Sea-Run Fish: Cycles of Abundance and Resilience
“I always dreamed that someday the dams would be removed but I never thought in my lifetime I would ever see ... a section being free flowing as my ancestors experienced it.”
For more information about the Water (nə̀pi) Song, please visit penobscotnation.org.
For millennia, the 349-mile Mousam River watershed supported thriving migrations of sea-run fish. Each spring, Atlantic salmon, shad, alewife, blueback herring, eels, lamprey, tomcod, and sea-run brook trout traveled upstream to spawn. These fish nourished the ecosystem and sustained Wabanaki peoples who lived seasonally along the coast for thousands of years. Mousam Falls was once a place of extraordinary abundance.
Sea-run fish are vital to watershed health and diversity. They carry ocean nutrients upstream, regulate ecosystem balance, and feed countless species. Alewives, mátamehs in Penobscot and siqonomeq in Passamaquoddy, are a keystone species essential to wildlife from seals and cod to otters and bears. Just about everything eats alewives.
Alewives —image courtesy of John Burrows
Colonial settlement and industrialization disrupted this balance. From the 1600s onward, settlers built dams to power sawmills and later textile factories, cutting off ancestral fish runs and Wabanaki access to traditional food sources. Pollution, habitat loss, and non-native species further depleted fish populations.
Today, the Mousam is Maine’s largest watershed without a fish passage. Spring fish runs can still be observed in the unimpeded stretch of the Mousam below the Kesslen dam, and allow us to imagine what a fully restored river might look like. An analysis done by the Wells Reserve estimates that dam removal and new fishways could bring back more than one million sea-run fish each year. Indigenous-led restoration projects, such as on the Penobscot River, offer a powerful model for ecological renewal and cultural healing, and reminding us of the work still to be done.
“At one time salmon abounded in the Mousam river, and they continued to be taken in great quantities until about the year 1760, when man had so obstructed the stream that it became unfitted for even a temporary habitation. Bass and shad were also very plenty in Mousam river... But soon after the settlement was initiated at Kennebunk, the bass came to the conclusion that it was unsafe to attempt navigation in this river, and discontinued their visits to it. ”
Reflection Questions
How do we understand population health and decide how many fish to take?
What differences might there be between Wabanaki and settler approaches to determining the harvest of sea-run fish, and why?
What would it look like to center and uplift Indigenous stewardship in continued efforts to heal the land and water? How might Land Back movements facilitate these efforts?
This research was compiled as part of the Just History Walk: Lives Between Two Rivers which took place on November 8, 2025. For more information about this walk, click here. For more research related to this area, click on the tags below. To download a hi-res version of the poster below for educational use, please contact where@atlanticblackbox.com.
poster design by Meadow Dibble