Passage Circa 1988
But with constant fishing, the sizes of the average alata reef fish rapidly diminish. The ice chest is not yet due in Port Adam Passage, yet a group, including me, paddle out in small dugout canoes, following the large dugout of the net owner/specialist bearing the large small-meshed nylon net. He leads us to the first of several alata he has selected for today’s harvest. He realizes it will take more than one site to catch enough to literally feed villagers, today’s goal.
At the first alata, most of the men jump down into the water, churning legs, treading water, stepping on and inadvertently breaking corals in the deeper spots while trying to keep heads above water. They anchor the net’s belly with the nito--the rope running to a stone which holds the belly to the bottom. And the spirit bird float is set to mark the spot. Eagerly, they set the net and draw both sides to surround the alata. Then everyone slowly walks the net walls into a tightening circle around the frantic fish.
Back on the beach, the catch is "shared out" into piles, one for each who worked the net. The net specialist/owner supervises the distribution of piles, allotting roughly equivalent sizes, types, and numbers of fish. The net specialist/owner allocates himself a bigger share. The average share has dropped to four kg of fish, like today.
A little boy and girl are squatting in the wet sand near the people offloading the canoes. They are playing at fish distribution, carefully arranging the brilliant tiny juveniles into flipping rows as their relatives deal out edible sizes.
Villagers willingly sacrifice these baby fishes who cannot escape the mesh. They literally see how a quarter of their catch would escape through changing to a net with larger mesh size. The Fisheries Department sells nylon nets in various legal mesh sizes, but there is no enforcement of mesh size regulations. The Lau do not weigh how their mesh size risks decimating alata reef populations. Nor do they consider returning to limited alata net-fishing, given the lure of cash from the ice chest. Besides, the Lau hold other beliefs as to why alata fishing is crashing. They insist absolutely that there is no connection between increased fishing effort and decreased catches.
Overfishing is not one of their concepts. Local perspectives on the causes of current catch failure are rooted in the custom political, religious, and social powers embedded in the alata system. The Lau can fault the spiritual powers of the nylon net and alata to explain scanty catches.
They are staunch syncretic believers in Jesus who resides at the head of their pantheon of ancestors and spirits. As in dolphin hunting, they blame individuals among themselves who can offend the all-important spirits credited with bringing in the fish. Certainly, the Lau condemn their “bush” rivals for harming the catch. They tell me how the bush men are fishing daily inside the Passage which frightens spirits and drives reef fish into deeper places.
In Honiara, I discuss management and the potential of the alata system with the top British fisheries officer. He says, "The Fisheries Department realizes there’s a lot of village fishing with the illegal mesh sizes. And we know that villagers don't leave time for reef recuperation. But we are lacking funding for a management mission and enforcement."
His solution, as Fisheries, is as predictable as the reef net-fishing situation, itself. Fisheries will bank on an economic model of diminishing returns that relies on a hands-off market solution. He predicts, "Villagers will stop overfishing once they cannot fill the ice chest enough to make it economically viable to send to Fanalei."
Reef management that reckons on an economic crash to control fisheries is a common pattern worldwide. Yet it is unsophisticated, lacking confidence in developing grassroots involvement in self-management. This is especially the case where there already exists the tempting reef-controlling alata system imbedded in the fishing culture.
Fanalei's national elite, for their part, are not talking about reef conservation or management planning for their alata, let alone approaching Fisheries for advice. They do not want to debate the frailty of reef ecosystems and sustainability, although a few of them already intellectually understand the concepts of marine ecology. Rather, as an elite clan group, they are torn over whether to ask their chief as steward of the alata to step in and reinstitute custom reef rights and the adi for the sake of reef survival. At home on Fanalei, villagers discount any ecological consequences of their intensive fishing for cash on the alata.
At this point, nobody contemplates how to use the alata system for reef conservation and management as stocks dwindle and seem to disappear.
Now the highly destructive fishing practice of gill-netting is spreading inside the Passage with the use of individually-owned and run little nylon gill-nets The Lau are buying up these illegal small-mesh nets second-hand from other villages. They are starting to set these smaller nets all around the Passage, but outside the alata. These “European robber nets” are a new causal factor for declining reef catches and are causing major social change because of their low cost and ease of solo use outside the custom alata system.
One man can set his own gill-net, anchoring it in place, and later hauling it in by himself. Even a relatively cash-poor person is able to purchase a used one for his nuclear family. As the net owner, he can place it almost anywhere in the Passage except in an alata, without special skill or permission. Others outside his nuclear family borrow the gill-net in return for a share of the catch, keeping it active in the water, ensnaring random fish by their gills.
The owner can leave his gill-net anchored on a reef overnight and longer. He and even his female family members including children can paddle out, don goggles to remove the catch, and leave the net in place if it seems productive.
Women's blood from childbirth and moon cycles in Malaita harbors overwhelming custom strength to harm spirits, especially those who bring in the fish. Note that ethnographers from European and American male-dominated cultures began calling the common global phenomena female "pollution". However, it is important to change jargon and emphasis. Female "powers" is a far more accurate way to reframe the phenomena since it is based on custom fear of female procreative blood's spiritual powers rather than on it being conceived of as dirty/foul.
Female procreative powers cannot injure the efficacy of the non-traditional nylon gill-nets which are outside the influence of custom skills and spirits, impersonally manufactured, and seen as foraging/collecting rather than as fishing/attracting. The novel gill-netting is being labeled "foraging" instead of fishing, foraging classically practiced by women and unmarried girls, who seek shellfish and octopus.
Given female powers, it was taboo for women to go custom net-fishing, or fish with the large nylon net that is being stored with the bird spirit. Yet as the alata yields less fish, unmarried young women, like me, are permitted to join the frequent net teams if there are not enough men. Overall, there is more leeway for unmarried women to participate as a team share shrinks, and as spirits are thought to abandon a fishery or not be a part of it.