Herring Scrap 16

Welcome to a new year and a new season of herring scraps, my serial herring historiography e-letter, broadcasting from this new location (previous herring scraps were email only, in August 2022). Today I’m picking up at herring scrap 16.

When I last sent a herring scrap to email subscribers, I was on the verge of a year of coursework towards a geography masters. That’s done; now I’m trying to write up my thesis.

The thesis – maybe it’s called A Model Fishery in Bad Relations – centers on the modern (1970-present) herring management/governance paradigm in Sitka Sound, Southeast Alaska.

I began to learn about the fish and the fishery soon after arriving in Sitka 10 years ago; I’ve continued learning about it ever since. As I tried to understand the potential harm of the fishery, it seemed impossible to square the local discourse I heard with the confident numerical projections of ADF&G. And as I began to observe decision making processes, at the Local Advisory Council meetings and at the Board of Fisheries, I noticed that it wasn’t as hard for decision makers: they were trained to privilege the sorts of information that ADF&G biologists and managers were able to produce and didn’t have to really buy into anything the locals said. In those meetings, I watched advising and deciding bodies deny articulated local and indigenous knowledges and histories in favor of tenuous-seeming scientifically derived findings.

This thesis is in part about how that scientific knowledge has been constructed and represented. It’s also about how those scientific representations (of herring in Sitka) have been asserted on the world: how they were received and processed by decision makers and then enacted by administrators and managers, often in the face of local and indigenous opposition. Altogether it is a case study about a reality-estranged state-sponsored science designed to promote commercial interests in denial of indigenous knowledge systems and life-ways.

I’ll be writing about rule-making, meaning-making, fisheries science, limited entry, and, maybe, once in a while, herring. It’ll be wonky, way in the weeds, but it might be worthwhile, so I’m trying to get it down.

The mere possibility of your readership will likely spur me on. The name of the game here is fast writing which I’ll have a chance to revisit and refine later. I’ll certainly try to get it right and clear as I do so, but sometimes I might leave loose threads or get lost in knots. If you find yourself interested or otherwise concerned, do chime in.

I don’t know if I’ll always have a plan, but right now I have a plan, and this is how I’m hoping to kick things off with the next few scraps…

There’s three newsy things happening about Sitka herring governance stuff right now; I’ll give each of them the scrap treatment and I think together they’ll be a good foundation for the rest of what I want to get at. The first: ADF&G just released their highest-ever herring biomass forecast for Sitka Sound, and thus the highest commercial catch allowance ever (and it isn’t close). The second: the Alaska Supreme Court just issued the opinion on Sitka Tribe of Alaska v. State of Alaska, Alaska Department of Fish & Game, and Southeast Herring Conservation Alliance (it’s disappointing). Third: Proposals for the next Board of Fisheries cycle on herring in Southeast Alaska are due in May. I think I’ll get all three out this week.

From there, the rest. I’m hoping to write and publish one or two of these puppies every week for next little while here. Thanks for reading. Subscribe (free) to receive new posts.

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