Free People of Color Lecture Series looks at colonialism's effect on Indigenous fisheries

The Aoki Center for Race and Nation Studies and UC Davis History Department continue the Free People of Color Lecture Series. This week, Professor Joshua Reid of the University of Washington presented his paper "From`Fishing Together' to `To Fish in Common With': Makah Marine Waters and the Making of the Settler Commons in Washington Territory."

Here is a description of Professor Reid's paper:

The acquisition of Indigenous lands through the erasure of Native peoples drives settler colonialism. Yet this settler colonial logic did not just unfold on land — it also unfolded across Indigenous marine spaces. This paper examines the 1855 Treaty of Neah Bay that the Makah Nation negotiated and signed with the United States to illustrate how the logic of elimination established a marine settler commons that privileged non-Native users and sought to remove Indigenous peoples. This example also complicates the usual settler colonial narratives that explain how nation-states replaced communally held Indigenous homelands with individually owned, fee simple property.

Conversely, this case study shows that the United States replaced propertied Indigenous marine spaces with a settler commons premised on equal access in which theoretically anyone could fish. Within two generations of the Treaty of Neah Bay, however, open and equal access to these fisheries fell victim to technological advances and state laws that privileged settlers over Natives. This marine-oriented example encourages us to consider a wider scope for the contexts and effects of settler colonialism in both the North American West and other places around the world.

Professor Reid is a registered member of the Snohomish Indian Nation and an associate professor of American Indian Studies and the John Calhoun Smith Memorial Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington where he also directs the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest. He is author of the award-winning book The Sea is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs (Yale, 2015).

The talk was well-attended, with more than 40 people virtually in attendance. Professor Reid effectively relayed the economic, social, and existential importance of water and fishing.