Local and Traditional Knowledge and the Historical Ecologyof Pacific Herring in Alaska

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ornton et al. / Traditional Knowledge of Pacific Herring
81
A HEARING ON HERRING
Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) have long been a
critical resource in the marine food web of the Gulf
of Alaska. While the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989
wreaked havoc on Prince William Sound herring
populations in the northern Gulf, the southern Gulf
also has been impacted, if less severely, by commer-
cial fishing, habitat degradation, and environmen-
tal changes over the past century. Just how much
Southeast Alaska’s herring have been affected is a
historical-ecological question. But debate around this
question is being carried out in a political-ecologi-
cal environment between commercial sac roe fishers
(who since the 1970s have harvested roe primarily
to supply Asian markets because Japan overfished
its own herring stocks), subsistence fishers (largely
Alaska Natives), and other stakeholders concerned
about the effect of herring declines on the marine
ecosystem.
On February 10, 2009, the Alaska Legislature’s House
special committee on fisheries held a hearing on her-
ring in which experts from local fishers to biologists
to anthropologists (ornton 2009) presented tes-
timony on the status and management of herring in
Southeast Alaska. Most of the testimony concerned
perceived declines of herring and a lack of proper
precautionary management principles on the part
of state managers, but Alaska State Fish and Game
officials and commercial fishers insisted the fisheries
were being managed conservatively. is debate was
a key impetus for our “Herring Synthesis” (ornton
et al. 2010) study, launched in 2008, in which we
sought to test the hypothesis, derived from Local and
Traditional Knowledge (LTK) bearers, that—while
herring might now be managed conservatively—her-
ring are being managed in a significantly depleted
state. is is the familiar shifting baseline syndrome
(Pauly 1995) in fisheries management wherein a
degraded sea comes to be seen as normal because, as
Callum Roberts puts it in e Unnatural History of the
Sea (2007:xiv-xv), “A collective amnesia surrounds
changes that happened more than a few decades ago,
as hardly anyone reads old books or reports.” At the
Alaska hearing on Pacific herring, the elder Tlingit
fishermen, like Clarence Jackson of Kake, were hav-
ing none of the collective amnesia. “e herring have
disappeared in my lifetime,” Mr. Jackson told the
House committee (Golden 2009).
Data notEs
Local and Traditional Knowledge
and the Historical Ecology of Pacific Herring in Alaska
T F. T
M L. M
V L. B
J H
F F (no photo)

Journal of Ecological Anthropology
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Vol. 14 No. 1 2010
SYNTHESIZING INFORMATION
ON HERRING
Despite their foundational and bellwether role for
North Pacific marine ecosystems, the Pacific her-
ring's historical ecology in the region is not well
understood. Salmon, halibut, cod, seals, sea lions,
whales, and sea birds all rely on herring for a critical
portion of their diet. Alaska Natives for millennia
have fished herring as part of their seasonal rounds
of subsistence—cooking and smoking the meat,
rendering oil from the flesh, and harvesting eggs after
spring spawning on natural (kelp) and introduced
(hemlock boughs) substrates. Natives are intimately
familiar with some aspects of the herring life cycle,
especially the spawning stage, which they monitor
carefully. But herring themselves are migratory and
to date studies have not been able to conclusively
track their ranges, seasonal movements, and level
of fidelity to spawning areas (Carls et al. 2008).
Herring life cycles, in turn, are affected by many
factors ranging from habitat and water quality to
levels of prey availability (e.g., krill) and predation.
It is hypothesized that a herring meta-population
exists in Southeast Alaska into which juveniles from
various areas are recruited and entrained. As such,
there are no separate genetic stocks but, rather, only
“regulatory stocks” based on their shared life histo-
ries in particular spawning environments—though
geographic populations may exhibit unique chemical
signatures in their otolith bones (Carls et al. 2008;
Meuret-Woody et al. n.d.).
In all, 86 individuals, both Native and non-Native,
from ten different Southeast communities, 66
archaeological site reports, and thousands of pages of
testimony, reports, and historical, ethnographic, and
biological studies were consulted for information on
herring ecology. We synthesized and mapped these
data using a GIS database to locate observations in
both space and time, where possible. e results
provide a robust picture of what has happened to
herring over the past 4,000 years in Southeast Alaska,
but especially in the past century.
For the past century or so herring have been heav-
ily exploited by non-Natives in Southeast Alaska
beginning with the opening of the first herring
reduction plant—a converted whaling station—at
Killisnoo, near Angoon in 1882. is intensive
commercial harvest of herring to produce oil and
fertilizer continued until the mid 1960s, when it
was undercut by the Peruvian anchovy industry.
e peak reduction harvest of 78,749 tons came
in 1929 and was shared by 18 reduction plants in
the region. Between 1920 and 1950 more than one
million tons of herring were removed from South-
east Alaskan waters. As early as the 1930s South-
east herring were identified as overfished on the
basis of stock assessments by biologists (Rounsfell
1930, 1931), but the first harvest quotas were not
put in place until the early 1940s after catches had
declined precipitously. Still, seine boats continued
to target masses of herring for another twenty-five
years until the last reduction plant, at Washington
Bay on Kuiu Island, closed in 1966.
ere was universal agreement among our con-
sultants that the reduction fisheries overexploited
herring, causing both local and regional impacts on
herring populations. In communities like Angoon
and Sitka, impacts were felt as early as the 1920s
and 1930s. e Angoon-Killisnoo area was dis-
proportionally affected due to the early reduction
plant being placed at Killisnoo, which targeted lo-
cal herring for decades during its early operations.
Indeed our oldest consultant, 100 years of age
in 2008, who worked in the Killisnoo reduction
plant in the 1920s, observed that herring were
no longer being caught near Angoon at this time;
rather the big herring seiners were travelling up to
50 miles away to fish. is localized depletion also
transformed the Native economy which had been
producing significant quantities of herring meat
and oil for millennia. Seven of nine archaeological
sites excavated in the area by de Laguna (1960) and
Moss (1989) contained herring bones, spanning a
period of approximately 1,800 years. At one site,
herring comprised 99 percent of fish remains and

ornton et al. / Traditional Knowledge of Pacific Herring
83
was, according to de Laguna’s (1960:46) informants,
a “famous locality for herring” (likely fall oil pro-
duction). Native herring oil production in Angoon
virtually ceased after the 1930s.
At this same time, Sitka Sound—by far the most
productive herring fishery in the Southeast re-
gion—was also being impacted to the extent that
local organizations were calling for a prohibition on
herring seining there. Such interventions may have
helped the Sitka Sound population avoid collapse and
rebound over time. But in many areas the cumulative
impacts of herring removals have yet to be reversed.
Fishermen we interviewed who plied the waters of
central and southern Southeast Alaska in the first
half of the twentieth century recall vividly when her-
ring stretched “as far as the eye could see” and their
roiling surfacing activities mimicked a mighty rain
or wind. “Today, you don’t see that anymore,” was a
frequent comment made by fishermen over the age
of 60. By the time Alaskan statehood was achieved in
1959 and a modern fisheries management regime had
been put in place in the 1960s, herring were already
depleted in many areas—though just how much is
difficult to quantify.
ADAPTING TO HERRING
Generally speaking, the ethnographic and archaeo-
logical data suggest that herring spawning and
near-shore massing areas are coincidental with the
establishment of long-term human settlements in
Southeast Alaska. Oral histories and archaeological
data synthesized for our project confirm the affinity
of Tlingit and Haida populations for settlement
sites proximal to high concentrations of herring
or eulachon (aleichthys pacificus, a similarly oily,
spring-spawning smelt fish), especially spawning
areas. e most direct way to measure the relative
importance of herring to ancient peoples comes
from documenting archaeological fish remains.
Herring remains are present as early as 8,000-9,300
years ago, but become particularly frequent after
4,000 years ago, when bones appear consistently in
more than 75 percent of reported sites that were ex-
cavated with fine mesh screens. Human population
would likely have been growing—resulting in more
sites—but dependence on herring as a food resource
likely evolved over time as human fishers were at-
tracted to herring spawning areas with abundant
substrates for egg deposition (such as macrocystis
kelp, rockweed, and eelgrass); human fishers sought
out herring along with competing predators (e.g.,
halibut, salmon, seals) (Monks 1987).
Historically recorded and on-going practices show
that indigenous people enhanced herring produc-
tion through the cultivation of marinescapes and the
regulation of users. Key techniques to enhance her-
ring supply include: habitat conservation (limiting
disturbance of spawning areas); habitat cultivation
(through placement of substrate, such as Western
hemlock, Tsuga heterophylla, boughs for spawning);
selective harvesting (e.g., of non-viable eggs lying
too deep or shallow in the intertidal zone to survive);
predator control; and transplantation of eggs to
new habitats. On the demand side, practices con-
tributing to the avoidance of overharvest included:
territoriality and limits on access; time-specific
prescriptions and prohibitions on interactions with
herring; diversifying site; prey and substrate choices;
and sanctioning of abusive harvesters (Emmons
1991; ornton et al. 2010).
Tracking the ancient time depth of cultural practices
which enhanced herring spawning habitat production
or regulated harvest, while extremely worthwhile, is
difficult to measure using archaeology (Caldwell
2011; Campbell and Butler 2010). Humans have
been co-evolving with and adapting to herring for
millennia and diverse spawning populations have
been critical to the biocultural evolution and diversity
of Southeast Alaska.
Today, spawning and rearing habitats throughout the
Southeast region are threatened. As Figure 1 shows,
historical spawning areas documented by consultants
in our study (from c. 1915-present) outnumber those
documented by the Department of Fish and Game

Journal of Ecological Anthropology
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Vol. 14 No. 1 2010
FIGURE 1: This GIS map displays miles of herring spawn recorded through interviews and focus groups with local and traditional knowledge
(LTK or LEK) bearers versus that recorded in government (Fish & Game) records for the Southeast Alaska coast. The LTK documents more than
twice as many miles of coast used for spawning, even though our survey did not include all Southeast communities. This disparity is a function
of greater time depth of observations and closer monitoring of herring spawning areas by local shers. Local shers also gave details on spawn-
ing reliability, environmental changes and impacts, and specic herring harvest and cultivation techniques in various geographic locales.

ornton et al. / Traditional Knowledge of Pacific Herring
85
since 1970 by a ratio of 2.5 to 1. Some of this habitat
has been lost due to degradation, while other areas
have been overfished and remain depleted. Even
during the so-called conservative management era of
Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game beginning in
1980, nearly half of Southeast Alaska’s herring sac roe
fisheries have had to be closed because the spawning
populations on which they depend can no longer
support them.
LESSONS FROM HISTORICAL ECOLOGY
AND LOCAL KNOWLEDGE
e Age-Structure-Assessment model currently used
by fisheries managers to estimate herring biomass is
treated with scepticism by many locals with long-
term herring experience. But at the State House
committee hearing on herring, the biometric model
was also criticized by biologists, one of whom (Evelyn
Brown) noted that Fish and Game does not “have the
tools to deal with this [marine ecosystem] complex-
ity,” and that more field research is needed, including
documenting the observations of local experts who
are viewing herring over the course of their life cycles
(Brown et al. 2002).
Al Wilson, an elder reared in Auke Bay but now liv-
ing in Sitka, has witnessed collapses of local herring
stocks already in his lifetime and admonishes:
I’d just like to stress the importance of the herring
as a food supply. e herring biomass is in danger
of collapsing. e Fish and Game by their own
reports say that the biomass has diminished in
the last two years [2006-2008], yet their harvest
increases...I was raised in a place called Auke
Bay and they had a tremendous herring harvest
there until they opened up the area to seining,
harvesting the herring for roe—sac roe... It’s never
come back. I know places like West Behm Canal.
e same thing has happened. I know the areas
around Hydaburg…near Klawock has diminished
tremendously. e herring roe that comes in there
is very small…Even when you look at past spawn
maps…there [were] substantially more miles
of spawn then. It seemed to me that from that
they could see that the herring biomass is getting
smaller. I’m really concerned. at’s my biggest
concern—that the herring biomass [at Sitka] will
collapse and I know that when that happens it will
never come back. At least not in my lifetime.
e recently released “A Program for Improving
Management and Research of Fisheries in the South-
east Region—Herring” (Hebert 2010) proposes a
relatively comprehensive set of proposed biological
studies, although it does not include a social scientific
or Local and Traditional Knowledge component.
Relatedly, the Canadian government is expanding
partnerships with The Haida Nation and other
First Nations in order to improve marine spatial
planning and ecosystem management (Jones et al.
2010). However, the Alaska government recently
(May 2009) chose to unilaterally terminate its 2002
Memorandum of Agreement with the Sitka Tribe
of Alaska seemingly in order to reassert its exclusive
managerial authority over the herring fisheries.
Although herring transplantation has been tested
in limited scientific studies—apparently with little
success (Hay and Marliave 1988)—these tests have
not been based on local knowledge and techniques
that our consultants judged successful. Perhaps res-
toration plans could be carried out in conjunction
with local Alaska Native tribes, whose members are
repositories of local knowledge about herring habitat
and enhancement techniques. is should not be a
substitute for conservative management of remaining
herring populations, but could enhance depressed or
defunct runs of herring. Such a program, however,
would have to be launched at an appropriate scale
(other techniques for herring enhancements are be-
ing piloted in Japan) and with corresponding com-
mitments to long-term monitoring, so effectiveness
could be evaluated over time and under different
ecological conditions.
In addition, more monitoring of herring spawning
areas should be carried out to reveal how climate
and other environmental changes, such as increased
predation by humpback whales (which, ironically,
were hunted for their oil and depleted before the
major shift to herring in the 20th century), are af-
fecting local herring populations. Some monitoring

Journal of Ecological Anthropology
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Vol. 14 No. 1 2010
is already being conducted formally and informally
by tribes and other associations, such as Sitka Tribe
of Alaska, and individual fishers. This could be
augmented and coordinated with other long-term
monitoring efforts beyond the aerial and deposition
surveys carried out by the Department of Fish and
Game. Sites of increasing herring productivity (e.g.,
around Yakutat and perhaps Hoonah) and decreasing
productivity (e.g., Kah Shakes Cove, Auke Bay, and
areas of Sitka Sound) could be compared in terms of
their ecosystem assets and constraints. Correlatively,
otolith and ancient DNA studies could be carried out
to further explore genetic and ecological relationships
between different geographic spawning and massing
populations of herring. In addition, impacts, like
noise pollution and contamination from develop-
ment could be monitored vis-à-vis key indicators of
local herring population health and LTK observations
over time, as documented in our study.
Finally, with respect to environmental change, it has
been hypothesized (Planque et al. 2010) that the
demographic effects of targeted fishing (e.g., removal
of mature spawners by sac roe fishers) may have “sub-
stantial consequences on the capacity of populations
to buffer climate variability through various pathways
(direct demographic effects, effects on migration,
parental effects).” Similarly, “selection of population
sub-units within meta-populations may also lead to
a reduction in the capacity of populations to with-
stand climate variability and change.” How current
herring fishing patterns might play out in relation
to realized and anticipated climate change patterns
would be greatly enhanced if the historical fishing
and observational data could be more closely cor-
related with historical patterns of climate variability
and herring spatiotemporal variability in Southeast
Alaska and elsewhere in the North Pacific.
For more information on the “Herring Synthesis” project,
see our project website: http://herringsynthesis.research.
pdx.edu/ and the full report (ornton et al. 2010).
Thomas F. Thornton, Environmental Change
Institute, University of Oxford, Thomas.thornton@
ouce.ox.ac.uk
Madonna L. Moss, Department of Anthropology,
University of Oregon
Virginia L. Butler, Department of Anthropology,
Portland State University
Jamie Hebert, Department of Anthropology, Portland
State University
Fritz Funk, Juneau, AK
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