Making salmon: Economy, culture, and science in the Oregon fisheries, precontact to 1960

The rapid decline of salmon runs throughout the Pacific Northwest has galvanized attention in the last fifteen years. Historians, scientists, politicians, and lay observers have offered many explanations for this "salmon crisis," but few have looked very far in the past or plumbed the primary documents necessary to understand the nineteenth-century roots of salmon management. "Making Salmon" attempts to fill that void by examining primary documents from the National Archives, the Smithsonian Archives, and regional archives to illuminate the social, cultural, economic, and environmental context of the decline of salmon and development of management from the aboriginal fisheries to the initiation of the smolt-release program in 1960.;"Making Salmon" pays particular attention to the role that fish culture has played in this history. Recent scientific research suggests that hatcheries may have contributed to the decline of salmon runs, so the study casts historical light on the emergence of artificial propagation as the primary tool of salmon management. The Oregon salmon fisheries, which adopted hatcheries in 1877 to save the salmon fisheries, serve as a long term case study of the intersection of federal, state, and private interpretations and misinterpretations of salmon biology and management strategies. Economic policies, political rivalries, and cultural biases have often had a far greater influence on salmon management than science even though administrators consistently represented their policies as "scientific." Thus an understanding of the political economy of management is crucial for understanding the larger forces driving the decline of salmon.;By integrating analytical tools from anthropology, history of science, geography, and sociology, "Making Salmon" offers a new way of examining the past through environmental history. The study insists on a viewing the past as a complicated and dynamic story of human interactions with nature and each other, and that the tendency to simplify that past for political purposes has been a major contributing force to perpetuating the salmon crisis. Thus "Making Salmon" offers a means for (re)viewing history and reframing the debate about the relationship between humans and salmon in particular, and humans and nature in general.