Losing Touch with Herring in the Rappahannock River

This essay on the historical foodways and cultural traditions of herring–human kinship in Virginia is part of the Companion Species series, which investigates a complex, interconnected, and co-constituted web of beyond-human relating. Series editors: Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Kuhelika Ghosh, Ellie Kincaid, and Bri Meyer.

This essay stems from a research collaboration between ecologists Matthew Ogburn and Henry Leggett from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and Mara Dicenta Vilker, ongoing since 2022. Along with undergraduate researchers Malvika Shrimali, Emily Johnson, Elena McCullough, Micah Dill, and Luke Sahli, this team has brought herring restoration into dialogue with fishing ecological knowledges through oral histories with fishers.

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The lives of people and herring along the Rappahannock River, in areas often characterized as “rural Virginia,” have long been shaped by migration, colonization, and industrial extraction. For millennia, herring were a vital food source for Indigenous Peoples and later supported Black and settler fishing communities. Their stories reveal herring to be interspecies companions cultivating foodways and traditions.

However, industrial fishing, pollution, and dam construction since the late nineteenth century drastically reduced herring returns. As J.T. Roane notes, river privatization during the Jim Crow era transformed these waterscapes by displacing Black and Indigenous relations and turning autonomous labor into precarious employment, all while depleting river oxygen and severing aquatic life futures.

Regulations to prevent herring population declines in Chesapeake Bay began in the 1970s. After banning gill nets like the one pictured above, a full moratorium on herring fishing (excluding recognized Sovereign Nations) was enacted in 1992. Fishers experienced the ban as severing ties with herring, “killing” shared worlds. While they resented being blamed for the collapse—pointing instead to pollution, industrial fleets, and invasive species—they mostly expressed powerlessness and despair. The fish were no longer in the Bay as they once were.

In April 2024, as herring continued their river run, the team from William & Mary joined researchers from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Rappahannock Tribe in their efforts to restore the fish. Adding another layer of stress to the herrings’ journeys, the authors donned waders and entered the creek with old, handmade dip nets borrowed from fishers, placing intercepted herring into water-filled buckets and passing them to the team outside. On a table, each fish was measured, sexed, and tagged with a small incision in its neck, allowing the team to track them and investigate why populations remain low, despite dam removals and fishing bans.

Herring Companions: Past Currents, Present Ties

Although not endangered, herring are considered a species of concern. River herring refers to two species: alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus) and blueback herring (Alosa aestivalis). As anadromous fish, they leave the ocean and migrate up toward rivers and ponds each spring, returning to the same spawning places each year through a physically demanding journey that leaves signs of wear on their bodies. Not all herring join the run; those blocked by dams or stocking programs have altered their migratory paths and now inhabit distinct ecological niches.

With over 90 percent of their historical population lost, landings dropped from 140 million pounds in 1969 to under one million by 2006. This measure of loss—which reduces herring to pounds and life to data—treats waters and fish as exotic Others rather than kin, as Zoe Todd notes, which sustains colonizing and commodifying relationships with them, as Max Liboiron argues. Still, measuring, quantifying, and tracking herring are precarious ways through which people attempt to confront loss.

The research team was also curious to learn from fishers: “How are they experiencing loss? Can their knowledge inform restoration?” With these questions, the team began documenting fishers’ ecological knowledge through oral histories in 2022. Unlike crabs or oysters, herring do not enjoy public appeal, prompting researchers to emphasize their ecological and cultural significance.

Yet these discussions with fishers revealed that herring sustain not only foodways and traditions but also interspecies companionship. Herring companionship differs from that of pets or aquarium fish. Donna Haraway traces the term “companion” to “cum panis”—“with bread”—suggesting that companion animals are those who stop being eaten and sit at the table, forming other than utilitarian relationships.

But what does companionship look like outside private homes and fenced yards, and instead in rivers, places experienced through migration, scattering, and collective rhythms that exceed the requirement of individualization, tagging, or naming? Haraway also reminds us that companionship is not just about sharing a home, a table, or a bed; it encompasses entangled histories, obligations, and responses. What form does this entanglement take within riparian relations that disrupt property-bound kinship?

Eggs, Generations, and the Loss of Touch

On the creek banks, a fish biologist mixes herring eggs and milt in a steel bowl, fertilizing them. A group of fishers, who once caught the fish and roe in vast numbers, watch and comment from folding chairs. In the hatchery, she swirls the eggs in McDonald jars and later in the lab, marks their otoliths—the ear bones behind the brain—with a chemical bath to track future movements. “They’re still here, you know?” she reflects, watching herring push upstream or waiting for the moment they “eye up” at her, enduring despite it all.  

Herring eggs have long been central to human-herring relationships along the Rappahannock. Female herring scatter sticky eggs while the male “bucks” search for them to release sperm. Moving into “schools,” herring reproduction is partially shaped by currents, migration, and dispersal more than family units, yet also by the legacies of settler property and kinship sedimented in Virginia’s waterscapes.

On riverbanks and in kitchens, herring roe was a shared substance, fried into cakes, scrambled with eggs, or canned as a delicacy. What wasn’t eaten fertilized fields—guts and heads buried to nourish corn and soil microbes.

With the fishing moratorium, people no longer touch herring and roe as they once did. Roe-filled buckets, fish guts in garden beds, and spring celebrations have vanished, replaced by growing narratives of loss. Many frame this loss in terms of broken generational legacies and disappearing traditions like “dipping” with nets each spring, a practice described as “a lot of fun, a lot of good eating.”

Those who grew up in the 1960s recall setting low nets across creeks, waiting overnight as herring filled the screens, and then salting, storing, and selling the fish. Even as salt fish became unnecessary with preservation technologies—and stigmatized as unhealthy—people kept fishing, not out of need, but to sustain a way of life that, they recall, tied together dispersed rural communities.

Today, fishers try to preserve tradition by bringing grandchildren to creeks to fish for other species, watch, wait, and remember. Old, unused dip nets still evoke memories of ancestors weaving them and the joy of fishing and eating together. Knowledge and tastes once embodied are now recounted rather than lived: “Herring to me has always been something that comes in the little can that my grandfather ate,” a younger conservationist told us.

Alliances with conservation actors through research, advocacy, and land easements have given these fishers’ stories a collective voice in a context that once criminalized their past. Within normative rural Virginia, narratives of generational memory and traditions make herring’s loss legible to state and conservation actors for whom these histories contain not only knowledges, but also help justify restoration efforts by proving herring’s provision of food and cultural services.

But another critical loss is the erosion of embodied, more-than-human relations with herring—bodily proximity, messy encounters, gutting, and riparian interactions. Many link declining community bonds to the detachment from fish, whether through loss of access to fishing or lack of hands-on experience.

“Fishing immerses you in touching gross, slimy things and learning where fish are and how water works,” one of the few women we interviewed explained. These intergenerational narratives gain further nuance when we include the fish biologist—fertilizing eggs under the fishers’ gaze—as she engages in a method of more-than-human, techno-sexual reproduction that unsettles normative, racialized ideals of kinship and generational transmission.

Re-storying Companionship Beyond Property and Individual Recognition

Herring–fisher relations are not purely extractive, as we learned from a man in his sixties who identifies as a fisher, born and raised along the Rappahannock. He recalls “fooling on water” from a young age—helping older men set nets, hauling fish, and learning the tides until he fished independently by sixteen, spending every free moment on the river.

In the 1990s, as markets declined, he remained committed to the river, remarking, “Only if my wife got on me too bad, I’d go get a real job somewhere for a while.” Now, with her retired, he takes on what he calls “real jobs” more often—on a fishing boat, driving trucks, working on a farm, or doing research—jobs governed by corporate schedules rather than (also industrialized) rhythms of fish and river.

This fisher’s alliance with herring and their specters reflects the precarity of extractive, commodified relations and a refusal to fully adopt capitalist rhythms. Like him, many fishers today feel disoriented—not only because they can no longer pass down traditional fishing knowledges and technologies to their grandchildren, but also because the absence of large herring runs has reshaped their sense of place and community, human and other-than-human. At its core, the fishing moratorium is not just a ban—it reorders intimate multispecies relationships.

Herring–human companionship invites us to rethink rural settler Virginia by considering more-than-human bodily intimacies—joy, pleasure, fertilization, regeneration, and refusals. While mediated by histories of property, extraction, and settler reproduction, these relationships also exceed them through multispecies kinship. While acknowledging that multispecies relations are never neutral or symmetrical, herring–people’s interspecies desires, touches, and annual encounters help us reimagine homecoming not as a return to a static “house,” but as “rivercoming.”

Indigenous peoples and scholars have long acknowledged the complexity of kinship with nonhumans, who can be both sacred and consumable, food and kin. Kaitlin Reed shows this tension in the case of salmon among many tribes in Northern California, and Nick Reo and Kyle Whyte explore similar questions in the hunting moralities of citizens of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians.

Along this vein, Haraway’s provocation that companion species “eat at the table” rather than being eaten does not imply they are never consumed, but that they cross a threshold, no longer objects or pounds but partners. Similarly, eating with or eating herring is not a strictly oppositional act but an expression of the precarious boundaries nonhuman animals inhabit, as Iván Sandoval-Cervantes and Rigoberto Reyes Sánchez have argued.

Likewise, herring traverse realms where being eaten does not preclude companionship—what Haraway figures as “eating at the table.” Yet the table metaphor conveys more than biopolitical relations; it evokes an image of a wooden table in a living room, enclosing family structures, property regimes, and normative kinship.

In contrast to the static wooden table of a private home or the chipboard tables of stakeholder meetings, the river is fluid, with porous property boundaries, where kinship is shaped not only by biology but by migration cycles and more-than-human regeneration. The safety of the nuclear house, which, as Kim TallBear notes, enforces “compulsory settler sex, family, and nation,” gives way here to perhaps less normative relations and different forms of risk, pollution, and toxicity. Herring arrive and depart each year as collectives, defying individual tagging to the point of requiring acoustic telemetry to follow them, challenging also the need for a name or a face to be recognized as an other.

If restoration is more than an ecological project—if it involves rebuilding relationships—then herring are not merely a species; they are kin. But what kinship is being re-storied when ideas of generational loss seem to overdetermine how conservation narrates herring–people relations, even as their companionship exceeds settler-colonial logics of legacy, property, and reproduction?

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Featured image: Black fishermen hauling river herring at the end of nineteenth century. Image by Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1879-1880, digitalized by Hathi Trust, 2017.

Mara Dicenta Vilker is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Integrative Conservation at William & Mary. She studies the production of environmental knowledges as they intersect with race, memory, and multispecies justice, with fieldwork in Argentina and collaborations in Virginia (US). Her work appears in anthropology, STS, and environmental journals, and she is currently completing her first book on invasion biology and multispecies repair in Austral Patagonia. Website. Contact.

Elena McCullough is a senior at William & Mary, studying Integrative Conservation and Marine Science. Her main interests include people-focused environmental research, marine conservation, and science and technology studies. She is currently conducting ethnographic research on the relationship between microbiologists and the bacteria H. pylori in a laboratory setting. Contact.

Micah Dill is a junior at the College of William & Mary studying Integrative Conservation and Philosophy. He spent the last year researching oral histories related to river herring in the Rappahannock River in Virginia. At William & Mary, Micah is involved with the Institute for Integrative Conservation as a researcher in the Conservation GIS Lab while also working on a honors thesis about the philosophy of nature. He is interested in how local communities can be better involved in conservation. Contact.