Which Fish? Knowledge,Articulation,and Legitimization in Claims about Endangered and Culturally Significant Animals

Introduction

Following the first snow in March, the Klamath Tribes ¹ of southeastern Oregon, United States, hold a ceremony to honor the return of the c’waam to the Sprague River, a tributary of Upper Klamath Lake. The c’waam and qapdo, fish known colloquially in English as the Lost River and shortnose sucker, migrate each spring from the lake to spawn. On a cold and muddy Saturday morning, I attended this ceremony at the invitation of the director of the tribal Culture and Heritage Department.

The ceremony took place around an open fire. On one side sat a group of tribal elders, whose role in the ceremony was to bless the fish. To their right was a drum circle; in front of them was a large plastic container filled with about eight inches of water and two large, brown-gray, fish. Seeming at first innocuous, the long-lived c’waam and qapdo are in fact at the center of environmental controversies in the Klamath River Basin over the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973, irrigated agriculture, and tribal natural resource management.

In this article, I explore the ways that the scientization of environmental laws, in particular the ESA, has influenced the discourses that people use to make environmental claims. In particular, statutory requirements in the ESA have created a situation in which legal authority and scientific authority are mutually constitutive. The result is a coproduction (Jasanoff 2004) of legal and scientific authority, in which one’s legal standing is contingent on one’s ability to produce and deploy scientifically legible environmental discourses. Understanding this, and seeking a more central role in environmental management, the Klamath have turned toward ecological research in their natural resource management program, in the process becoming major producers of scientific knowledge about the Upper Klamath Basin’s environment. Leveraging the legal authority of science, the tribes have thus attempted to shed their historically subordinate position in matters of environmental governance. At the same time, the Klamath’s relatively new role as producers of scientific knowledge sometimes sits uneasily with their understandings of what many tribal members term their “tribal historical knowledge” of the environment.

I argue that while in many cases, the knowledge claims of native peoples and scientists have “circulated along two distinct and non-overlapping tracks” (Walley 2002, 275; see also Scott 1998; Wynne 1992), in the case of the Klamath Basin, the knowledge that a group produces and uses can be quite eclectic, making it difficult to link a group’s identity to “its” knowledge. Instead, groups in the Klamath Basin tend to integrate seemingly disparate articulations (Clifford 2001), always with an eye toward the question of which discourses provide the most authority. Gaining access to these authoritative discourses, however, has created situations in which groups must sometimes speak in unaccustomed vocabularies to establish their legitimacy.

I begin with a discussion of the c’waam ceremony as a site that reveals how one aspect of the environment is known in differing, yet overlapping ways, revealing a fluidity between environmental knowledge and a group’s identity. I then discuss the authorization of one particular discourse about the fish within the ESA, the law that frames environmental disputes involving the sucker. Employing boundary work to differentiate what it identifies as “scientific” knowledge claims from other claims, the ESA has influenced how groups frame their environmental claims. I next examine how the Klamath have contended with the legal authorization of scientific discourses about the sucker.

Many Fish

The audience at the c’waam ceremony included people belonging to many social worlds in the Upper Klamath Basin. These included tribal members, ecological scientists, regulators, the press, and nontribal residents. The diversity of those in attendance reflected the diversity of ways people knew the fish at the ceremony’s center.

As the ceremony commenced, one of the tribes’ cultural and governmental leaders told of the c’waam’s creation and significance of the fish for the tribes. Long ago, a giant serpent, far larger than a man, had attacked a Klamath village on the shores of Upper Klamath Lake. The inhabitants could not stop the creature, so the creator g’mok’am’c came to their assistance. He slew the serpent, cut it into pieces, and threw the pieces into the water below. Hitting the water, the pieces transformed into c’waam, and g’mok’am’c advised the villagers to honor them with a ceremony each year. If they did, the fish would be the first to return to the rivers each spring from the lake, where they spend the winters, and they would become the earliest available fresh meat. Indeed, the c’waam and qapdo have long been important tribal food sources, and tribal members today recount the distinct, delicious taste of the meat as well as the ease with which they could once catch the fish.

But since 1986, they have not. That year, the Klamath government placed a moratorium on the tribal subsistence fishery, a right guaranteed by treaty (16 Stat. 707, 1864). The moratorium anticipated an additional way that people have come to know the fish. Two years later, in 1988, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (1988) declared both the Lost River and shortnose suckers to be particular kinds of legal creatures: endangered species, deemed a “in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range” (16 USC § 1532) and therefore eligible for protection under the ESA. Dams, wetland reclamation, diversions, dredging, and hybridization had rendered the fish species unable to sustain themselves. The protections afforded the suckers as a result of their new legal status as endangered species thrust the fish into the center of intense conflicts over environmental management in the Klamath Basin, where water resources are overallocated among agricultural, conservation, and tribal–trust uses. For the Klamath, the importance of the sucker—spiritually, culturally, and as part of their historical economy—has made the decline in fish populations especially troubling and has made efforts to restore them a central goal of tribal policy.

The ways of knowing the sucker do not end there, however. How was the Fish and Wildlife Service able to legally determine that Chasmistes brevirostris (shortnose sucker, qapdo) and Deltistes luxatus (Lost River sucker, c’waam) were in danger of extinction? They did so using research conducted by fisheries biologists working for the Klamath Tribes, universities, and government agencies, which were prompted by observations by tribal fishers of population declines at formerly productive fishing grounds. The Fish and Wildlife Service’s reliance on scientific studies and reports in their decision-making process, in turn, was dictated by the requirement within the ESA that legal determinations of endangerment be made “solely on the basis of the best scientific and commercial data available” (16 USC § 1533). ²

In other words, the fish are also scientific objects, organisms under intense scrutiny by biologists, ecologists, and other environmental scientists. In contrast to the 1980s, when there was a paucity of scientific information on the fish (US Fish and Wildlife Service 1988), the law’s statutory demand for scientific data has been a major motivator behind the explosion of scientific studies regarding the fish and the Klamath Basin environment (see also Ranco 2000). As if to emphasize this additional facet of the sucker, both fish in the ceremony had been caught by the US Geological Survey biologists and spent the night before at the Klamath’s research station and hatchery. There, scientists in the Klamath Tribes Natural Resources Department hatched, raised, and studied suckers over the last decades. In addition to conducting some of the first research into the basic life histories of the fish, they conducted research on breeding and raising the fish in captivity (should the fish’s wild populations dwindle to the point of needing to be boosted by domestic stock) and studies to better understand the impacts of declining water quality on the fish.

Since 1995, the US Geological Survey has also operated an extensive sucker tagging program in the Upper Klamath Basin, in which scientists have assigned unique “social security numbers”—to use the words of one researcher—to thousands of fish. These identification numbers are either written on the tags themselves or encoded in radio frequency identification chips implanted inside the fish. Periodically, these individuated fish are recaptured by researchers or sensed by underwater antennas. When they are, their identification numbers and locations are recorded, and the fish are translated from living animal into immutable, mobile data (Latour 1987), used to construct numeric models of population dynamics. Others involved in scientific research include environmental nongovernmental organizations, universities, and several state and federal agencies, including the Fish and Wildlife Service, the US Bureau of Reclamation, and the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board (2003).

The fish in the ceremony, in sum, were boundary objects, at once one fish and many fish, with “different meanings in different social worlds but [with a] structure [that] is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable in several…” (Star and Griesemer 1989, 393). In their shared referent, differing claims and ways of knowing the fish existed not in stark differentiation but rather in close interrelation with each other. Were the c’waam and qapdo not known by the Klamath as gifts of the creator and a prized source of food, fishers may not have noticed their decline and may not have pushed for the fish becoming an urgent conservation for the Klamath government. In turn, that prioritization motivated some of the first scientific studies of the fish’s ecology, as the tribes sought to enroll federal conservation agencies in the fish’s protection. With these data and the associated narrative of population decline these data made possible, the Fish and Wildlife Service was able to fulfill the ESA’s statutory requirement that determinations of endangerment be made “solely on the basis of the best scientific and commercial data available” (16 USC § 1533). And upon that foundation, the fish became “legal facts” (Silbey 2007), facts of life created by the specific rhetoric and procedures of the law, invested with particular legal significance, and protected by the regulatory authority of the state. And finally, without such federal protections, there would be little chance of the fish being able to resume their central place in tribal culture and the tribal economy. Each knowledge claim, in other words, depended entirely on the others, and none—whether legal, scientific, or based on the tribes’ cultural practices—could easily exist independently.

As boundary objects, the fish opened a window onto the relationships among social worlds and the knowledge claims that emerge from, and are deployed by, them. In making claims about the fish, people constituting one social world drew on knowledge claims commonly associated with another. One cannot be surprised in the Klamath Basin when a Klamath tribal member talks science, when a scientist talks law, when a regulator talks science, or when scientists talk culture. As boundary objects, the fish became a node through which the environmental discourses of these social worlds all passed, an intersection point common to all of the discourses. At the same time, none of these social worlds was sharply bounded from the others. Strict divisions among Native Americans, scientists, and regulators have become impossible to uphold in a place where Native Americans are scientists, scientists are regulators, and, in light of the tribes’ sovereign status, regulators are tribal members.

This fluidity of discourse and group identity was well illustrated by Allen Foreman—Klamath Tribes’ chairman, government regulator, and sponsor and consumer of scientific data—when he gave a brief speech before the ceremony. In it, he called upon numerous, differing knowledge claims about the fish. He began by discussing the possibility that the legal status of one of the suckers might change from endangered to threatened, perhaps a sign of recovery that might pave the way to the reinstatement of the tribal subsistence fishery. ³ With this reference, he invoked the historical economic and cultural life of these animals alongside the fish as complex legal organisms under federal law. He briefly wondered aloud, was the fact that the c’waam ceremony had not been practiced in the decades following the tribes’ termination a possible contributing factor to their decline? He continued that the return of the sucker would not have been possible without faith and the return of the tribes to cultural health, illustrated in part by the successful efforts by tribal elders to restore the c’waam ceremony. He concluded that the fish seemed, based on the most recent scientific reports, to be rebounding. ⁴

With the blurring of boundaries between knowledge claims and the groups that produce and use them, the contingency of this relationship becomes clear. The fact that people in the Klamath Basin drew together diverse knowledge claims when speaking about the fish suggests that the link between a person’s identity and the knowledge that person produces and deploys were not exclusive or deterministic. Instead, people in the Klamath Basin drew quite fluidly on knowledge claims that may at first seem closely associated with another group and articulated these into complex, hybrid claims about the animals. The assemblages that result reflect, in the words of Clifford, the “hooking and unhooking…a cutting up and combining of linguistic elements, always a selection from a vastly greater repertoire of semiotic possibilities” (2001, 477) to represent one’s self and one’s world. These “articulations” are both discursive and concrete: they join claims that may initially seem quite distinct—here, for instance, those of population biology and the c’waam ceremony that had not taken place for decades—while they connect the activities and actors of seemingly distinct social worlds—here, fisheries biologists and tribal elders—into a single whole, all relying on the fish as boundary objects. At any given time, therefore, the associations between a group’s identity and its knowledge are not immutably bundled together. Nor are the discourses of any particular and impermeably bounded social world starkly separated from another. Rather, a group’s identity and knowledge are coproduced, emerging in a mutually constituent relationship with each other, as one group pulls in and enrolls the discourses, actors, and practices of another to articulate an authoritative claim (Abbott 1988; Espiland 1998).

The Scientization of Environmental Disputes

While people draw on and assemble eclectic knowledge claims to speak about their environment, not all claims are equally authoritative in a particular moment and not all areas of discourse are equally available to a particular person (Foucault 1981; Hall 1986a; Clifford 2001). Scientists, for example, tend to draw less explicitly on tribal fishers’ knowledge of the sucker than do tribal regulators upon scientists’ knowledge. The reason for this asymmetry lies in the fact that certain discursive forms are privileged above others because of the legal requirements of environmental disputation. In particular, the ESA explicitly legitimates, scientific, ecological discourses in the management of endangered species, while minimizing the legitimacy of other knowledge claims. ⁵ More generally, natural resource management and environmental law have become scientized, with the expectation that decisions be science-based (Bocking 2004).

Environmental disputes under the ESA are prime examples of this phenomenon. From its very epistemic foundations, the ESA frames nature itself in terms of the science of ecology (Delaney 2003). The prominence of the ecosystemic understanding of the environment owes itself in large part to the ESA’s emergence as a central piece of environmental law in the United States at the moment when the discipline of ecology was becoming the primary lens through which scientists, regulators, and the general public viewed nature (Bocking 1997; Hays 1987). Outside the regulatory arena, words “ecology,” “environment,” and “nature” have become synonymous, belying the highly scientized understanding of nature in everyday life (see, e.g., McKibben 1999). As Delaney (2003, 199) argues, “the ecological framing is, in some respects, the official ideology of American law with regards to artificial extinction.” From the species to its habitat, the ESA’s nature is one that ecologists view as “webs of material connections” (Delaney 2003, 193; see also Rohlf 1989). However, the ideas that nature is systemic, that species depend on habitats, and that flows of matter and energy connect living things to their habitats and to each other are scientific conceptions, not direct accounts of the state of nature. As Latour points out, “Ecology, as its name indicates, has no direct access to nature as such; it is a ‘-logy’ like all other scientific disciplines,” the truth claims of which are advanced, supported, and evaluated in ways shared with other branches of science (2004, 4).

Just as scientific understandings of nature figure into the ESA’s definition and ordering of the environment, scientific data and scientists play a central role in the implementation of the ESA. This is particularly true in the listing of endangered species, a process known as determination, and in reviews of federal projects that may affect endangered species, a process known as consultation. Throughout both determination and consultation, the ESA’s boundaries between permissible considerations serve to legitimize and delegitimize particular discourses and the actors that speak them (Gieryn 1999).

For a living thing to be an endangered or threatened species, it must pass through a determination process outlined in Section 4 of the ESA. Determinations often begin with a petition to the Fish and Wildlife Service or US Marine Fisheries Service by a nongovernmental organization. ⁶ Petitions are accepted based on “a finding by the Secretary as to whether the petition presents substantial scientific or commercial information indicating that the petitioned action may be warranted” (16 USC § 1533). Even at this early stage, boundaries are being drawn between legally permissible and nonpermissible knowledge—in particular, whether the petition contains “substantial scientific or commercial information.” If a petition is accepted, the Fish and Wildlife Service or Marine Fisheries Service designates the organism as a “candidate species” and initiates a study to determine whether it meets the criteria for endangerment. Limits on the sorts of knowledge that are considered legally legitimate continue. According to the ESA, “The Secretary shall make determinations [of endangerment]…solely on the basis of the best scientific and commercial data available to him…” (16 USC § 1533). Moreover, in regulation clarifying the appropriate considerations during determination, both the Fish and Wildlife Service and Marine Fisheries Service state these decisions must be made “solely on the basis of the best available scientific and commercial information regarding a species’ status, without reference to possible economic or other impacts of such determination” (50 CFR § 424.11, emphasis in the original).

Once listed as an endangered species, the boundary drawing between “scientific” and other considerations continues in the process of consultation. As outlined in Section 7 of the ESA, consultation is the process by which federal projects are reviewed for their possible impact on endangered and threatened species and their critical habitats. Consultation begins with the federal agency wishing to undertake a project (known as the “action agency”), asking the Fish and Wildlife Service or Marine Fisheries Service whether or not any listed species might occur within the area of the proposed action. “If the Secretary advises, based on the best scientific and commercial data available, that such species may be present” (16 USC § 1536), the action agency is required to begin consultation with the responsible service over the effects of the proposed action. This review is to be carried out based on the “the best scientific and commercial data available” (16 USC § 1536). The outcomes of the consultation process, in the case that there is an adverse effect, are lengthy scientific reports known as biological opinions that outline the steps the action agency must take to avoid adversely affecting the species in question.

The delineation of “science” from other knowledge is especially clear in the process for designating critical habitat, areas that are “essential to the conservation of the species and . . . which may require special management considerations or protections” (16 USC § 1532). To designate critical habitat, the Fish and Wildlife Service or Marine Fisheries Service must make their decision based on “the best scientific data available and after taking into consideration the economic impact, and any other relevant impact, of specifying any particular area as critical habitat” (16 USC § 1533, emphasis added). The requirement that “economic impact and any other relevant impact” must be considered contrasts with the exclusion of these concerns from determination and consultations (Liebesman and Peterson 2003) and removes any doubt that an error of omission might have occurred in limiting legitimate considerations during determinations of endangerment and consultations to “scientific.”

The boundary work conducted within the ESA serves to bolster the legitimacy of the act by conferring on its decisions the authoritative, rational mantel of science. Ecological conceptions of nature and evolutionary conceptions of species are not simply written into the ESA, in other words. Rather, the epistemic authority of scientific discourses is central to establishing and maintaining the legal legitimacy of the ESA. With the ESA’s demand for particular types of information comes the ability for the Fish and Wildlife Service or Marine Fisheries Service to defend their enforcement actions—which may cause economic hardship and may be unpopular—by pointing to the scientific pedigree of the information used to make these decisions. In so doing, the government agencies operating under the ESA “seek to legitimate their claims about natural reality”—that a particular species is endangered or is jeopardized by a proposed action—“as scientifically made and vetted inside the authoritative cultural space” of scientific knowledge production (Gieryn 1999, 16). ⁷

The result is a situation in which one’s legal authority under the ESA is directly related to one’s ability to produce, deploy, and counter scientific expertise in environmental decision-making. A mutually constitutive, coproductive relationship between law and science emerges in which the legitimacy of environmental laws is built around the authority of scientific claims, while the authority of scientific claims is bolstered by their centrality in the rule of law. To be considered legitimate participants in such environmental negotiations, claimants must speak about the environment in the authorized discourse, that is, in ways understood to be scientific.

However, the authorization of scientific discourses has occurred in tandem with the deauthorization of knowledge that is considered not scientific, which in turn narrows the discourses available to make a claim within the context of the law. The narrowing of available discourses, in turn, leads to a “rarefaction…of the speaking subject,” or a narrowing of who can make these claims (Foucault 1981, 61). This situation is particularly problematic for people, indigenous and not, who have not historically made environmental claims using western scientific discourses, a situation that has been observed around the world (Wylie 2011; Corburn 2007; Cruikshank 2005; Walley 2004; Nadasdy 2003). As a result, these groups may be marginalized unless they gain access to the authorized discourses of environmental disputation, even if science is not the primary discourse they would otherwise employ to speak about their environment.

Contending with Science in Law

After the c’waam ceremony, I approached Foreman and asked if he would be willing to speak more with me about the fish, their significance for the tribes, and the management conflicts surrounding them. A week later, he offered me a cup of coffee at his office, and we sat down to talk. Foreman recounted the importance of the fish to the tribes, noting that some Klamath preferred the taste of these fish to that of salmon, which had also migrated into the Upper Klamath Basin before the construction of dams without fish passage blocked their migration, beginning in 1911 (NOAA Fisheries 2014). He began to tell me about the suckers’ decline, which tribal fishers had begun to observe in the 1970s. Before I even had a chance to ask anything specific about the relationship between science and environmental law, he said:

But when the tribes first started complaining [about the decline of the sucker], people would come back and say, “where’s your science?” We brought in people like [our fisheries biologist], and others before him. They confirmed with science what we knew forever. We changed the method of confirming what we already knew. We had to convert to science because mainstream society said, “Where’s your science?” They had us over a barrel until we could produce it.

Doing so seemed to demand the tribes frame their claims in scientifically legible ways: “science can capture and translate our tribal historical knowledge to the nontribal world.” Over the next decades, the Klamath established themselves as producers of legally authoritative scientific knowledge about the sucker fish and the regional environment, ultimately succeeding in gaining endangered species status for the fish. The strategy, which extended to other culturally significant animals as well, was one in which scientific information became a way of accessing the intensely political arena of wildlife management by creating “better methods and more accurately quantify[ing] environmental impacts” (Klamath Tribe Fish and Game Office 1989, 2). Without such methods and the quantifiable data they produced, the Klamath would not be able to “effectively work in the political spectrum of natural resource management,” and their efficacy, especially the ability to evaluate proposals, “educate the decision-maker, and inform the public” would be highly circumscribed (Klamath Tribe Fish and Game Office 1989, 2). People demanded science—“Where’s your science?”—and not “what they call the folklore of the tribes” as a basis for action: “Landowners believe science.” Authority ultimately “goes back to irrefutable scientific data we’ve been providing.…It all goes back to science because you have to prove it.” ⁸

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the legal authority of these articulations was put to the test. In 1992, 1995, 1996, and 1997, massive sucker “die-offs” occurred, covering the shores of Upper Klamath Lake with the bodies of dead fish (US Fish and Wildlife Service 2001). Throughout the decade, the Fish and Wildlife Service conducted consultations with the Bureau of Reclamation’s Klamath Irrigation Project over its impact on the endangered suckers, issuing several biological opinions calling for changes in the project’s operation, especially the use of fish screens to prevent the entrainment of suckers in canals and changes to the amount and timing of water draws from Upper Klamath Lake, the main source of water for the project.

In 2001, the Fish and Wildlife Service issued another biological opinion, in which it ordered irrigation water to 210,000 acres of the project farmland to be completely shutoff to maintain higher water levels in the lake (Doremus and Tarlock 2008; Buchanan 2010). Following the shutoff, which coincided with a drought and the main growing season, intense, sometimes violent conflict ensued between those in favor of the policy and those opposed, including trespass and vandalism of government property, threats against government natural resource (Young 2001; Rampton 2003), and a shutoff-related “shooting rampage” in Chiloquin, OR, the seat of the Klamath government (New York Times 2001).

Given the centrality of scientifically legible claims in the legitimacy of ESA enforcement actions, the conflict quickly shifted to rancorous expert disagreement over the scientific evidence presented in the report. Critics, who realized that the legitimacy of the water shutoff rested entirely on the stability of the underlying scientific claims, began challenging the “reliability of science and openness of the process” that had led to the water shutoff (House Committee on Natural Resources 2001, 3).

By this point, however, the tribes’ position in relation to scientific knowledge about the fish had radically changed from that of several decades earlier. In fact, the tribes had established themselves firmly within this social world of scientists, with the associated ability to make legally authoritative claims under the ESA. Intersecting in one way or another “with the work of virtually every researcher of the Upper Klamath Lake system,” and carrying out their own studies on the fish and their habitat, the tribes had become an obligatory passage point in the world of sucker research (Klamath Tribes 2001a, 2). And as a result, instead of being asked “where’s your science,” the tribes had become askers of this very question. In response to one of many critiques of the biological opinions, for instance, the tribes could write, “These assessments [i.e. critiques] were invariably made by either lay people with no appropriate scientific expertise or by consultants only marginally familiar with the data sets and analyses…” (Klamath Tribes 2001b, 2). In this statement, the tribes asserted a position as a gatekeeper, policing the boundary between those who are able to produce and deploy scientifically legible discourses and those who are not. The statement attempted to transform a lack of epistemic authority into a lack of legal authority under the ESA: if these critics did not possess “appropriate scientific expertise,” after all, could their statements be considered “solely the best scientific…data available?”

While these efforts, on the one hand, increased the Klamath’s legal authority in environmental disputing, they also produced tensions, originating in the complex relationships between what Foreman called “tribal historical knowledge”—something akin to what is often called “indigenous,” “traditional,” and “local” knowledge (Berkes 1999; Whyte 2013)—and what he called “science” as well as the tribes’ ability to produce and deploy these varied discourses about the environment. Indeed, in drawing upon knowledges and knowledge-making practices historically associated with nonnative peoples, the Klamath faced the prospect of being viewed as “inauthentic” (Buchanan and Darian-Smith 2011; Darian-Smith 2004; Garroutte 2003). This, in turn, is often undergirded by the widespread idea that “indigenous” and “scientific” knowledges remain epistemologically distinct and that producers of these knowledge claims remain socially isolated from each other. Indeed, both scientists and nonscientists, as Cruikshank (2001, 390) argues, are prone to caricature the other as irreconcilably different. And while these characterizations belie the internal diversity of each system (Agrawal 1995), such distinctions retain remarkable traction.

In our conversations, however, instead of identifying an unbridgeable divide between indigenous and scientific knowledge, Foreman took the general position that claims made by hunters and fishers were commensurable with those made by scientists (Espiland 1998). Science, he said, became “a bridge of communication between tribal historical knowledge and the contemporary world.” However, this commensurability was not easily achieved. Foreman described the process as a “conversion” from one worldview to another, suggesting the impact and completeness of traversing this boundary. An almost religious transfiguration occurred, in which one would need to change the way one understands and thinks about nature and adopt a vastly different one.

Even with this commensurability, however, there was no illusion about the hierarchies of authority that existed among these knowledges and the political reasons for claiming that someone else does not know the world in an authoritative way? In large part, these hierarchies seemed to be based on the perception of “mainstream society” wherein Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin Paiute statements about the environment were perceived as local, situated stories, while the utterances of scientists were perceived as universal, abstract knowledge. Here, a recurring portrayal of tribal fishers’ and elders’ environmental discourses as anecdotal or “what they call the folklore of the tribes” and scientific discourses as abstract “knowledge” was called to the fore (Agrawal 1995; Nadasdy 2003; Walley 2004; Cruikshank 2005; Corburn 2005). This portrayal clearly had the effect of diminishing the authority of these claims as well as the authority of the person who made them. In response, Foreman rhetorically attempted to remap the boundary between knowledge and anecdote to subsume tribal discourses by referring several times to “tribal historical knowledge” in explicit contrast to nonnatives’ use of the term “folklore.” ⁹

However, simply renaming was not enough to overcome entrenched perception about the (lack of) authority of tribal historical knowledge or to satisfy the discursive expectations of the law. As a result, the knowledge of hunters and fishers had to be made scientifically legible through processes described as “translation” and “confirmation.” At the c’waam ceremony itself, the tribes’ Culture and Heritage Department had similarly said that “science is confirming” tribal knowledge about the fish, for instance, its long life span of up to forty years and the fish’s importance in the region’s ecosystem. These statements clearly linked the delegitimization of a knowledge claim with the subordination of the claimant, highlighting the political stakes at play. Fishers’ and elders’ knowledge of the fish population decline, spawning habitat, and annual migration had to be rearticulated as data through methods recognized as scientific in the field of fisheries biology and in the arena of regulation. Once scientized in these ways, the knowledge of fishers and elders gained some immunity from characterizations as narrative, and also became, in its configuration as scientifically legible statements, acceptable to the formal–rational bureaucracy of environmental management (Cruikshank 2000; Nadasdy 2003).

While the metaphor of confirmation at first seemed to recapitulate a familiar hierarchy, in which science has the power to validate or invalidate the other, the idea of confirmation also contained a subversive element as well. Indeed, it implicitly asserted that indigenous knowledges—“what we knew forever”—preceded scientific ones. In this framing, confirmation was simply a process of making preexisting tribal knowledges usable in the context of nontribal institutions of governance, suggesting that scientists were achieving today the understandings that have long been already known by Native Americans.

These new juxtapositions of and interrelationships between the Klamath’s knowledge as hunters and fishers and their knowledge as scientists raise the prospect of an indigenous identity that belies conceptions of static, autochthonous traditions, or bodies of knowledge, just as it destabilizes the prospects of a monolithic science insulated from politics and culture. As Clifford (2001) notes, portrayals of indigenous peoples as a priori and outside of colonial society overlook contemporary and historical cultural hybridity. Rather, indigenous peoples exist at a “fraught borderland…between indigenous and diasporic affiliations and identities” (Clifford 2001, 470), where they necessarily adopt aspects of both. The Klamath’s negotiation of this position, and their ability to produce and use diverse vocabularies in making claims about their environments, has indeed resulted in “unexpected…ensembles” (p. 487) of knowledge and new relationships among claims and claimants.

These assemblages directly challenge static notions what constitutes “indigenous” knowledge and tradition or for that matter “science.” While native peoples “may be forced to speak in uncharacteristic ways” about their world if they wish to be heard (Cruikshank 2000, xv), these vocabularies, while new or different, are no less “authentically” indigenous because “cultural forms will always be made, unmade, and remade” (Clifford 2001, 479). In the context of environmental governance in the Klamath Basin, it seems that science has become essential in ensuring the continuation of a Native American culture and that the same Native American culture is essential to the production of scientific knowledge.

Conclusion

Which fish are the suckers? Spirits, a source of food, a data point in a population curve, or a species (itself a contested scientific category; Shrader-Frechette and McCoy 1994; National Research Council 1995) listed as endangered under federal law? In fact, they are all these things, boundary objects coproduced by the intersecting discourses and practices of numerous groups, over which none can claim a monopoly on knowledge regarding their “nature.”

In this article, I’ve argued that people articulate different bodies of knowledge to make claims about their environments, complicating the perception of hard-and-fast relationships between a speaker’s identity and his or her knowledge about the world. Furthermore, the boundaries between groups historically associated with certain bodies of knowledge—regulators with legal knowledge, Native Americans with indigenous knowledge, and ecologists with scientific knowledge—are increasingly ill-defined in practice, adding further dynamism to the articulation of knowledge and identity.

Boundary objects such as the sucker serve as tangible nodes of intersection among different discourses. These discourses are themselves assemblages, as indigenous peoples flexibly produce and deploy a wide range of vocabularies, mediated by structuring phenomenon such as environmental laws. Animals and other such points of intersection may aid in further conceptualizing the relationships among seemingly distinct “types” of knowledge. In the Klamath Basin, people from differing but overlapping social worlds produce and draw on differing but overlapping knowledge claims, contradicting the assumption that particular people know the world only, or even primarily, in particular ways.

At the same time, the scientization of environmental laws has had the effect of shaping the articulations of groups wishing to make authoritative claims; those who do not speak in the authoritative discourse are delegitimized in disputes. The question, “how do you speak authoritatively about the natural world?” is therefore not only at the center of disputes about environmental knowledge and discourse but also central to conflicts about environmental action. Efforts to bound or draw distinctions between discourses—through assertions that something is, or is not, “scientific” or “indigenous” environmental knowledge—are not only epistemological statements but also political acts that can both reinforce and challenge unequal power relations among actors.