Winner of the 2014 Albert Corey Prize from the American Historical
Association
Winner of the 2013 Hal Rothman Award from the Western History
Association
Winner of the 2013 John Lyman Book Award in the Naval and Maritime
Science and Technology category from the North American Society for
Oceanic History
For centuries, borders have been central to salmon management customs on
the Salish Sea, but how those borders were drawn has had very different
effects on the Northwest salmon fishery. Native peoples who fished the
Salish Sea--which includes Puget Sound in Washington State, the Strait
of Georgia in British Columbia, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca--drew
social and cultural borders around salmon fishing locations and found
ways to administer the resource in a sustainable way. Nineteenth-century
Euro-Americans, who drew the Anglo-American border along the forty-ninth
parallel, took a very different approach and ignored the salmon's
patterns and life cycle. As the canned salmon industry grew and more
people moved into the region, class and ethnic relations changed. Soon
illegal fishing, broken contracts, and fish piracy were
endemic--conditions that contributed to rampant overfishing, social
tensions, and international mistrust. The Nature of Borders is about
the ecological effects of imposing cultural and political borders on
this critical West Coast salmon fishery.
This transnational history provides an understanding of the modern
Pacific salmon crisis and is particularly instructive as salmon
conservation practices increasingly approximate those of the pre-contact
Native past. The Nature of Borders reorients borderlands studies
toward the Canada-U.S. border and also provides a new view of how
borders influenced fishing practices and related management efforts over
time.
Watch the book trailer: http:
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ffLPgtCYHA&feature=channel_video_title
