Rivers, Fish, and the People: Tradition, Science, and Historical Ecology of Fisheries in the American West ed. by Pei-Lin Yu (review)

MUCH OF THE RICHNESS in Native American and Indigenous studies comes from the interdisciplinary approaches we take in our scholarship and through diverse collaborations with Indigenous communities. In a similar vein, Rivers, Fish, and the People strives to reflect recent collaborations between researchers and Native peoples. Combining ethnographic information, historical ecology, and archaeology, the contributors detail the environmental and cultural contexts of several rivers in the North American West to determine what was being harvested, and how, in the past before the historical period.

In their examination of rivers and fisheries from northern California to southern British Columbia and east to the Columbia Plateau, the contributors demonstrate the ways that Indigenous fishers "coped with significant variability in access to fish" (191). For example, geologic and other natural events along the Snake River periodically disrupted salmon runs, as Mark Plew and Stacey Guinn argue. This meant that communities along the Middle Snake River relied more on foraging than fishing for long periods of time. This conclusion echoes the work of Anna Marie Prentiss, another contributor to this volume, who has argued that the decline in salmon runs along the Fraser River during the early Medieval Warm Period (around 750–1250 CE) encouraged an expansion in diet breadth among St'át'imc villages. In his chapter on secondary resources along the Lower Spokane River, Jason Jones finds that Indigenous populations relied on collecting freshwater shellfish "to counter unplanned resource deficits" (148). This strategy was not simply one of shifting to any other resource during poor salmon runs; instead, it was a planned harvest of a reliably available food that exemplified successful resource intensification to offset salmon run fluctuations. Similarly, Kevin Lyons reveals that in the absence of salmon, Kalispels fished extensively for other species and in many of the same ways as they did for salmon. Together, these contributors reveal that even among the "Salmon People," customary subsistence was more complex and diverse than previously assumed.

The chapters also illustrate that Indigenous fishers of the North American West were not passive consumers—many engaged in practices that enhanced the productivity of some fisheries. For instance, Plains Miwoks of northern California used fire and other management strategies to "optimize habitat conditions" for fish in their efforts to "adapt to fluctuating environmental conditions" in the Lower Cosumnes River watershed (180). As Michelle Stevens and Emilie Zelazo find, controlled burns helped manage the landscape to maximize the availability of natural materials used for fishing nets and to keep the floodplain clean and clear for juvenile fish. In an intriguing chapter, Pei-Lin Yu and Jackie Cook combine ethnographic evidence and new research in lithic tools to demonstrate a "large-scale but flexible and adaptive, system of anadromous fish procurement and processing" at a Kettle Falls site on the Columbia River (90). Yu and Cook detail the staggering amount of labor to process salmon, estimating that women spent approximately a third of each year engaged in and preparing for this activity.

Despite many of the chapters' specific strengths and the editor's claims about what the volume accomplishes, it falls short in engaging more fully with Indigenous methodologies. For instance, Stephen Grabowski's chapter about the biology and ecology of Pacific salmon missed the opportunity to draw from Indigenous knowledges of fish and waterways. When considering how some archaeologists use the dearth of fishing equipment and fish bone remains to infer that the ethnographic record overstates the importance of salmon, Yu and Cook helpfully remind the reader that archaeology does not happen in a vacuum—these studies "have real social, political, and legal consequences for Native American communities today" (73). Ignoring this key tenet of Indigenous methodology, Plew and Guinn's otherwise excellent chapter makes this inference along these lines. Similarly, many of the contributors neglect to decolonize the very nature of archaeology or ecology, assuming that these scientific approaches...