Abstract
Pacific herring (Clupea pallasi) are a keystone species in the marine ecosystems of the Tlingit and Haida peoples of Southeast Alaska and British Columbia. Herring are not only caught and eaten and their eggs gathered, but also cultivated through respectful engagement, especially in their spring spawning cycle. This paper examines the nature of herring cultivation as a means of ensuring sustainable, reliable, and accessible supplies of these foundational forage fish, which are integral to the marine food web. Understanding the full range of cultivation techniques involves looking at both the supply and demand sides of herring production within specific anthropogenic seascapes and social-ecological systems. I argue that herring cultivation techniques helped sustain abundant and predictable returns of spawning herring in particular locales for centuries, if not millennia, and that these techniques and the relational knowledge-belief-practice complex that supports them have relevance as tools in contemporary fisheries management to enhance and restore local spawning populations within an adaptive management and ecosystem stewardship regime.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Anderson, E. N. (1996). Ecologies of the Heart: Emotion, Belief, and the Environment. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Anderson E. N. (2014). Caring for Place: Ecology, Ideology, and Emotion in Traditional Landscape Management, Left Coast Press.
Armitage, D., Berkes, F., and Doubleday, N. (eds.) (2010). Adaptive Co-Management: Collaboration, Learning, and Multi-Level Governance. UBC Press.
Berkes, F. (2012). Sacred Ecology, 3rd ed. Taylor and Francis, Philadelphia.
Chapin III, F. S., Carpenter, S. R., Kofinas, G. P., Folke, C., Abel, N., Clark, W. C., Olsson, P., Stafford Smith, D. M., Walker, B., Young, O. R., Berkes, F., Biggs, R., Grove, J. M., Naylor, R. L., Pinkerton, E., Steffen, W., and Swanson, F. J. (2010). Ecosystem stewardship: sustainability strategies for a rapidly changing planet. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 25: 241–249.
Codding, B. F., Bird, R. B., Kauhanen, P. G., and Bird, D. W. (2014). Conservation or Co-evolution? Intermediate Levels of Aboriginal Burning and Hunting Have Positive Effects on Kangaroo Populations in Western Australia. Human Ecology 42(5): 659–669.
Cruikshank, J. (2001). Glaciers and Climate Change: Perspectives from Oral Tradition. Arctic 54(4): 377–393.
Deur, D., and Turner, N. J. (eds.) (2005). Keeping It Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America. University of Washington Press, Seattle.
Drucker, P. (1955). Indians of the Northwest Coast. American Museum of Natural History, New York.
Emmons, G. T. (1991). The Tlingit Indians. In de Laguna, F. (ed.), American Museum of Natural History Anthropological Papers, vol. 70. University of Washington Press and the American Museum of Natural History, Seattle.
Garibaldi A., & Turner N. (2004). Cultural keystone species: implications for ecological conservation and restoration. Ecology and Society 9(3).
Hanna R. (1944). Hearings on Cliams of Natives of the Towns of Hydaburg, Klawock, and Kake, Alaska, Pursuant to the Provisions of Section 201.21B fo the Regulations for Protection of the Commercial Fisheries of Alaska, Transcript of the Proceedings, Vol. 13, On file at Juneau State Historical Library, Juneau, AK.
Hay, D. E., and Marliave, J. B. (1988). “Transplanting Pacific Herring Eggs in British Columbia: A Stocking Experiment.”. In Hoyt, R. D. (ed.), 11th Annual Larval Fish Conference. American Fisheries Society Symposium 5, Bethesda, pp. 49–59.
Jones, C. G., Lawton, J. H., and Shachak, M. (1994). Organisms as Ecosystem Engineers. Oikos 69: 373–386.
Jones, R. (2007). Application of Haida Oral History to Pacific Herring Management. In Haggan, B. N., Neis, B., and Baird, I. (eds.), Fishers’ Knowledge in Fisheries Science and Management. UNESCO Publishing, Paris, pp. 103–118.
Jones, R., Rigg, C., and Lee, L. (2010). Haida Marine Planning: First Nations as a Partner in Marine Conservation. Ecology and Society 15(1): 12 [online].
Kalland A. (2000). Indigenous Knowledge:Prospects and Limitations. In Ellent, R., Parkes, P., Bicker, A. (eds.), Indigenous Environmental Knowledge and its Transformations: Critical Anthropological Perspectives, Routledge, pp. 319–331.
Kennedy, D. (2000). First Nations Fisheries Management. Invited lecture delivered at the University of Victoria, Febrary 1, 2000, Personal communication from Robert Boyd, Portland State University.
Langdon, S. J. (2007). Sustaining a Relationship: Inquiry into the Emergence of a Logic of Engagement with Salmon among the Southern Tlingits. In Harkin, M. E., and Lewis, D. R. (eds.), Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, pp. 233–273.
MEA (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment). (2005). Synthesis Report: Ecosystems and Human Well-being: General Synthesis, Island Press.
McGoodwin, J. R. (2006). Integrating Fishers’ Knowledge into Fisheries Science and Management: Possibilities, Prospects, and Problems. In Menzies, C. R. (ed.), Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Natural Resource Management. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, pp. 175–193.
McKechnie, I., Lepofsky, D., Madonna, M. L., Butler, V., Orchard, T. J., Coupland, G., Foster, F., Caldwell, M. & Lertzman, K. (2014). Archaeological data provide alternative hypotheses on Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) distribution, abundance, and variability, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1316072111.
Nuttall, M. (2009). Living in a World of Movement: Human Resilience to Environmental Instability in Greenland. In Crate, S., and Nuttall, M. (eds.), Anthropology and Climate Change: From encounters to actions. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, pp. 292–310.
Pinkerton, E. (1994). Summary and conclusions. In Dyer, C., and McGoodwin, J. R. (eds.), Folk Management in the World’s Fisheries. University of Colorado Press, Niwot, pp. 317–337.
Rosen, D. A., and Trites, A. W. (2000). Pollock and the decline of Steller sea lions: testing the junk-food hypothesis. Canadian Journal of Zoology 78(7): 1243–1250.
Ross, A., Sherman, K. P., Snodgrass, J. G., Delacore, H. D., and Sherman, R. (2011). Indigenous peoples and the collaborative stewardship of nature: knowledge binds and institutional conflicts. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek.
Salisbury, O. M. (1962). Quoth the Raven: A Little Journey into the Primitive. Superior Publishing Co., Seattle.
Smith, E. A., and Wishnie, M. (2000). Conservation and subsistence in small-scale societies. Annual Review of Anthropology 29: 493–524.
Swanton, J. R. (1909). Tlingit Myths and Texts. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 39. GPO, Washington, DC.
Swanton, J. R. (1905a). Haida texts and myths: Skidegate dialect. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 29. GPO, Washington, D.C.
Swanton, J. R. (1905b). Tlingit method of collecting herring-eggs. American Anthropologist N.S. 7: 172.
Therriault, T. W., Hay, D. E., and Schweigert, J. F. (2009). Biological overview and trends in pelagic forage fish abundance in the Salish Sea (Strait of Georgia, British Columbia). Marine Ornithology 37(1): 3–8.
Thornton, T. F. (2008). Being and place among the Tlingit. University of Washington Press, Seattle.
Thornton, T. F. (2012) Watersheds and marinescapes: understanding and maintaining cultural diversity among Southeast Alaska Natives. In Johnston, B. R., Hiwasaki, L., Klaver, I. J., Castillo A. R., Strang V. (eds.), Water, Cultural Diversity, and Global Environmental Change, Springer, pp. 123–136.
Thornton, T. F., and Hebert, J. (2014). Neoliberal and neo-communal herring fisheries in Southeast Alaska: Reframing sustainability in marine ecosystems. Marine Policy. doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2014.11.015.
Thornton, T. F., & Kitka, H. (2015). An Indigenous Model of a Contested Pacific Herring Fishery in Sitka, Alaska. International Journal of Applied Geospatial Research (IJAGR) 6(1): 94–117.
Thornton, T. F., Butler, V., Funk, F., Moss M. L., Hebert J., Elder J. T., Craig, R., Hamada, S., Maciejewski Scheer A. (2010a). Herring Synthesis: Documenting and Modeling Herring Spawning Areas within Socio-ecological Systems over Time in the Southeastern Gulf of Alaska, Final Report, North Pacific Research Board Project #728, Portland, OR: Portland State University, Accessed 10 January 2010, http://herringsynthesis.research.pdx.edu/.
Thornton, T. F., Moss, M. L., Butler, V. L., Hebert, J., and Funk, F. (2010b). Local and traditional knowledge and the historical ecology of Pacific herring in Alaska. Journal of Ecological Anthropology 14(1): 81–88.
Thornton, T. F., and Kitka Sr., H. (2010). The Tlingit way of conservation: a matter of respect. In Walker Painemilla, K., Rylands, A. B., Woofter, A., and Hughes, C. (eds.), Indigenous Peoples and Conservation: From Rights to Resource Management. Conservation International, Arlington, pp. 211–218.
Turner, N. J., and Berkes, F. (2006). Coming to Understanding: Developing Conservation through Incremental Learning in the Pacific Northwest. Human Ecology 34: 495–513.
Ware, D. M., Tovey, C. (2004). Pacific Herring Spawning Disappearance and Recolonizing Events, Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat, Report 2004/008, Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my colleagues and consultants in the “Herring Synthesis” study (http://herringsynthesis.research.pdx.edu/) for their input to this paper; the original research was supported by a grant from the North Pacific Research Board (project #728). I would also like to thank the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, for its support. Finally, I am grateful to Robert Boyd, Doug Deur and the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their constructive comments on earlier versions.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Thornton, T.F. The Ideology and Practice of Pacific Herring Cultivation among the Tlingit and Haida. Hum Ecol 43, 213–223 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-015-9736-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-015-9736-2