Cree Fishing Practices as Adaptive Management

Some of the early interest regarding traditional knowledge in fisheries started with lagoon management systems ( Chapter 3 ). There was work going on also in the Gulf of Maine lobster fisheries (e.g., Acheson 2003 ), the Canadian North, and notably in Oceania, given the detailed findings regarding fisher knowledge ( Johannes 1981 , 1998 ). By the mid-2000s, there were enough cases to publish a UNESCO compendium on fishers' knowledge ( Haggan et al. 2006 ). However, the importance of this knowledge ( Silvano et al. 2023 ) and of small-scale fisheries in general, was not fully appreciated until relatively recently ( Basurto et al. 2025 ; Berkes and Franz 2025 ).