A New Deal for River People

At the start of the twentieth century, a diverse group of Americans relied on rivers for their autonomy.Fifty years later, most of these communities had either disappeared or had their relationship with their waterway dramatically reshaped.River people obtained some subsistence and distance from a state that rarely represented their interests.Across the South, formerly enslaved people and their descendants squatted, sharecropped, or owned land in the bottomlands of rivers where fish and game supplemented their livelihoods.In northern New England, members of the Penobscot Nation lived on Indian Island, fished in the Penobscot River, and worked in jobs such as guiding, basketmaking, or the canoe industry.In the arid Southwest, the Cocopas, "River People," moved and farmed across national borders on the Colorado River.And in the upper Midwest, the mostly white poor riverboat families who preferred to be called "the river people" to "river rats," followed the weather and seasons along the Mississippi and its tributaries. 1 No one has captured the exact number of river people living in the United States, partly because for many of these communities, avoiding the government (whether federal, state, or local) served as a core rationale for their location on or along a river.The existence of river people fueled many state efforts to remake rivers, but their persistence and protest continue to shape ecological, political, and cultural life in the modern United States. 2 Historians have long noted the ruptures between communities and rivers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which common resources were consolidated by a more powerful elite.This ran along three main lines of overfishing, dam building, and pollution.In 1788, for example, the residents of Brunswick, in what was then the District of Maine, petitioned the Massachusetts Senate and House of Representatives due to the use of large nets out of season.They argued, "the Law as it now stands gives one part of the Community a privelidg sic over the rest." 3 Their claims went unheeded by the legislature, and by the early nineteenth century, lawyers and entrepreneurs had entrenched rivers as engines of industry and outlets for waste over any other consideration of rivers as a common good. 4 Despite declining fish runs and no