Print version available at University of Washington Suzzalo library, 3rd Floor, History of the Americas collection: E51 .C15 v.5
Samuel Alfred Barrett (1879-1965) was the first person awarded a PhD in the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Born to a family of European American settlers, Barrett’s father operated a string of general merchandise stores in the United States, where he first came into contact with American Indian communities as customers for tinned salmon. After studying anthropology with Franz Boas and Alfred Kroeber, Barrett conducted field anthropology in the Klamath Basin region across southern Oregon and Northern California, documenting aspects of Klamath, Modoc, Yurok, Karok, Hupa cultures, including their fishing practices. In this report, Barrett describes the fishing technologies created and employed by the indigenous communities of the Klamath Basin, including their handmade boats, handmade nets, division of labor, and strategies for capturing wild fish from the river and lake waters of the Klamath region. An excerpt from page 20 (p.250) describes the traditional techniques used by Tribes to capture river sucker fish: “Still another form of net is used in the smaller streams, is a dip net with a pole and circular hoop. This is ordinarily used from the bank, but may be also used from a canoe. It is employed in taking of small fish such as suckers.” As publicly funded research, this 1910 document supports Klamath Tribes’ centuries-long claims about their fishing methods, territories and aquatic species relied upon to feed their communities, at a quiet moment between the signing of their treaty with the US government (1864), the formation of the Bureau of Reclamation to manage waters of Western US States (1902), when sucker fish stocks were placed on the Endangered Species Act (1988), and habitat restoration was initiated by the US Bureau of Reclamation, in the form of dam removal (actualized in 2024), to restore tribal river foodways protected by the Tribes' treaty rights. Barrett’s study, while not written by members of the Tribes, is part of a larger corpus of evidence that supports Tribes’ own oral histories, about skillfully capturing sucker fish along the Klamath River waterways, with nets of their own making, “since time immemorial” – an argument crucial to and repeated throughout court rulings on Indian water rights in Oregon and California, at the Ninth Circuit Court and US Supreme Court levels in the Twenty First century.
