Losing Touch with Herring in the Rappahannock River

https://edgeeffects.net/human-herring-relations/

Excerpt: “Herring–human companionship invites us to rethink rural settler Virginia by considering more-than-human bodily intimacies—joy, pleasure, fertilization, regeneration, and refusals. While mediated by histories of property, extraction, and settler reproduction, these relationships also exceed them through multispecies kinship. While acknowledging that multispecies relations are never neutral or symmetrical, herring–people’s interspecies desires, touches, and annual encounters help us reimagine homecoming not as a return to a static “house,” but as “rivercoming.”

Indigenous peoples and scholars have long acknowledged the complexity of kinship with nonhumans, who can be both sacred and consumable, food and kin. Kaitlin Reed shows this tension in the case of salmon among many tribes in Northern California, and Nick Reo and Kyle Whyte explore similar questions in the hunting moralities of citizens of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians.

Along this vein, Haraway’s provocation that companion species “eat at the table” rather than being eaten does not imply they are never consumed, but that they cross a threshold, no longer objects or pounds but partners. Similarly, eating with or eating herring is not a strictly oppositional act but an expression of the precarious boundaries nonhuman animals inhabit, as Iván Sandoval-Cervantes and Rigoberto Reyes Sánchez have argued.”