Salmon Viruses and Sovereignties-at-Sea: A Settler Colonial Politics of Salmon Aquaculture

This dissertation examines the settler colonial, multispecies, and microbial politics of Atlantic salmon aquaculture in what is now British Columbia, Canada. Salmon aquaculture production systems enable 18 million Atlantic salmon to be raised in nets that are anchored to the seafloor in the coastal waters of British Columbia each year. Aquaculture is recognized as the fastest growing method of food production worldwide and is often positioned as a “blue revolution” capable of providing sustainable, affordable seafood in the midst of salmon population declines. In British Columbia, however, the raising of Atlantic salmon in critical Pacific salmon migration routes has engendered concerns about emerging industrial uses of the waterscape and the ability for farm-borne viruses to move between species. By investigating how industrial aquaculture is encountered, negotiated, and resisted on-the-ground, particularly by Indigenous communities in whose waters the practice is occurring, I instead propose that aquaculture is not a radical departure or a revolutionary break from the past, but is steeped within and dependent upon histories of colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism that have long transformed salmon and waterscapes into sites of state and economy-building.Stemming from ongoing uncertainties regarding the potential for pathogens to transfer between Atlantic and Pacific salmon, this dissertation particularly focuses on historic, scientific, and political controversies that surround salmon viruses. In the absence of state monitoring for salmon pathogens like Piscine orthoreovirus (PRV), Indigenous leaders and their allies travel to sites of aquaculture production to monitor the daily operations of farms and gather underwater video footage from within farm sites. Campaigns to enact stronger fish health protections and document the spread of viruses and pollution also become part of broader political movement aimed at reclaiming territory and restoring Indigenous forms of governance within coastal waterscapes. While pathogens come to reflect and reinforce colonial structures of dispossession, I argue that Indigenous-led efforts to track pathogens throughout salmon bodies and ecosystems are shifting power dynamics in ways that offer new possibilities for the “blue revolution.” This research brings scholarship on pathogens and industrial landscapes into conversation with enduring concerns about the material consequences of environmental injustice and colonialism. In situating aquaculture as part of an under-explored extension of settler colonial logics, structures, and governance into marine space, I suggest that the dominant framing of settler colonialism as land-based leaves large openings for understanding how colonialism and sovereignty are enacted in water-centered and maritime regions. Illuminating how industrial aquaculture and efforts to track pathogens take place within a broader politics of asserting sovereignty “at sea” reveals how historical inequalities and ongoing power dynamics become inscribed within oceans, with important implications for understanding contemporary ocean politics in the 21st century.

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