Fishy settler colonialism: Barrie Blatchford, ‘Salmon propagation and settler colonialism in California: the United States Fish Commission, the McCloud River Hatchery, and the dispossession of the Winnemem Wintu’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Fishy settler colonialism: Barrie Blatchford, ‘Salmon propagation and settler colonialism in California: the United States Fish Commission, the McCloud River Hatchery, and the dispossession of the Winnemem Wintu’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

08Mar25

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. In settler California, the USFC set up one of its first hatcheries for chinook 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 in the 1870s and 1880s to introduce chinook salmon there in hopes of aggressively remaking waters to better suit the culinary tastes and angling preferences of European-descended settlers. Over time, the salmon productivity of the river declined, ceasing entirely with the Shasta Dam’s construction in the 1940s. But in an exemplar of Indigenous resilience and environmental stewardship, today the Wintu are leading efforts to restore chinook salmon to the river.

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