Session Schedule ASEH Toronto Conference 2013

Crossing the Land-Sea Border: Fishermen and Environmental Identity in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Its Islands Panel 10-E: Algonquin Chair: Claire Campbell, Dalhousie University Panelists:  Edward MacDonald, University of Prince Edward Island Blurring Lines: Time, Place, and Identity in the 19th-Century Prince Edward Island Fishery  Brian Payne, Bridgewater State University A Fisherman’s Identity: Negotiating Nationality in the Disputed Geography of the North Atlantic, 1854-1870  Rainer Baehre, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Grenfell Campus Ship Owners, Captains, and Fishers: Narrative Accounts of Disputed American Fishing Practices in Newfoundland Waters, 1890-1925 Abstract: Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Gulf of St. Lawrence was both a political and a geographic borderland. It was a place that was both at the center of a resource economy; the North Atlantic fishery, while also at the periphery of those nation-states invested in that economy. Fishermen conducted multiple border crossings on a daily bases as they worked to maintain a livelihood in this complex geo-political region. Fishermen moved through places ranging in scale and scope from the local village or outport in which they lived, the regional governments that set the laws, and the larger Atlantic marketplace in which they sold their commodities. Fishermen also crossed environmental borders, working both land and sea as part of their occupational pluralism. Through this process Americans, Canadian, Prince Edward Islanders, and Newfoundlanders not only competed with one another for control over the valuable resources, but; as this panel will demonstrate, often cooperated in efforts to find stability and profit in their work and lives. While these structures (village, nation, empire, market, and environment) did shape the legal parameters of fishing in the North Atlantic, all three of these papers will show how fishermen often negotiated the overlaps of the structures to redefine those limits in ways that would best suit their immediate needs. As such, this panel seeks to show how fishermen were both influenced by the natural and human environment in which they worked while also actively redefining the cultural geography and their own identities.