Mr. Joseph D. Jewel (b. 1957) is deputy director of the Office of Marine Fisheries at the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources. He was born in 1959 on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the small fishing community in east Biloxi known as the Point. His parents were Mr. Thomas Jewell and Mrs. Betty Jane Seymour Jewell. He was the second son in a family of six sons and one daughter. Following the return of his parents to his father’s ancestral home in Oregon, Joe was raised by his maternal grandparents in a commercial fishing family. Jewell was graduated from Biloxi High School in 1978. In the fall of the same year, he attended Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College Perkinston Campus. In 1980 he enrolled at Centenary College of Louisiana, from which he was graduated in 1983 with a BS in Geology. In 1984 he became a member of the US Coast Guard, and he worked at Gulf Coast Research Laboratory until 1993. He returned to college and completed an MS in Anthropology/Archaeology at The University of Southern Mississippi. Additional work experience includes Lance Computers Systems and the US Corps of Engineers, Vicksburg District. At the time of this interview, Jewell was employed at Mississippi Department of Marine Resources as the Deputy Director of the Office of Marine Fisheries. Jewell is a member of the Advisory Council for the Mississippi/Alabama Sea Grant Consortium, Mississippi Coast Basin Team, Mississippi Pascagoula Basin Team, Mississippi Food Safety Task Force, and the Mississippi Association of Personnel Administrators.

Scope and Content Note:
His interview addresses the following subjects: commercial fishing, fishing families, shrimping, oystering, shrimping equipment, trawl nets, push trawl, Vietnamese fishermen, oyster tongs, oyster dredges, finfishing, making and repairing nets, legal restrictions on nets, marine regulations, cast nets, gillnets, monofilament nets, Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, Hurricane Katrina, BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, National Resource Damage Assessment, closing Gulf waters to fishing, Bonnet Carre Spillway, Mississippi River flooding, freshwater diversion into Mississippi Sound, Vessels of Opportunity, recreational fishing