ABSTRACT
My James Bay Cree fishery did not fit this model at all. These fishers were far from the helpless actors in the Greek tragedy. They decided among themselves on the (unwritten) rules of conduct of the fishery, mutually agreed upon; they communicated and used social sanctions where necessary to get compliance among members. The Cree did not think of these as ‘rules’ but simply the ‘way things were done’. Also of a great deal of interest to me, the locally-designed fishing system was fundamentally different from biological management systems in use in commercial fisheries in subarctic Canada. Commercial fisheries were usually managed by fishing gear and mesh size restrictions, season and area closures (for example, during spawning), and catch quotas. By contrast, Cree subsistence fishers used the most effective gear available, the mix of mesh sizes that gave the highest possible catch per unit of effort by area and by season, and deliberately concentrated their fishing effort on aggregations of the most efficiently exploitable fish.
