The Nature of Borders: Salmon, Boundaries,
and Bandits On the Salish Sea is Lissa K.
Wadewitz’s new book about how humans have conceptualized ocean and freshwater
boundaries in the transnational context of the Pacific Northwest. The book is
published by University of Washington Press. Wadewitz is an assistant professor
of history at Linfield College in Oregon. The following interview was conducted
by email.
Your book deals with the concept
of "borders" on multiple levels (e.g., indigenous, maritime,
international). Tell us what the term "border" means in the context
of the fishery.
When I started writing my Ph.D.
dissertation (from which this book is derived), I knew I wanted to write about
how the creation of the international border at the forty-ninth parallel in
1846 (and adjusted in the 1870s among the San Juan Islands) affected fishery
management practices as well as salmon fishing activity. In order to better
understand the emergence of the industrial fishery of the 1890s and early
1900s, I kept delving deeper into earlier Native American fishing practices. I soon
realized that the story I was trying to tell was not just about the
international border, it was really about contrasting border systems. The “borders”
drawn by Pacific Northwest Native peoples were essentially restrictive access
customs that limited who could fish when at the height of the salmon season.
The later international political border between the U.S. and Canada, in
contrast, created a bifurcated, competitive market with divided regulatory
jurisdictions. Since water, salmon, and fishermen move, however, this border became
a line of opportunity for fishermen, smugglers, and other fishery workers. It
simultaneously became an obstacle to joint salmon conservation policies and
created a regulatory nightmare for government officials.
To play with the idea of borders
a bit further—another series of borders that appear in the book are the social
borders that fishermen and other fishery workers of varying ethnic backgrounds erected
between themselves. Fishermen tended to work the same type of gear as their
fellow countrymen, so they were often divided by both gear type and ethnicity. Asian,
white, and Native cannery workers also rarely found ways to build alliances
across ethnic lines because their suspicions about one other obstructed any
larger collective bargaining effort in their negotiations with the canners.
Why the Salish Sea?
The Salish Sea is the perfect
place to study the impact of border drawing on marine space and a valuable
natural resource. Not only are these waters cross-cut by the international
border, but they also connected the region’s Native people to one another and to
their salmon. As a result, these waterways offer the ideal geographic location
for looking at contrasting border practices.
As for the term itself—I
initially used “Puget Sound/Georgia Basin” to refer to this series of connected
waterways, but that term sounds so clinical and academic I never really liked it.
I also think that using “Puget Sound/Georgia Basin” reinforces a sense of
disconnection—Puget Sound on one side and Georgia Basin on the other. But these
waterways are, in fact, a connected marine
ecosystem. The term “Salish Sea” not only emphasizes that ecological fluidity,
it also implicitly recognizes the long tenure of Coast Salish people in this
region and how they likely thought about this waterscape—as one body of water
that connected them to their kin and favored salmon fishing locations.
Although your book is not about
Alaska, the theme of transnational fisheries management is of great interests
to Alaskans. What parallels do you see between the history of the Salish Sea
and Alaska waters?
From what I’ve seen in my
research, I suspect that the border between southeastern Alaska and northern British
Columbia presented some regulatory difficulties and opportunities similar to those
that emerged along the forty-ninth parallel. It would be intriguing to compare
the two border regions and tease out their differences. I also know that fish
piracy—stealing salmon from salmon traps—was common in Alaska as well. (For a
great book on Alaska’s salmon fishery’s history, see David F. Arnold, The Fishermen’s Frontier: People and Salmon
in Southeast Alaska.)
But the real connection I see
between Alaska and the salmon fisheries farther south is with the salmon
themselves. Because salmon spend so much of their lives at sea and intermingle
while out on the high seas, they are inherently a transnational fish. As a
result, the interests of fishermen and fishery managers all up and down the Pacific
coast (and indeed throughout the northern Pacific) are linked because of the salmon’s
geographic reach. Historically, this has been a tremendous challenge for
fishery managers. Despite the passage of the 1937 Sockeye Salmon Convention
that finally brought the U.S. and Canada together to jointly manage this shared
resource, the treaty waters did not match up with where people were actually
catching fish. Fishermen were increasingly fishing miles offshore in order to
catch the fish before their competitors, but the treaty only covered
territorial waters three miles out. So from the very beginning of joint
management, the area under regulation was simply too small to be effective.
How did you become interested in
the topic?
I had just done a reading course
in environmental history with my graduate advisor at UCLA and had become very
intrigued by the field. Environmental history focuses on the relations of
people to nature and natural resources in the past. As I read more, I found
that several scholars had noted that although natural resources like water and
animals move across international borders at will, few historians were
following their subjects and crossing borders in their research. Due to my
undergraduate background in Asian Studies, I already had a curiosity about
international relations and issues, so I applied this interest to my new
research in U.S. history. I also knew that borderlands historians had largely
neglected studying the U.S.-Canada border. There seemed to be a lot of
possibilities there.
Once I started investigating
possible borderlands topics, I stumbled upon this shared salmon fishery between
Washington and British Columbia. It seemed the perfect case study to examine
the historical impact of border-drawing on a valuable natural resource. Little
did I know at the time how rich and complex the story would become. When I
started running across references to fish pirates, salmon smuggling, and violent
interactions between American and Canadian fishermen out on the water, I knew I
was on to something.
Why should people read the book?
Although I freely admit that my book is an
academic history, I also worked very hard to make the book accessible to a
broader audience. So there are footnotes, but there are also border bandits,
fish pirates, and tales of interethnic conflict sprinkled throughout. Because my
book reveals both the long history of Native American fishing practices and the
serious impacts of regulatory inaction, I think it can add significantly to the
general public’s understanding of our current and ongoing salmon crisis. I also
think readers will be intrigued by the connections between the fishery
management tactics of pre- and early-contact Northwest Native peoples and the
new management practices being experimented with today.
