America’s Pacific Exchange: The United States Fish Commission, Settler Colonialism, and the Transnational Transplantation of Fish in the Pacific World, 1872-1920

• In Event: Extraction and Its Discontents: Biotic Exchange, Resource Consumption, and Social Imagination in the Modern Pacific World

Abstract

Congress created the United States Fish Commission (USFC) in 1871 to investigate the causes of fish diminution on the Atlantic seaboard, but the USFC’s remit soon expanded from study to intervention. Using the new techniques of “fish culture”—the artificial fecundation of fish—the USFC embarked on a decades-long campaign to remake America’s watersheds by artificially restocking desired species, transplanting favored native species to new waters, and through the introduction of choice foreign fish. The USFC also exported American fish abroad—typically chinook salmon, shad, and whitefish—to nations as diverse as Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, and Germany. Yet this massive episode of bioengineering has been largely overlooked.

Although the USFC’s impact was global, I focus here on the USFC’s role in remaking the Pacific World and the settler-colonial logic that underpinned it. In settler California, the USFC set up one of its first hatcheries for salmon propagation on the McCloud River, a tributary of the Sacramento. In so doing, the USFC dispossessed and subordinated the Winnemem Wintu people who lived on the river, a sad story of colonial violence that has been downplayed in existing historiography. The USFC distributed the products of this hatchery—millions of chinook salmon eggs and juvenile fish—across America and to foreign nations interested in fish “acclimatization,” the contemporary term for non-native species introductions. New Zealander and Australian acclimatization societies contracted with the USFC to introduce chinook salmon there in hopes of aggressively remaking waters to better suit the culinary tastes and angling preferences of European-descended settlers. The USFC also made extensive shipments of salmon and common carp to the Hawaiian Islands—often instigated and facilitated by Euro-American settlers—and Japan. In all this, I look away from the Atlantic World “Columbian Exchange,” as per Alfred Crosby, toward the heretofore neglected “Pacific Exchange.”

Author

• Barrie Ryne Blatchford, Columbia University