Resisting the Imminent Death of Wild Salmon: Local Knowledge of Tana Fishermen in Arctic Norway

Abstract In 2009 the Norwegian Directorate of Nature Management warned that the Atlantic salmon population in the Tana River in arctic Norway was dramatically reduced. Active measures had to be taken to prevent extinction. Local fishermen protested against this description of the cause of events. On fishing expeditions, expert claims were continuously discussed. Such conversations were, and are, a substantial part of everyday conversation among local fishermen. In this article, the fishermen’s conversations are used as an entry into particular aspects of local knowledge, its relational nature, and the implicit epistemological politics. As their witness, during hours of fishing and conversing, I observed how the fishermen scrutinized scientific knowledge claims. They didn’t just question and compare the expert’s knowledge claims with what they themselves knew. Significantly, the fishermen made comparisons of how knowing was done. The ongoing conversations of the fishermen enacted a resistance more complex than was visible at first sight. Positing fisheries science as the “Other,” local knowledge was enacted and assembled as fluid and heterogeneous, including numerous unequal and loosely assembled entities. Introduction In the years 2009-2010 the Norwegian Directorate of Nature Management and related environmental institutions all claimed the urgent need to protect the wild Atlantic salmon populations in the Tana River in arctic Norway. According to environmental authorities, active measures had to be taken to prevent a further decline of local salmon species. In the Tana Valley, many fishermen did not agree with this description. In their opinion, ebbs and flows in the fishing populations were part of life. Fishing restrictions were therefore an unwelcome prospect. As the Directorate attempted to reduce both the fishing time and the number of fishermen on the river, protests came in many forms. This article is about the fishermen’s ongoing commentary on the experts’ predictions of the state of the Tana River Atlantic salmon populations. I wish to make these daily conversations, undertaken in the course of fishing and other salmon-related practices, my point of access into local ecological knowledge (LEK). Although a substantial number of the population along the Tana River in Finnmark consider themselves to be Sami, many are not so clear on their ethnic identity. There are also a number of non-Sami, Kvæn, and Finnish along the river. I therefore choose not to engage in a discussion regarding differences between indigenous knowledge (IK) and local ecological knowledge. All of us who work with groups that rely on centrally governed natural resources will recognize this kind of ongoing commentary of an expert’s opinions. In this text, I suggest that these conversations offer particular insights into local knowledge. Local knowledge may, as we all know, complement scientific knowledge. For the last three decades, many fishery scientists have substantially benefited from the collaboration with fishermen (Ludwig et al. 1993, Johannes 1993, Mackinson 2001). Fishermen, for example, have contributed to fish science on subjects central to their professional exercise, such as observations of fish behavior and distribution, as well as feeding habits, habitats, and fish movements (Johannes 1993, Eythorsson 1993, Mackinson and Nøttegård 1998, Pinkerton 1989, Mackinson 2001, Aswani and Lauer 2006). Articles on such exchanges of knowledge provide the impression of that local knowledge being in a form immediately available to science. In this article, I am interested in less specific kinds of local knowledge, the kinds that scientists, at least in the Tana River, show little interest in. There are several reasons why this knowledge is not of interest to fish scientists: part of it relates to its form, which is not specific enough to suit scientific purposes. However, this knowledge does, in my opinion, provide us with insights into the particular nature of a local knowledge. By use of the interface between science and fishermen’s knowledge, this chapter provides insight into local Tana fishermen’s epistemology, to how the fishermen know what they know, and what the fishermen think about how scientists and fishery managers know what they know. These insights are useful for purposes such as understanding processes of the collaboration between experts and local knowledge holders (Ween and Riseth 2011), preparing the grounds for co-management structures (Pinkerton 1998), or the joint planning of future regulation (Pinkerton 1989, Berkes and Folke 2000)
The ethnographic material that this article is built upon is assembled from fishing expeditions on the Tana River. It highlights the intersectionality and relationality of local knowledge, as local knowledge is produced and practiced in dynamic adaptive processes (see Berkes 1999, Davidson-Hunt and O’Flaherty 2007). Knowledge is ordered, according to Law and Mol, by structured routine performances that make cause-and-effect relations, and cluster elements and attributes in assemblages (1994: 643). These assemblages often emerge as entangled. I make notes of the topographies of knowledge displayed in the fishermen’s accounts, and the materialities involved (Verran 2002). Local knowledge not only responds to changes in the local environment or to technological innovations, but also engages with other knowledge practices, such as fish management or fish science. In my ethnographic material, the fishermen’s conversations made apparent the complexities of the present knowledge interfaces: how such sites may not necessarily involve smooth mergers, but could involve rubbing or even clashes (Law 2007). In this material, the rubbing involved in these interfaces makes epistemological politics visible, as the fishermen with me as witnesses attempted to translate, comment, and object to what they perceived to be expert knowledge claims (Roth 2005). To my argument it is significant that these ongoing reflections are acts of resistance in more than one way. First, they manifest an objection to the hierarchical relations between scientific knowledge and local knowledge. While scientific knowledge, as already described, is regularly employed to verify the accuracy of local knowledge (DavidsonHunt and O’Flaherty 2007), local knowledge is here applied in similar acts of “Othering,” to confirm or discredit scientific knowledge. Second, as I will show, the fishermen not only question what is known, i.e., the expert claims that salmon are disappearing, but also how scientists and other experts come to know what they know. Let us turn to the Tana River. Salmon trouble in the Tana River Its size and its salmon populations make the Tana River the third largest Atlantic salmon river in the Northern Hemisphere. Along with other key salmon rivers in Norway, it has been protected from salmon farming (NOU 1999: 9). Originating in the far north of Finland and Norway, smaller rivers join up in Tana Valley to form the border between the two nations. Its position as a border river partly explains why the Tana has always been special, both in a Norwegian and a Finnish context. It has also made the regulation of the river cumbersome. The management of the salmon fisheries is a matter of international negotiations. Its management has moreover been complicated by its particular colonial as well as its postcolonial recent history. Colonial relations at the turn of the 19th century made Norwegian authorities introduce a particular kind of user rights for those who farmed land adjacent to the river. Farming, as proper sedentary life, was encouraged by the state and the king. In 1888 such practices became rewarded with the right to fish with nets and for commercial purposes. Provided that the household produced hay for one cow (2000 kg), one member of the household was given the right to fish with nets for commercial purposes. The people in the remaining population were only allowed to fish with rods. In the 1970s the holders of net fishing rights, called Laksebreveiere, became powerful stakeholders, many of whom consider themselves to be Sami. Some three decades later, management of the Tana River changed again with the establishment of the Finnmark Estate (FEFO). When this independent legal body was formed in 2005, the land and resources in the county of Finnmark were handed over to its inhabitants in recognition of the unlawfulness of the state appropriation of Finnmark, as well as the indigenous rights obligations of the Norwegian state (International Labour Organization 169) (Ween and Lien 2012). Following up on the obligations of the Finnmark Act (2005), negotiations to establish local fishery management were started in 2008 and were completed in 2010 with the establishment of the Tana Fiskeforvaltning (Local Fisheries Management). During this process of regulatory changes, negotiations with Finland over the regulation of salmon fisheries were placed on hold. Fishery regulations on the border stretch of the river have effectively not changed since 1989. Local fishermen on the Norwegian side, however, have experienced several restrictions to their fishing times and fishing practices since the 1980s. The fishing season is becoming shorter, fewer salmon fishing lots are renewed, and several restrictions on fishing gear have been introduced (Niemelä et al. 2009, Ween 2010). Despite these restrictions, there are no bag limits in any kind of salmon fishery on the river. The Tana River is also one of the very few salmon rivers in Norway where net fishing is still legal. The salmon here are fished with pursed seine along the coast and in the fjords; they are fished with standing nets in the river too, as well as by local rod fishermen and visiting anglers. When I first came to Tana in May 2009, the future death of Tana wild salmon was prophesied with increasing frequency by natural scientists and environmental institutions1 (see also Niemelä et al. 2009). According to the County Councillor’s Environmental Protection Office, catch reports from 2009 were less than 30 tons, and the average fish weight was a meager 3.27 kilos. To the scientists, this showed a dramatic decrease in the large salmon that the Tana River previously had been so famous for (Niemelä et al. 2009). According to Statistics Norway, the 2009 catch implied an almost 50% decrease from the year before (http://www.ssb.no/elvefiske/). Comparing the 2009 catch with the top seasons in the 1970s, when catches could be up to 250 tons, it further underlined the alarming nature of the situation (Niemelä et al. 2009).