Making Sturgeon Count

Abstract

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When the United States dammed the Columbia River, the migratory natural history of the river’s oldest and largest fish, white sturgeon, was obstructed. Settler fisheries science did not account for sturgeon movement in regulatory configurations of the river’s ecosystem. This article examines how practices of counting and constructing the value of fish shape and are shaped by sturgeon in motion. The article uses ethnographic data, hatchery archives, scientific reports, and the published testimonies of Yakama and other Indigenous fishers to reveal the relationship between settler colonial cultural and empirical practices of measuring, monitoring, and monetizing sturgeon and their movements from the late 1800s to the present.