Enclosing the Fisheries: People, Places, and Power

Privatizing Northwest Salmon: Examining the Global Context of Indigenous Claims in British Columbia

Crisca Bierwert

doi: https://doi.org/10.47886/9781934874059.ch9

Abstract.—This paper situates the claims of the Stó:lō Nation, a First Nation of British Columbia, in the context of conflicts over the conservation and allocation of salmon. I address two major contestations and discuss how concepts of privatization permeate both. The first contestation is between aboriginal and nonaboriginal fishers, a conflict with a high degree of racialized tension. In this conflict, the Stó:lō have obtained recognition to participate in the commercial fishery of British Columbia as a community, holding a communal fishing license. Their community quota represents a new kind of thinking in fish conservation and allocation, a variation on a trend toward individual quota allocations that has developed in recent years, a trend called privatization. The second contestation pits salmon farming against fishing, with farming positioned as a solution to market demands and economic uncertainties, a new and powerful form of privatization. In this contestation, culture wars do not concern race, ethnicity, or historic links to land. They involve a variety of new discourses that discuss the character of salmon and construct salmon as a product to be desired more than a resource to be sustained. The paper concludes that the Stó:lō model of a community quota may stand as a beacon for rethinking and renegotiating salmon fisheries in the region. At the same time, new cultural constructions may need to emerge that make salmon fishers more visible to consumers, lest the current marketing images of salmon obscure the economic and ecological threats to salmon as a resource.