Salmon in the Circumpolar North: Indigenous Rights and Resource Management Systems 

This entry serves to show the new directions my project has started going in. Notably, my research questions have changed. The project’s focus will be fixed on fishing rights rather than general Indigenous rights. I’ve narrowed down specific repositories for research which will help me to compare the histories of fisheries management and the Indigenous fishing rights of Native Alaskans, Canadian First Nations Peoples, and the Sami Peoples of Norway, but with a main focus on Alaska.

Maritime environments are particularly suited to transnational history because oceans resist political boundaries. Swedish historian Sverker Sörlin suggests that the Arctic Ocean, its surrounding seas, and the Circumpolar North as a whole act as a transnational space.(1) Looking at the maps below, you’ll notice that the council areas of Arctic Indigenous groups (Fig. 1) extend across the national boundaries of Arctic States (Fig. 2). Transnational historical approaches are especially suited to study this land of borderlands. 

 

 

This project primarily focuses on salmon management in Alaska but will employ a comparative analysis of salmon management elsewhere in the Circumpolar North, Indigenous fishing rights in relation to these regions, and a view of anadromous – or migratory – fish as transnational actors. Alaska’s fisheries – or fishing spaces – are situated at the crest of the North Pacific and have ecological, political, economic, and cultural significance. A myriad of actors are involved in these fisheries. At the local  level, state residents and Native Alaskans practice subsistence fishing; on a wider scale, there are state and federal regulators and international corporations that stake interests in commercial fishing. 

Fisheries management and Indigenous rights in Alaska must be considered within the larger historical context of colonization and federalization. There have been three salmon management regimes in Alaska’s history. In the 1770s, Russia began to colonize the southern coastline of Alaska. They attempted to enforce mercantilist economic practices and monopolize natural resources. Following the purchase of Alaska by the U.S. in 1867, Euro-Americans implemented capitalist principles in Alaskan fisheries.  Prior to all of this, Native Alaskans managed salmon harvests with a clear system of communal property in which property rights accrued to the social group that a given resource could adequately support. A large body of water was not owned by anyone, but certain sections would belong to groups. Escapement, the process of allowing enough fish to migrate upstream to the spawning grounds, ensured the salmon life cycle could continue with strength. Ecosystems thrived. Despite the effectiveness and sustainability of Native Alaskan fishing practices, they were not consulted by the US government in the design or implementation of the most recent salmon management system: the 1973 Limited Entry Program, which sought to reduce overfishing through by issuing permits. Permits related to what type of fish you were catching, where you were catching it, and what gear you were using to catch it. The rural and Native Alaskan fishermen who received permits were disproportionately older, and this initiated a devastating trend in which the permits died with them, and fewer and fewer Native Alaskans could afford to obtain permits to fish commercially, threatening the livelihoods of entire communities. Anthropologist Stephen Langdon describes the continued inaccessibility of this economic landscape today saying, “…access to the fisheries is now tightly integrated with access to financial institutions and state bureaucracies. Rural populations are at a disadvantage in dealing with these institutions…”.(2) This project asks, how have salmon management systems in Alaska evolved with the migration of different people to the region? How have Native Alaskan fishing rights been affected by these management systems over time? And finally, how do struggles for Native Alaskan fishing rights compare with Indigenous resource rights in other Circumpolar regions like Canada, Norway, and Russia?

 Methodologically, this project adopts a transnational historical approach. Rather than treating Alaska as a contained space, it examines how salmon operates across borders. This aligns with Patricia Clavin’s ideas of ‘manner’ and ‘place’ which emphasize processes of exchange and migration that operate on a different scale than that of the nation-state.(3) Pierre-Yves Saunier’s book on transnational history shares a similar approach and encourages historians to adopt the scalar logic of geography.(4) Fishery management in Alaska does not exist in isolation; it is shaped by international agreements, shared ecological management strategies, and global debates about Indigenous rights. 

This project draws on sources that highlight this overlapping and integrated network of fishery management. First, I will examine legislative documents like the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) and the implementation of the 1973 Limited Entry Program. Both reshaped Indigenous rights in Alaska. Notably, ANCSA did not preserve explicit Indigenous hunting and fishing rights, creating ongoing tensions over subsistence access. Second, I will examine firsthand accounts of Native Alaskan experiences in the shifting landscape of fishing in their communities using federal reports from Alaska’s Digital Archives and the National Archives, as well as recorded interviews from the University of Alaska’s Oral History Project. This research will be supplemented by secondary sources from the Alaska Historical Society, the Arctic Council, and other publications and institutions. Finally, the project will incorporate comparative scholarship on Indigenous fishing rights in other Circumpolar regions, particularly First Nations Peoples in Canada and the Sami People in Norway. These broader analyses of Arctic policy and indigenous sovereignty allow for a comparison of how communities negotiated access to natural resources in the 20^th century. Together, these sources allow the project to integrate environmental, legal, and social histories of fisheries. 

This project contributes to transnational history in several ways. First, it highlights Indigenous actors as central participants in transnational systems rather than purely local subjects. Alaska Native communities interact not only with U.S. state institutions but also with international regulatory frameworks and global environmental movements. Second, by examining salmon as both ecological actors and economic commodities, the project demonstrates how environmental processes shape political and economic systems across borders. Examining Alaska’s salmon fisheries through a transnational lens offers a powerful way to rethink resource sovereignty, environmental governance, and Indigenous political agency in the 20th century. 

1. Sörlin, Sverker, ‘The Arctic Ocean’, in David Armitage, Alison Bashford and Sujit Sivasundaram (eds.), Oceanic Histories (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 269-295.    
2. Steve Langdon, ‘From Communal Property to Limited Entry: Historical Ironies in the Management of Southeast Alaska Salmon’, in J. Cordell (ed), A Sea of Small Boats: Customary Law of the Sea and Territoriality in the World of Inshore Fishing (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 304-333.
3. Patricia Clavin, ‘Time, Manner, Place: Writing Modern European History in Global, Transnational and International Contexts’, European History Quarterly 40:4, pp. 624-640.
4. Pierre-Yves Saunier, Transnational History (London, 2013).