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6 / The Historical Roots of the Canadian-American Salmon Wars joseph e. taylor iii Salmon, the foundation of a rich industry and heart of a culture, is the subjectof ajealoustug-of-warbetweentwootherwisefriendlyneighbors. —thomas c. jensen In the past few years Canada and the United States have clashed in remarkably vitriolic fashion over the fate of Pacific salmon. In 1994, Canada tried to leverage changes in international harvest allocations by imposing fees on AmericanvesselsboundforAlaskathroughBritishColumbiawaters.American o‹cialsrespondedbythreateningtoraisedutiesonshipstravelingtoCanadian ports through Juan de Fuca Strait. The following year, Indian tribes and the governmentsof Oregon,Washington,andCanadasuedAlaskaoveritssalmon managementpolicy.Theproblemscontinuedin1996,whenCanadacriticized Alaska’s quota on chinook salmon, and in 1997, when British Columbia once again impounded American vessels en route to Alaska and unilaterally set fishing quotas on Pacific salmon stocks. American managers replied by unleashing a free-for-all harvest on Fraser River sockeye (Oncorhynchus nerka), and in retaliation Canadian fishers blockaded an American ferry in Prince Rupert harbor. To the uninitiated it might appear as though salmon fishing had devolved into a state of near anarchy, but close observers have understood these conflicts di¤erently.1 These contests reveal not a lack of order but the flawed way order has evolved throughout the past century. Many of the fishery’s recent problems are the by-products of solutions to fishing disputes arrived at during the 1970s and 1980s. Those conflicts, in turn, erupted from the failings of treaties dating back all the way to the 1890s. In other words international fishery man155 agers are struggling against a chain of mounting failure. They are caught in a downward spiral that began with an event that comes as close as anything does in fishery management to original sin: the estrangement of fishing from discrete runs of salmon; that is, the moment when fishers abandoned rivers and their genetically distinct runs to prey on homogenous schools of fish in the larger and less-regulated ocean. The problem emerged first in the Puget Sound and Gulf of Georgia in the 1890s, where rival fishers began to harvest Fraser River sockeye at alarming rates. The United States and Canada searched for a solution by focusing solely on the allocation of Fraser sockeye, but their inability to contain or sustain that fishery snowballed into additional treaties acknowledging the complexity of the forces involved and extending regulation over an ever-expanding area and array of fisheries. Unfortunately, none of these solutions met with much success. The reasons for failure were manifold. Early treaties were often behind the times, addressing outmoded conditions and covering insu‹cient areas, and negotiators usually lacked the foresight and power to e¤ect conservation . Even worse, later treaties rested on a diplomatic foundation that had already hopelessly confused the biological coherence of management. Diplomats had reached agreements by engaging a strategy of abstraction that conceptualized salmon populations as national claims. This subordinated the fate of any individual run, such as Fraser River sockeye or Columbia River chinook (O. tshawytscha), to parity between Canadian and U.S. shares of overall harvests. To maintain this sense of balance, parties agreed to trade fish like blocks of stock, reallocating some fisheries to compensate for imbalances in others. This created a fiction of international equity through biological bookkeeping. National quotas were sustained via deliberate constructions of regional inequalities: American fishers in Puget Sound and Alaska maintained access to Fraser and Skeena River runs by allowing Canadian trollers on Vancouver Island to prey on Columbia River and coastal stocks. This was an expedient way to forge international comity, but it was also (and remains today) an irrational way to manage salmon. It validated the same ocean fisheries that fishery scientists had tried to throttle during the 1920s because of trolling’s tendency to undermine managers’ ability to know which runs were being harvested, and how intensely, until it was far too late. Treaties thus fostered a process that distanced harvest from natal streams and made saving salmon increasingly di‹cult. Tounderstandhowfisherymanagementdevolvedintothisirrationalmode, we must look at the historical roots of Canadian-American fish fights. This chapter examines the paradoxical evolution of salmon fishing, its environ156 joseph e. taylor iii mental and industrial contours, the many interests and tensions that shaped diplomatic negotiations and scientific research, and the managerial consequences of international policy. Salmon talks began in the 1890s, and in 1937 the U.S. Senate finally ratified an agreement. Unfortunately, this reconciliation created as many conflicts as it resolved. By abstracting a complex fishery into national quotas, negotiators concocted an image of...

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