuries before canneries existed. Later arrivals, immigrants who came from far outside Alaska to work the fishery, get folded into the same story, their lives now bound to the same runs. The film treats salmon as the region's common denominator, the one resource that native families, cannery workers, and newcomers all depend on, still, in the same waters.