Session Schedule ASEH Toronto Conference 2013

Reimagining the North Atlantic: Borders and Boundaries Panel 7-E: Algonquin Chair: Brian Payne, Bridgewater State University Commenter: Richard Judd, University of Maine  William Parenteau, University of New Brunswick Fighting the Tide: Net Fishers, Anglers and the Politics of Resource Management in the Canadian Atlantic Salmon Fishery, 1867-1914  Suzanne Morton, McGill University Putting Lines on the Water: Mapping Lobster Districts, 1873-1930  Robert Gee, University of Maine ‘A Vile Calumny’: Local Fisheries, International Waters, and Scientific and Institutional Theories and Practices at Grand Manan Abstract: The inshore marine fisheries of the North Atlantic Coast present a number of unique challenges for the environmental historian. This panel uses the salmon, lobster, and the herring fisheries in Canadian Atlantic waters to highlight new approaches to this emerging branch of environmental history. The second half of the nineteenth century brought controversies in almost every facet of North Atlantic fishing as proponents of scientific conservation challenged traditional rights and defended the use of modern fishing technologies. Scientific fisheries management promoted a new and unfamiliar relationship to place and fish, and it opened the door for a regulatory regime consonant with new capital-intensive fishing equipment and international markets – or, in the case of salmon, secured place in the fishery for an international sport-fishing fraternity.

However, as these papers demonstrate, traditional ways of fishing persisted through this period.

Communities of islanders, harbor-based lobster catchers, and indigenous peoples possessed intimate ecological understandings of the marine environment, and they used this work-based knowledge to defend customary rights and traditional uses of the marine environment. Reimagining the North Atlantic in the late nineteenth century was a difficult process for fishers and fisheries managers alike. These three papers take into account not only the “top down” process of imposing new scientific regimes, but also the “bottom up” resistance that in many cases shaped the dialogue over who owned the fish and how they were to be harvested.