Japanese Exclusion and Environmental Conservation in the BC Salmon Fisheries, 1900-1930
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Between 1900 and 1930, fishermen, cannery workers, investors, fisheries officials, and federal commissioners in British Columbia knew that the salmon in the Fraser and Skeena Rivers were overfished. They saw the solution in hatcheries, controlling when and where people could fish, and limiting the number of fishermen engaged in the commercial fisheries. Yet while the first two solutions relied on a certain scientific logic, the last issue was highly influenced by racial ideologies. In the immediate aftermath of Canada’s 1908 Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan and with greater force after the First World War, the government and white nationalists sought to curtail the presence of Japanese immigrants and Canadians of Japanese heritage in the BC salmon fisheries. They explicitly described their goals as a strategy for fish conservation and as a way to make the fisheries more accessible to white fishermen. This article shows that local contingencies made the workforces and racial anxieties different not only in BC and California or in Alaska and Hawai‘i, but also on the southern and northern coasts of the same province. Merging the often-separate histories of environment and Asian exclusion, this article argues that between 1900 and 1930, government policies in British Columbia aimed at conservation and public concerns about resource depletion were infused with racial ideologies. It demonstrates how state efforts to regulate the fishing industry, and more specifically human responses to changing environmental conditions, became highly linked with the anti-Asian agitation that had already taken hold on the Pacific coast of North America.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".