Vincent J. Roscigno Julia Miller Cantzler The Ohio State University
This study will examine and compare the historical and contemporary processes through which aboriginal fishing rights have been negotiated in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, where three unique patterns have emerged and persist. This study has two primary aims. The first is to highlight the social mechanisms through which ethnic identity and culture are strategically wielded to resist forces of colonial assimilation. The second is to reveal the broader processes through which identity-based movements can affect structural changes in the dominant society. This comparative historical study will be facilitated by the use of event structure analysis (ESA). With the assistance of the ETHNO software package, temporally sensitive causal narratives will be constructed, which will detail both the specific as well as the abstract and theoretically-driven processes that produced the three divergent patterns of fishing rights. As demonstrated in recent studies of social movements, ESA permits a deeper, more systematic analysis of the temporality and contingency of events than is typical for historical analyses employing narrative alone. Interview and archival data will be collected at law libraries, indigenous law centers and indigenous fisheries commissions in Wellington and Auckland (New Zealand), Sydney and Canberra, NSW (Australia), Cairns, Queensland (Australia), Boulder, Colorado, Portland, Oregon and Olympia, Washington. This project will advance sociological knowledge in several ways. First, the analyses will illuminate more general sociological discourses on the legal construction of race and the nature of racial and ethnic categories and meaning-systems. Second, the research provides a unique opportunity to expose the dynamic processes through which cultural meaning-systems both affect action and materially impact existing power structures. Finally, the study will fill a void in the social movement literature by specifically linking conceptions of political process with seemingly dichotomous notions of "collective identity" and "culture."
This study will have on-the-ground, policy implications for indigenous and state actors currently embroiled in struggles for control over natural and cultural resources. By exposing the evolving power dynamics and structural constraints that shape indigenous-state relations in these three national contexts, this study will reveal the contextual opportunities and obstacles for policy-level resolutions of conflicts over indigenous fishing rights, as well as other sovereignty-based claims of aboriginal people. It is hoped that this information will help dismantle the barriers that inhibit the achievement of mutually satisfactory resolutions of these ongoing disputes.
