The nature of borders: Salmon and boundaries in the Puget Sound/Georgia Basin (British Columbia)

This dissertation examines the nature of native and Euro-American borders in the Puget Sound/Georgia Basin and their attendant environmental and social repercussions. Since the pre-Columbian period, human beings have delimited the Pacific slope according to their respective cultural priorities. As Northwest Indians drew territorial borders that aligned with productive fishing sites and evolved customs that curbed access to those locations and to salmon, their borders controlled overall native salmon harvests. Indigenous demarcations initially remained resilient with the arrival of Euro-Americans and compelled early visitors to respect native territories and spiritual beliefs regarding salmon. In contrast, Euro-Americans drew borders that neglected salmon geographies and effaced nature. Native peoples forced Euro-Americans to include productive salmon fishing sites within newly created reservations and learned to manipulate the Anglo-American divide for monetary and political gain. However, economic and demographic changes soon challenged Northwest Indians' ability to maintain their salmon fishing and border customs. As the regional canned salmon industry boomed in the 1890s and 1900s, Euro-American and Japanese fishers followed their indigenous predecessors and maneuvered across the boundary for both personal and political purposes. Border banditry, transnational fish piracy, and illegal border crossings became endemic to the region by the early 1900s, and these transborder transgressions granted fishers and fish workers opportunities for higher catches, additional income, and better wages. In the process, however, these illicit activities contributed to overfishing and to the decline of salmon runs in the Puget Sound/Fraser River industrial salmon fishery. Archaeological and anthropological studies, oral histories, newspapers, government documents generated at both the federal and local levels, and scientific reports from the United States and Canada all reveal that how nations draw borders is critical to both environmental and social history. The nature of the borders used to demarcate the Puget Sound/Georgia Basin from the pre-contact period to World War I played a crucial role in determining how people caught and managed salmon; a transborder approach is thus essential for understanding pre-contact native history, the causes of social and environmental change in a borderlands region, and the factors that contributed to the current Pacific salmon crisis.