Naval, Shipping and Fisheries Exhibition

Transcription

This is the New Bedford Working Front Festival, and it was started about 10 years ago by a folklorist, who thought, it was time for people to pay attention to what the fishing industry of New Bedford is about, and get to know not only the kinds of fishing, and the kinds of gear, and all the businesses that are associated with the fishing industry. I'm an anthropologist by training. And I lucked into learning about the fishing industry when I was a graduate student. I spent a summer going out on the boats, the day boats, out of Provincetown, and it was fantastic. I'd go down at 4 o'clock in the morning and hail a captain going out, and I'd say, "Can I go out with you for the day?" (Laughs). And you know, I was just a graduate student, and they'd say sure. Everybody always said yes. So that gave me the vocabulary for understanding at least the very basic information about the fishing industry. One of the things that summer that I learned about was the marketing, and how they are really price takers. They have to accept whatever is offered by the buyers, because they have a perishable crop. Once I finished my Ph.D. I got a call from the one social scientist at the time who worked for the National Marine Fisheries Service. And he said, "Would you be willing to work on social impact assessments of some of the regulations that are being changed in the Northeast fisheries?" So I didn't know what I was getting into, but I said "Sure!", and I think that my work was one of the first social impact assessments in the country, even though the Magnuson Act, which is the act that controls fisheries regulations, required social impacts assessments, along with their economic impacts and environmental impacts. As time progressed, I was given a lot of freedom to develop my expertise and that expertise has been focused pretty much on fishing communities, and how they're affected by changes in regulations. But not only changes in regulations. There's also the whole environmental affect, which people do recognize now, and changes in marketing, and that's one of the things that I have become more involved with lately is a push towards community supported fisheries and direct marketing. One of the things I didn't mention is that I got my Master's in folklore, so oral histories have always been of interest to me. So when Laura Orleans, who is the director of the festival, she started it, learned that I had been a folklorist and knew that I was involved with the fishing industry, and I'd met her a few times. She encouraged me to get started with...what they wanted to do was collect oral histories of people from all walks of the fishing industry. Again, not just the fishermen, but also the processors, and also the lumpers. One other thing that the festival does is it has drawn people from Alaska, and California, and the Gulf Coast, and the Carolinas, and brings these people, some of them are performers, they are musicians, poets, fisher poets... actually, they even brought people from Norway, and I think Ireland, and certainly Portugal, because New Bedford has a big Portuguese tradition, as well as a Norwegian tradition in the industry. People have said that the Portuguese have been traditionally the ground fishermen here and the Norwegians have been the scallopers. And a long time ago I can remember interviewing some of the Norwegians, and they said, "We're educating our kids out of the fishery". So, in a way, part of the effort for the festival is to make sure that the young people realize that there's still industry, there's still a lot of value, to working in this industry, and it's helpful, it's really helpful to the country. I mean it's part of keeping food security. I mean, you can go off into all kinds of tangents, but it is really valuable industry. There are historians that talk about the importance of knowing the past in order to be able to face the future. And to see what choices were made in the way fish are managed, and the way families decide to continue fishing or not to, and that it isn't until you understand that that you can begin to make the choices to fulfill the vision that you might have of what a community might look like. I think it's really important for people to look at our world now, and recognize that although there is change, people still need jobs. And they need jobs where they can feel proud of themselves, and they can be happy to go do their jobs. And something like the fishing industry, which is providing a tremendous value, I think is one of those jobs that people can be proud of. For a lot of us, especially young people, we're so used to going to the grocery store and buying whatever they buy, whether it's an apple or a piece of fish, it's cellophane-wrapped. So they never stop to think where it came from, and how did it get there. And it's that chain that's really important to us. And it's something that people really need to be aware of. And buying local, supporting your family fishing, as well as the others, I think is really important.