Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis

Bibliographic Essay

BibliographicalEssay Commercial fishing and maritime shipping are modern paradoxes. Although fishers and sailors still play crucial roles in feeding and supplying society, most consumers are oblivious to their labors. The market system that moves goods around the world so efficiently has effectively separated products from the identity of their producers. Thus a shopper in Iowa can buy a fillet of salmon and never know its species-let alone whether the fish was wild or hatchery bred, ocean or pen raised, commercial or farm harvested. Modern capitalism has erased the fish's history. A similar condition of ignorance pervades most products, but as long as stores have fish in the case, shoes on the shelves, clothes on the racks, and cars in the showroom, few shoppers seem to care where productscome from, let alone how they got there. These blinders have constrained scholars as well. Although Atlantic cod kept colonial New England solvent into the eighteenth century, and Pacific salmon enriched the Northwest until the 1970s, most researchers relegate these activities to footnotes. The academy seems filled with landlubbers, but not exclusively so. A few historians, anthropologists, folklorists, geographers , political scientists, and sociologists do investigate our maritime activities . Unfortunately, they, like their subjects, remain marginal figures in academia. Their obscurity stems in part from an absence of professional organs dedicated to fishery and maritime subjects, including the history of oceanography. This vacuum needs filling-and soon. In the meantime, I have compiled a brief guide of selected works on the fisheries to increase awareness; and to assist people interested in writing environmental histories offishery and maritime subjects, I have also included a discussion ofimportant problems and sources. When it comes to fishery history, each fishery is unique enough that no single topical or chronological organization covers all cases. A chronology 379 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY of studies on Pacific Northwest salmon, for example, does not even serve well for the California salmon fisheries, let alone Gulf Coast shrimp or Atlantic cod. Rather than try to invent a new topology, I will use the standard temporal and geographic categories of American history with the hope that readers will see how these studies mesh with broader historical themes. For useful bibliographies see "Selected References on the History of Marine Fisheries," Marine Fisheries Review 50, no. 4 (1988): 228-38; N. G. Benson, ed., A Century of Fisheries in North America (Washington: American Fisheries Society, 1970); A. F. McEvoy, The Fisherman's Problem : Law and Ecology in the California Fisheries, 1850-1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and W. M. O'Leary, Maine Sea Fisheries : The Rise ofa Native Industry, 1830-1890 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996). . Scholars have researched Indian fisheries extensively. Among the most significant, if dated works, are G. W. Hewes, "Aboriginal Use of Fishery Resources in Northwestern North America" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1947); C. Rau, Prehistoric Fishing in Europe and North America (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1884); and E. Rostlund, Fresh Water Fish andFishing in Native North America, University ofCalifornia Publications in Geography no. 9 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952). For cultural aspects see B. Gunda, ed., The Fishing Culture of the World: Studies in Ethnology, CulturalEcology, and Folklore, 2 vols. (Budapest : Akademiai Kiad6, 1984). Among the more important works on Indian fishers are D. F. Arnold, "'Putting Up Fish': Environment, Work, and Culture in TIingit Society" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1997); F. M. Atton, "Fish Resources and the Fisheries Industry of the Canadian Plains," Prairie Forum 9, no. 2 (1984): 315-25; D. R. M. Beck, "Return to Nam'O Uskitwmit: The Importance of Sturgeon in Menominee Indian History," Wisconsin Magazine ofHistory 70 (Jan. 1995): 32-48; F. Berkes, "Fishery Resource Use in a Subarctic Indian Community," Human Ecology 5 (1977): 290-307; C. E. Cleland, "The Inland Shore Fishery of the Northern Great Lakes: Its Development and Importance in Prehistory," American Antiquity 47 (Oct. 1982): 761-84; B. Hayden and J. M. Ryder, "Prehistoric Cultural Collapse in the Liliooet Area," American Antiquity 56 (Jan. 1991): 50-65; C. Junker-Andersen, "The Eel Fisheries of the St. Lawrence Iroquoians," North American Archaeologist 9 (summer 1988): 97-121; A. L. Kroeber and S. A. Barrett, Fishing among the Indians ofNorthwest California, University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnography no. 21 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960); 1. La Rivers, The Fishes BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY and Fisheries ofNevada (Reno: University ofNevada...