Tapestry Press
Totem Salmon
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Tapestry Press
Totem Salmon
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Totem Salmon by Freeman House. 1999. Beacon Press. 228p. Native American tribes, speaking languages from different linguistic families, along the Klamath River in northern California cooperated in sustainably harvesting salmon migrating upstream. Contrary to Garrett Hardin’s idea from The Tragedy of the Commons, in this watershed both humans and fish lived in harmony with the land for thousands of years. In 1872 the new US Fish Commission sent Rev. Livingston Stone, a Unitarian minister, to California to establish a salmon fish hatchery on the McCloud River to provide stock to replenish New England streams draining into the Atlantic. Unaware that salmon on the two coasts represent two genera and that unlike the Atlantic Salmo, the Pacific Oncorhynchus die following one reproductive season. Of the 50.000 fertilized eggs taken from the hatchery in 1872, only 200-300 fingerlings were released into an eastern river. None survived. The blasting of the Central Pacific Railway in 1883 barred the salmon attempting to swim upstream. Stone’s hatchery was closed for five years. The six species of salmon that inhabit the western coast of the US are subdivided into many sensitive populations adapted to recognize the scents of individual rivers. In 1991 the American Fisheries Society documented that 214 Pacific stream populations of salmon had been exterminated. In 1982 Freeman House worked with volunteers, his neighbors, to increase the survival of king salmon on the Mattole River in northern California. Like most rivers, logging and temporary road construction that allowed loggers to transport logs had seriously degraded or destroyed the stream quality for salmon egg survival and development. Unlike most, salmon in this river had not interbred with introduced hatchery salmon raised from another river’s population. With minimal financial support from the state of California the Mattole Watershed Salmon Support Group trapped fertile adults; incubated fertilized eggs and released juveniles back into the stream. Salmon numbers continued to decline in spite of the first ten years of the work of the volunteers and their release of about 250,000 healthy juveniles. A turning point occurred when a memo from the Dept. of Fish and Game banned logging that added sediment to streams or elevated water temperature. Freeman advocates bioregionalism, connecting to your local ecosystem. It nourishes his spirit. Written December 22, 2008.
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