The Nature of Borders: Salmon, Boundaries, and Bandits on the Salish Sea

Abstract

Fish swim. Salmon, in particular, swim: up rivers, down creeks, into the ocean, back into the stream where they were hatched. If pressed to give an example of mobile nature, it is hard to come up with a better one than the five runs of Pacific salmon. The fish are masterful colonizers, cutting their bright silver threads throughout the Pacific ecosystem. Everybody wants them. And sharing has never been simple. It was not simple for the regional native tribes that inhabited the northwest corner of North America, as Lissa K. Wadewitz writes in The Nature of Borders. The abundance of salmon shaped native societies. They evolved complex methods for taking salmon, but also for conserving them. Access to good fishing areas was restricted. Tribes needed to process large quantities of perishable salmon quickly, which may have led to the evolution of polygamy. The need for labor may have contributed to the emergence of slavery. Intermarriage was used to gain access to choice fishing locations, and “social, physical, and regulatory borders” protected the sites (p. 173).