Fishing Among Primitive Peoples: A Theme in Cultural Geography

FISHING AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES: A THEME IN CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY Erhard Rostlund University of California, Berkeley American geographers have made several good studies of the salt-water fisheries of our day, but they have not done much with fresh-water ashing, and have given hardly any attention to the fishery of native North America. Fresh-water fishery has been overlooked, perhaps, because of its rather small commercial importance in our present economy. But in primitive times, when most of the American Indians did not have the equipment required for the larger offshore fisheries, rivers and lakes, and the water along the shore, provided most of the fish they captured. It may also be submitted that a theme of inquiry does not necessarily gain significance because big quantities are involved. The archeologist values his pottery, not according to the number of tons of potsherds he can collect, but because pottery is a magic lamp that throws light on his problems of chronology; in the same manner of speaking, quantity of fish as a commodity, while not unimportant, is not the core of the theme proposed here. Rather, the value of studying the fishing of primitive folk lies in the promise that such investigations may throw a modest light on some of the problems of cultural geography. The curiosity of a cultural geographers is always aroused by questions of relations between different cultural areas; and a study of fishing in those areas may help to clarify such relations. A brief review of some of the results obtained from a study of fishing in native California and the bordering regions will serve as an illustration [1], There was fishing of a sort even in the arid land» east and southeast of California; but if the Apaches, the Utes, or the southern 'Paiutes fished at all they used such implements as a simple club, the spear, the bow and arrow, and a very rudimentary trap. The technique of driving fish into shallow waters or into corners was very common. Sexual continence was not required before fishing, but it was before hunting. Hunting , in fact, is the word that characterizes their taking of fish: they employed their customary hunting weapons and methods to take a game that happened to be in the water. They had none of the specialized implements of true fishermen, such as harpoons, fish hooks, fish nets, or weirs. In short, they can hardly be called fishermen at all. As laboratory specimens these fish hunters are interesting, since they seem to exemplify the kind of threshold situation from which fishing may once have originated. It can be postulated that men first hunted land game, then added hunting in the water, and finally developed implements designed for use in water, thus becoming true fishermen. It is not proposed, of course, that the Paiutes or Apaches as such were extremely ancient occupants of their land, nor that they were belatedly on the way to becoming fishermen; it is the unspecialized character of their fishing or fish hunting that is intriguing. It is quite clear that the California Indians learned little if anything about fishing from their neighbors in the arid lands. North of California the situation was very different from the one just described. The northern neighbors of the California Indians were highly skilled and specialized fishermen: they had several kinds of fish hooks, different types of fish nets with specially made net sinkers and floats, and the sinkers were often quite complex artifacts, grooved, bored, or wrapped stone objects. They also had special implements for gauging the size of mesh in net making, different meshes for different fishes, complex harpoons, elaborately constructed weirs and traps, manufactured clubs to be used only for the killing of fish, the requirement of sexual continence before fishing, socially important fish rituals, 1948of Pacific Coast Geographers27 and such ideas as that fishing songs were private property and that one must not speak disrespectfully of the fish. This fishing complex and the pervasive atmosphere of fish in social institutions and folk lore penetrated into California, but on the whole its complexity diminished with latitude. Distribution maps of the various fishing implements and methods reveal a rather clear southern limit of...