Paper short abstract:

Using salmon and their movement as a lens, the paper examines the role of inter-species dialogue in disrupting geographically naive approaches to Islands as entities, and the potential of an ongoing relational approach to the study of assembleges involving Islands.

Paper long abstract:

Studies of Islands have emerged as a unique and vital focus of research over the last couple decades. Works like Hau'ofa's Our Sea of Islands have moved us quite systematically towards the study of Islands, underlining the dynamic connectedness between terrestrial and marine environments, and between individual islands and elsewhere. By tracing the many and varied ways that salmon connect ocean, island, and other land forms in an ongoing inter-species dialogue, we can move the discourse one step further, and dissolve Islands into an interspecies dialogue made in movement. Such a strategy opens up some insights on the connectedness of coastal and interior communities, islands and other actors/actants, on global, regional, and local scales. Salmon have traveled the rivers from inland to sea for eons; salmon were one of the fish "acclimatized" into new geographical setting by European colonial powers; even more recently, the growth in Atlantic Salmon aqua-culture has further complicated these already complex connections. In and around islands salmon, variously understood as Indigenous, invasive, acclimatized and naturalized have transformed both local ecologies, and the ways these ecologies are linked to the rest of the Globe in terms of biology, politics and economy. The different manifestations of salmon give rise to differently configured assemblages of islands, oceans, and rivers. Integrating multi-species ethnographies into our conceptual toolset, these assemblages give rise to new ways of thinking, most urgently by pushing the geography of Islands into an assemblage of overlapping (serial) ontologies that emerge (become) as ecosystems themselves transform over time.