Keystone Nations: Indigenous Peoples and Salmon Across the North Pacific (School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar)
Keystone Nations examines unique coastal cultures that have managed fisheries for several millennia. The Itelmen, Koryak, Aleut, Sugpiaq, and Nimiipuu peoples have all made their lives from our oceans. This book warns of what can happen if we don t change how we manage our harvesting of fish from the ocean. Ask yourself, how can we change our fisheries policies so they are sustainable for our global community? Do you want your children s children to have fish to eat too? --pre-publication blurb, Sven Haakanson, Executive Director Alutiiq MuseumFew truly wild species are as closely interwoven with human culture as Pacific salmon. They are the foundation of both sustenance and cultural identity for hundreds of local communities from California to the Korean Peninsula. Salmon are the ultimate keystone species. Keystone Nations describes for the first time the ancient and complex relationship between wild salmon and the human communities that depend on them across the vast North Pacific arc. --pre-publication blurb, Guido Rahr, President, Wild Salmon CenterThe result of a...School for Advanced Research seminar, the book queries the nature of particular salmon-human relationships drawn from specific cultural and geographical case studies. The editors opine that both the northern Pacific salmon and the indigenous cultures of the region are in precarious positions, largely due to the operations of the world's dominant political powers and their failure to...recognize the human right to cultural expressions and survival. The contributors identify salmon as a keystone ecological and cultural species due to its outsized effects on environmental and human cultural systems. Several papers effectively utilize the metaphor of agricultural production language to contrast the ontologies of global versus local salmon-human relations. The cases illustrate the long and varied biography of salmon-human relations; in the end, the contributors hope that the human partners' particular bodies of knowledge about salmon can help to sustain the diversity of both human and salmon futures in the region. --S.R. Martin, Choice, February 2013, vol. 50, no. 06The result of a...School for Advanced Research seminar, the book queries the nature of particular salmon-human relationships drawn from specific cultural and geographical case studies. The editors opine that both the northern Pacific salmon and the indigenous cultures of the region are in precarious positions, largely due to the operations of the world's dominant political powers and their failure to...recognize the human right to cultural expressions and survival. The contributors identify salmon as a keystone ecological and cultural species due to its outsized effects on environmental and human cultural systems. Several papers effectively utilize the metaphor of agricultural production language to contrast the ontologies of global versus local salmon-human relations. The cases illustrate the long and varied biography of salmon-human relations; in the end, the contributors hope that the human partners' particular bodies of knowledge about salmon can help to sustain the diversity of both human and salmon futures in the region. --S.R. Martin, Choice, February 2013, vol. 50, no. 06Keystone Nations is a captivating exploration of the significance of the relationship between indigenous peoples and salmon in the North Pacific.... The contributors represent a rich array of international institutions, and they provide a breadth and depth of theories, methods, and ethnographic examples.... The backgrounds of the authors and their approaches integrate the biological and social sciences, indigenous and non-indigenous perspectives, and historical and contemporary processes in ways that would be informative and enlightening to a broad audience. --Daniel Monteith, Journal of Anthropological Research, vol. 69, 2013With beautiful color plates and outstanding scholarship, this volume is especially recommended for its emphasis on how the historical relationships between commercial fishing, resource conservation, energy development, and international politics influence indigenous sovereignty issues and impact decision making among Native people today. --Gina D. Stuart-Richard, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 38:1, 2014