Fish of the Future: Genetically Engineered Salmon and Settler Colonial Science

Abstract:This article takes up the recent controversy over genetically engineered (GE) salmon and the FDA's approval of these fast-growing "frankenfish" for human consumption. While many believe that GE aquaculture plays a necessary role in the future of food security (especially in a world threatened by increasing climate instability), Indigenous communities throughout the world have raised concerns about the impacts of GE technology. At the heart of the issue is a clash between settler scientific values (including risk-based assessment, colonial right of discovery, and intellectual property) and Indigenous epistemologies, which take a more comprehensive approach to the complex relationships between the environment and those inhabiting it. Weaving together issues of ecology, climate change, and tribal sovereignty, this paper historicizes the GE salmon struggle within global processes of colonialism and resource extraction, and troubles the arguments GE fish are "unnatural." Such designations rely on particular ideas about nature, property, and technology that reinforce settler scientific values. I argue that rejections of AquAdvantage salmon rooted in Indigenous epistemologies enable a more sophisticated critique of settler science, and are thus able to open new lines of inquiry into what our relationship with nature can and should look like in a settler colonial context.