Darcey Evans

I research salmon farming in the coastal waters of Washington State and British Columbia. I particularly question how a salmon virus associated with the farms has become entangled with the protection of Indigenous rights and territories and I trace how, amidst tense state and scientific calibrations that struggle to determine the pathogenicity of the virus, First Nations are actively creating alternative virus surveillance and management regimes. I look to the lives, bodies, and movements of salmon to ask how aquaculture and its pathogens might transform the salmon migration route and contribute to newly emerging toxic geographies of settler-colonialism. I hope to provide space for the bodies of salmon to tell stories of livability, encounter, and colonial entanglement in a watery borderland between settler-states.

I have been involved with salmon conservation and advocacy for much of my life. Raised in the UK and the US, I am of British-Karuk heritage and a member of Quartz Valley Indian Reservation. Water and salmon stewardship hold personal significance and influence my educational and career aspirations. I spend as much time in, near, or on water as possible.