In this episode of Tributaries we share Judd Esty-Kendall's talk at the 2023 Common Ground Fair. The talk revolves around the themes discussed in MITSC’s special report, SEA RUN, particularly focusing on the detrimental effects of colonial and modern policies on the quantity and quality of tribal fish stocks, sustenance fishing, and lifeways practices. He highlights the severe decline in fish populations due to dams, pollution, and overfishing, contrasting past abundant fish stocks with the current endangered status of many species. He also discusses efforts to restore fish populations, such as dam removals and improved fish passageways.
Transcript Below:
Judd Esty-Kendall:
This talk is about a book called SEA RUN. It's actually not about the book, but about the story that's in the book. My name is Judd Esty-Kendall, and I am a researcher and writer for MITSC. MITSC is the Maine Indian Tribal-State Commission. It was formed in 1980 when the Indian Land Claims case was settled. Seems like just yesterday to me. It set up MITSC with 13 members. There are two members from the Penobscots, Passamaquoddies, and Maliseets each, six members from the state, and then a chair chosen by the rest. And MITSC has a number of different duties under the Settlement Act. One is to, is to continually review the effectiveness of the Settlement Act and the social, economic, and legal relationships between the tribes and the state. And another is to study and make recommendations about the implementation of Maine's fish and wildlife management policies on non-Indian lands in order to protect fish and wildlife stocks on Indian lands.
The Settlement Agreement also says the members of the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot tribes have the right to take fish for their sustenance regardless of any other rules or regulations. They can take fish on the reservation land. Okay, they're not bound by the usual rules. So you start to look at, if we can take fish for sustenance, what does that mean?
What does sustenance mean to you? If you think of the word, what does it mean?
Comment from the Audience:
Enough to eat?
Judd Esty-Kendall:
Enough to eat, enough to eat and drink, right? Okay? And that's the way the state would read the word sustenance. Now, put yourself in an out of body experience, and you're a native, a tribe whose people have lived along one of the Maine rivers since the memory of human beings runneth not to the contrary.
What does sustenance mean to you? Sustenance, in the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot languages, (and Maliseet, which is almost the same as Passamaquoddy), doesn't just mean food and drink. Sustenance is what gives life, and that includes your community, your family, you as an individual. It includes the ritual, it includes the celebrations and the ceremony that surround the gathering of food and other things that, give life.
So it's a much broader idea. The idea of sustenance had a definition given by the Canadian Supreme Court that dealt with very similar issues between First Nation people, Native people, and settlers in Canada. And rather than being just enough for you to eat or drink to keep yourself alive, they define sustenance as allowing for a moderate living, so that you could support yourself, you would have enough to trade.
If someone farther inland shot a couple of moose and has some moose meat available, you can trade fish for moose. That's all part of it. It's not just for your individual case. It's not just catching a fish for that evening's dinner. It's enough to support yourself and your community and to share. There are stories about the Passamaquoddy tribe down at Pleasant Point when fishing was good everybody would wake up sometimes to a fish in their mailbox. Everybody would have a fish in their mailbox, just distributed. And this, difference in the concept of sustenance is language based. The English language, God bless it, I love it, it's nice to write in, it divides things into little chunks. Okay? It's a very, precise, detailed language, and it's noun-based. Okay? And you name everything. You know....
"God gave names to all the animals."
The native languages, are verb based, relationship-based. And the concept of sustenance, there is no word for sustenance in the native languages that you can translate. It has to do with the relationships with in your community, your relationships with the fish, or the other wildlife, your relationships with the geography. That's what sustenance is.
Okay, remember the Claims Settlement Act that gave native people the right to sustenance in reservations? And MITSC, which has employed me as a writer and researcher, has the duty to think, to look at fish and game policies on non-native lands and how they affect fish and game on native lands.
Now I want to tell you the bad news: you really can't eat the fish, and there are not very many of them, on the native reservations. This is not because of any policy or practice of the native tribes. This is all because of policies either about or that affected fish and game quantities and quality from non-Indian lands that lead over into Indian lands. Because of course, Indian lands are much, once much larger than they are now, and they're now pretty small, and the rest of it is non-Indian land.
I'll give you a couple of little figures. Last year, I think it was last year, they counted (and they do a pretty careful count) 1,500 salmon going up the Penobscot River. Okay? 1, 500. That sounds, that's enough fish to count. The fish stocks are generally about 1 percent of what they were in colonial times, and pre-colonial times. Pre-colonial times lasted well into the colonial era. They used to catch 100,000 salmon in the Penobscot every year. Now they can count 1, 500 and no one's allowed to catch them because they're an endangered species.
Shad- American Shad, used to come up to the Penobscot. Two million Shad. Coming up to spawn. Now there's maybe ten, eleven thousand. Again, we're at about a 1%. A concept I should get out before we go much further. Who knows what diadromous fish are? There are many fish that live part of their lives in freshwater and part in saltwater. Salmon, shad, alewives, sturgeon. These are fish that live their lives in the ocean and spawn in fresh water. So they come up the rivers to spawn, and they come way up the rivers, all the little fingers. And the river becomes streams and becomes brooks and becomes little rivulets and little ponds and lakes. The fish will go all over the place. But there are also fish like the American eel that live their lives in fresh water and spawn in salt water. Elvers. Heard about elvers? Elvers are in the news every once in a while. They spawn in the ocean and then live their lives in the Maine rivers.
The alewives, the little river herring that come up to spawn. There are, now after there's been some dam removal, for example, on the Penobscot, and also on the St. Croix River (which we share with Canada), has done a lot of state of the art fish passageways around some of the dams. Twenty years ago, there were almost no alewives getting up the St. Croix. Now there's half a million going up. That, again, sounds like a pretty fair number of fish. So we got half a million alewives going up the St. Croix. Who wants to take a guess at how many used to go up the St. Croix?
5 million. 5 million, we got 5 million, we got 10 million here, who will see me on 10 million?
We got 5, 10 million. 20 million. 20 million, we got 20 million. 100 million. Well that's a little high. No, anywhere from 30 to 80 million, 80 million alewives used to go up the St. Croix River. Okay, what this meant for what we would call a sustenance lifestyle was at certain times of the year fish were not hard to catch. You could catch them in baskets. You didn't need all this, highfalutin gear or seine nets where they would, you would channel the fish into a net. And in pre-colonial times, the native people, probably (it's been estimated because people have gone, have tried to study this and figure it out). Maybe a third of the calories, calorie intake, was from fish, from sea run fish. Okay, you'd catch when the salmon would run and you could smoke them, salt them, however you preserve them, dry them, and that would last for a long time.
What happened? Why are the fish so few compared to what they used to be? Dams? Chemicals? Dams and chemicals. Okay, we've got this, is you're both right. Okay. Pushaw lake was a prime spawning ground for alewives. It's a shallow lake, there's reedy areas , there's meadows that come down to the lake and become swamps and then become grasslands, whatever. But there's a dam at the end of Pushaw Lake where it flows out to the Penobscot River and Pushaw Stream into the Stillwater. And for years (that dam was built in the 1960s), and it was impassable for the Alewives, who actually couldn't even get far enough up the Penobscot in those days to get to the Pushaw stream anyway. But that dam now has a fish passageway, and the Alewives are there, they're back in Pushaw Lake. Of course, there are bass and northern pike in Pushaw lake that eat the damn things that never used to be there before. You get some of those northern pike and they're pretty big fish, they eat a lot, but in the 1860s, Maine created a Commissioner of Fisheries. There were actually two commissioners back then. And they employed some people that were really active and really into fish. And they did a big survey and they came back and said, "there's not a river in Maine that has a healthy fish population." And it's dams, 1860, it's 1866 or 67, right after the Civil War. Dams, overfishing, and pollution. Now at that time they said pollution is a major factor in certain places but not overall (little did they know what was going to happen). Because the same year they're doing their survey of all the Maine rivers to figure out what's happened to the fish, Governor Joshua Chamberlain, Maine's hero of all time, who held the ground at Little Round Top, won the Civil War for the North, was a very smart guy.
He commissioned a group to study all the rivers to find out where the best places to build dams were. And so at the same time you got the Commissioner of Fisheries saying, you gotta take out the dams, you gotta take out the, you gotta let fish in. It's not that hard to make a fishway. You've got the governor saying, "build dams everywhere." That's going to be Maine's savior, now that the lumber industry is starting to taper off, the ship building industry isn't what it used to be. And so we got dams on all of these rivers.
Question from the Audience:
Did they know about fish ladders?
Judd Esty-Kendall:
They did. The Commissioner of Fisheries are out telling everybody it's not that hard to build a fish ladder. Build a fish ladder. And they were largely ignored, and by 25, 30 years, the legislature was no longer funding that part of state government. So we got dams. The dams weren't meant to keep the fish out. They didn't say, let's build a dam to keep the fish out. The rivers were meant to keep the water from flowing down to the ocean unless you wanted, unless human beings wanted it to go.
But they prevented the fish from going anywhere. Then, the pollution up to that time was runoff from agricultural land, it was, the sawdust and bark from, sawmills, then they started to build paper mills. The early paper mills used rags actually to make paper. and they just wanted the, power from the river.
But then they started making it with wood pulp. And that polluted the rivers terribly. There's material in the book, Sea Run, just talking about how bad it was. The Androscoggin was considered the most polluted river in the United States. There's little blurbs about how so and so walked across the bridge to town and threw up right in the middle of the street, that it would, if you paint your house white it would turn it black within a relatively short amount of time from the fumes. People would have to sit inside in the summer burning candles and, you know, incense if they had it back then here in the United States to try to keep the smell out.
And that's continued. There was a court case where the, Androscoggin was put under the authority of a special master in the court. He was actually a chemistry professor at Bates. And, he was supposed to say when they had to stop putting this sludge into the river because it was getting down to no oxygen in the river, okay?
And then the paper mills started to change the way they made paper because that court order only applied to the sulfite way of making paper, not to the next way, I can't remember what it was called. and that put your dioxins and your cancerous chemicals into the river.
At the time the land claims was settled in 1980, and the natives got the right for sustenance fishing regardless of any other state laws, there weren't very many fish in the river, and those that were there, you didn't want to eat them unless you wanted to get sick or you only wanted to eat once in a rare while. That has now started to give way, okay, because, as, some of you may know, on the Penobscot, the two, two of the main stem dams came down. Dams have come down on some of the other rivers, the Kennebec, and St. Croix, because we shared with Canada, the Canadians are better at building fish ladders and fish passageways, but not all that great.
So the fish are starting to come back. So we're from about a thousand alewives up to half a million now, and hopefully building.
Does anyone know why it's important that the alewives come up the river? These are the ones that came up in the 30 to 80 million amounts. The alewives are the fish that the other fish eat. And not only that, they're the fish that everything eats: the birds, the mammals, other fish. But now, you can, at some of the dams, the back of the reservoir behind the dams, when the little alewives are running back, there'll be lots of birds sitting on the dam. They're just picking those little alewives off because fish use the current to figure out where they're going. Okay. They're confused. Because where's the current going here? So they mill around. And the birds just pick them off. Now, that was the alewives role anyway: to do their best, but they were, a lot of them were going to be food for the birds and the otters, raccoons, whatever they have, and the other fish, but not like they are now because the dams interrupt the flow of the river, they change the temperature of the water, they change the composition of the riverbed in terms of where fish can spawn or where fish feed. the alewives were an important foundation base to a broader ecology that allowed sustenance fishing. Again, sustenance in the broader sense, where it means feeding yourself, feeding your family, feeding your community. It means trading between communities. It means the ceremonies that mark different times of the year. That was the alewives were the basis for that.
And they were done in, as we've talked about, by the dams, the pollution, the overfishing. And it has changed the ecology of Maine.
People, sort of think, "you know, if I go up, maybe even past Katahdin and hike into the deep Maine woods, there may be, I'll find places that are just like they used to be back before we settled all this." Okay? Those places don't exist. There's wild land, wild forests, but the ecology, the animals, the plants, everything is different because we've changed the ecology.
The alewives used to have hitchhikers: the fresh water mussels, their larvae, would hitch a ride with the alewives, going up the rivers. Now, if you're a little mussel larvae, and you have your choice of 50 million Ubers to take you up the river, you're gonna get there. And they would get into all the, these, again, these little ponds, little streams.
They're an animal, the mussels, that feed by flushing water through their system and taking out what they can eat. You get a lot of those little mussels, and that cleans the water. So the composition of the water is different than it used to be. Every little piece of the ecology has been affected by what we did to the fish, yes.
Question from the Audience:
Since the alewife population collapse, has there been anything to take its place? Or has everything just shrunk down without that foundation?
Judd Esty-Kendall:
Nothing has taken the place of 50 million alewives in a river, 20 million alewives in a river. But this leads to another issue. Thanks for bringing that up. Another issue that has affected what we call the sea run fish, the diadromous fish that used to be this huge amount of the caloric intake of natives and of early colonial settlers. You think people settled here didn't figure out, "Oh my God, it's, early June, I can hardly, I could walk across the water on the backs of those alewives."
Okay? But, people have introduced other fish, other animals, other plants. I'm sorry to say that the wisdom of the Maine legislature in the 1860s set up the first Commissioner of Fisheries, whose first charge was to bring back the sea run fish (which, as we've talked about, they were largely unable to do because they had no authority over the dams), and then they got defunded about 25- 30 years later. But the second charge to the Maine Commissioner of Fisheries was to introduce the black bass to Maine. Black bass at the time just meant bass, okay, that's what they were called. Maine didn't have any bass. How many people know someone that's gone fishing for bass in Maine? They're all over the place. In fact, there was a huge political controversy on the St. Croix because the bass fishermen and the guides on East Grand Lake, Spednic Lake, the lakes that come off of the St. Croix River, thought that when the alewives were starting to come up again, that was affecting the bass population. So Maine passed a law in the 1990s that prevented the dams from allowing any alewives to go up the rivers. Okay.
I know, it's stupid policy, okay. But they were convinced that's what was doing it. A political battle ensued, and finally in 2012,
The Passamaquoddy tribe got involved with this issue and made a big push, and there is now a law in Maine requiring that they do what they can to let the alewives pass and that's why the alewives are starting to come back.
Not to get political, but after Maine passed that law, there was an attempt by Maine's congressman at the time, a few years later, Mr. Poliquin, to pass a federal law that would take the St. Croix out of the usual regulation by the federal government because it was Canada on one side and Maine on the other, that would have blocked the passageway for the alewives. But that, our Congress in its wisdom never passed that law. So don't say Congress has never done anything good. Sometimes inaction is very good.
One point I'm going to make, it just occurred to me when I said, Canada on one side and Maine on the other. This relates back to what we talked about in terms of languages and the way people perceive the world by the way their language is created.
English. Okay. Categories. We've got lines here. This is the over here, this is over there. This is what we name this, a language full of nouns. Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Maliseet: it's all relationships and verbs. So the word for a canoe changes slightly if it's just sitting there than if you're in it. It becomes an animate object.
Rivers, to the English, are borders. You got your Bangor over here and you got your Brewer over there. You got your Canada, you got your Maine, everything's cut by a river. The rivers were the central part of Native American territory. Penobscots were people of the Penobscot. All its tributaries, wherever it went, it was the central highway in their territory. Passamaquoddies, people of the St. Croix, people of the Skutik River. The Maliseets, people of the beautiful river St. John, goes through Canada and then forms part of the northern border between Canada and Maine. It's a different way of conceiving your territory and how you relate to that territory.
So I'm going to go back to the theme about the alewives forming the basis for the ecology. Yes.
Question from the Audience:
What was policy governing the St. Croix because there were more parties involved? Was it particularly different?
Judd Esty-Kendall:
Yes, good question. It is somewhat different. Early on, When the United States and Canada became countries and realized that they were going to have to live next to each other for a long time, they formed a joint commission, Canadian American commission. It deals with all the borders between the U. S. and Canada in a lot of ways. But there's a, a, particular joint commission for the St. Croix that deals with supposedly pollution in the river, with river passage, with fish the ecology of the river. So that's been a little bit different. The United States has had to deal with Canada.
Unfortunately, that, that commission hasn't really had the teeth that it should have. For example, one of the big dams on the St. Croix, I can't remember which one right now. They wanted to build a big dam. Okay, the Canadians said, oh, we gotta, you gotta talk to us too. Okay, they said there has to be fish passage around the dam.
The company building the dam, this is the Baileyville Dam, I think, the company said, "Oh sure, okay, we got you, we got you. Fishways, yeah sure, we got you." They built the dam and no fishway. Okay, nothing happened. Until someone pointed out to the Canadians, who said, oh wait, you said, Oh yeah, you said you'd build a fishway there.
Oh, yeah, we did. Sure. Sure. yeah, we'll put one in. Okay. This was in the 1800s, later 1800s. There wasn't a fishway put into that dam till like 1960s.
So it didn't make any difference. Same with, I talked about the political controversy with the alewives and whether you were stopping the alewives from going up the Skutik because my God, they were affecting the bass population, which were an invasive fish, but people like to catch them.
The commission, the joint commission, didn't order the fish to be at passage. But they did do studies to show that the alewives weren't actually what was affecting the bass population. It was the water temperature. The water temperature was getting a little warmer, and that was affecting the bass. The bass actually is a fairly warm water fish. So they put out studies, and finally, those studies helped with getting the, the river opened up to the alewives again.
But I want to make another point before I try to open it up for questions.
What happened to the fish in Maine's rivers, from this bountiful resource down to one percent of what they used to be, was a change in economy. Just like the languages are different, the native languages and English, the economies were different. The natives, and this is not, meant to be a value judgment here.
You draw your own conclusions. The native economy was one of sustenance and trade. You understood that there was a certain amount you could take, and some years were leaner and some years were fat. But there was a certain amount you could take to make sure that this all continued. And you were an equal partner with the alewives, an equal partner with the salmon, and with the little mussels that came up today, they're all equal parts . Now change your idea of an economy to one of the accumulation of wealth. What happens? who's ever got the net closest to the mouth of the river is going to get as many fish as they want. And who's ever a little farther up the river isn't going to get as many fish. There are petitions from the 1820s, right after Maine became a state, and there actually were, petitions back in the colonial era from the natives and from working class colonial settlers, asking that the rivers be open because these companies are taking all the fish at the mouth of the river. We don't get any fish. Alewives, river herring, we call them, were salted and shipped to the West Indies in huge amounts to feed the slaves on the sugar plantations and to this day, the national dish of Jamaica is saltfish.
Saltfish. And that was the Maine business people who were making money off that trade. Selling salmon around the world, okay? This is the accumulation of wealth, and it only stops when that resource starts to run out. So that affected the fish in Maine's rivers, but I'm going to ask you, what is at the root of climate change?
It is an economy that emphasizes the accumulation of wealth. The same thing that happened in Maine's rivers is happening worldwide. And sure, we're thinking, in the English language, let's think of technological ways we can try to change this, make it better. Think of the relationships between the different animals, between the plants and the humans. It's those relationships and fracturing of those relationships that leads to a result where, finally, we're running out of that resource. The salmon, I'm hopeful. Because all of the tribes, Penobscots, Passamaquoddies, Maliseets, Mi'kmaqs, are working on restoring the rivers within their historic territory.
The alewives are starting to come back. Maybe we can, to some extent, recreate the ecology once again. But the world is changing. Salmon are cold water fish. The Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest warming bodies of water.
Are the salmon going to come back? I don't know. Maybe they're just going to go farther north. And the bass? You want to know how many, remember I said that 1,500 salmon had been counted in the Penobscot River last year as opposed to 100,000 that used to be caught? How many salmon do you think were counted in the St. Croix River last year? Do I have an estimate? Salmon would come up to St. Croix and it's vast, maybe not 100,000 being caught because the Penobscot's a bigger river, but a lot. How many salmon were counted in the St. Croix River last year? Zero. No salmon. After 1980, there was a huge federal stocking program for salmon in the St. Croix River. They raised them. They stocked them. It didn't take. The federal government gave up.
Local groups and state and towns took over, not a problem. Continued trying to stock the salmon in the St. Croix River. There are no salmon counted going up the St. Croix River. Temperature, water temperature, pollution, there's still, Baileyville Mill is still running on the St. Croix. And the bass. Remember, they're an invasive fish.
There were no bass in Maine before 1860s. The bass eat the salmon. There are bass all through the St. Croix River because we stocked them in East Grand, we stocked them in Spednic Lake. So are the salmon coming back? We can hope, and the native tribes are doing what they can because salmon had a particular ceremonial impact on the tribes as well as the sustenance impact.
My son works for the Penobscot Indian Nation, has for years, and every once in a while, the chief gives out gifts. This is part of the culture as well. Remember I talked about the fish in every mailbox? When the fishermen had a good day? My son got a salmon, an actual wild salmon that the Penobscots got actually from Canada.
But the chief gave out salmon to a lot of the people on the reservation, the employees. We grilled that salmon. I can't tell you how good that was. I wanted to create a ceremony around grilling that salmon. So good.
But, we shall see. The general population is starting to understand these issues and this interplay more. The natives have always known it.
Read SEA RUN but it's available online at the MITSC, M I T S C website. You can download it. Read the whole thing. Talk about books to go on your coffee table for people to pick up and read. SEA RUN is that book.
I'm going to leave time for any questions. I did want to mention one other thing. I've done another research project for MITSC. It's about the hidden language in Article 10 of the Maine Constitution. You may say, wow, whoop, whoop, whoop. But you're all going to vote on it. In November, question six, whether to put the original language back in the Constitution, the language that's still part of the Constitution, it just can't be in any printed copies by law, by constitutional law.
And the language says that Maine takes from Massachusetts all the duties and responsibilities Massachusetts had for the Indians in the District of Maine. That language has been out of printed copies of the Maine Constitution since the 1870s. You have a chance to put that language back in by your vote on question six in November.
Questions?
Question from the Audience:
What are the duties that Massachusetts had?
Judd Esty-Kendall:
Ah, now that's, it's a sticky issue that I'm not going to try to tell you, but for example, the most recent treaty between Massachusetts and the Passamaquoddies allowed the Passamaquoddies to fish whenever they wanted in either branch of the Skutik (St. Croix) River, and they could cross at all of the crossing places. Everybody knew what the crossing places were. That's actually where they would fish as well, but do you think if you're a Passamaquoddy you can go out and fish anywhere you want without a license in any one of the branches of the Skutik River? No, I wouldn't suggest it right now.
There was the right to fish and hunt in the treaties. a major court case from the 1890s when two Passamaquoddies said, "God damn it," and they went out and shot two deer in January out of season because they were hungry. They got convicted of shooting deer out of season and they tried to defend based on the ancient treaties and all those ancient treaties the language came into the court. And the court basically said "how do we, know that you people that call yourselves Passamaquoddies are the same people that made these treaties?"
They got convicted. Anyway, more questions. Yes.
Question from the Audience:
You mentioned fish, but you also talked about game. Yes.
Judd Esty-Kendall:
The book was a big bite to chew. Okay, and we did the book just about sea run fish. There could be books written about game as well. Everything from snapping turtles, deer, moose. Maine used to have caribou.
Clams. Clams? Clams are still a food, in terms of native sustenance, clams are part of the native food base. They would go right to the seashore in the summer and get clams. Still today, clams are one of the least polluted of the sea foods. maybe if, the state of Maine ever comes to its senses and looks at ways to recreate the sustenance economy of the Wabanaki people, clams might take a bigger role than they used to. That's one of the ideas.
Yes?
Question from the Audience:
Are there any current research projects that MITSC is conducting about the changing ecology in Maine?
Judd Esty-Kendall:
Not MITSC right now, but there are academics that do that. I can tell you, I don't know a whole lot about fish and I'm not a scientist. Okay? Believe it or not. But, there's a lot of material to draw on when we did the research for the book. Okay, there's scientists all over have said, "Oh my God, what's happening to the fish?" They can study why and wherefor it's all out there, but they write differently than we write.
I should mention, I can't remember if I mentioned by name, Tony Sutton, was the other researcher and writer. He couldn't be here because of a family issue today. But Tony interviewed people in the tribes about these issues, and their words are interspersed with the more technical language in the book. And you can see, they've known these things all along. Right there.
One of our recommendations is that any state action that might affect the fish and the ecology take into account what's called TEK it's basically traditional ecological knowledge. Like the Maliseets live along the Meduxnekeag. There's no salmon in the Meduxnekeag. How do we know there used to be salmon in the Meduxnekeag? Because the Maliseet say so. There's a MITSC tent right in this nice long tent right over here where there's more literature, there are copies of SEA RUN, there are, all kinds of brochures and you get to talk to Rachel. Thank you very much!
Comment from the Audience:
Thank you Judd! Thank you so much.
