Finding my religion: World Wide Winnemem edition

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Salmon Are Sacred
 

Below, thoughts on the Winnemem apology tour and related salmon news.

(A few of the ten thousand participants in the Ceremony of Tears, held in June of 1940 to mark the inundation of Kettle Falls on the Columbia River by the soon to be completed Grand Coulee Dam and the consequent eradication of the salmon runs that had fed the people of the Columbia watershed for ten thousand years (as demonstrated by archaeological evidence) and transferred nutrients from the deep ocean into the inland continental forest ecosystem for two million years. For the next few years, the salmon returned from the Pacific, only to die at the base of the dam. These were Colville and related and neighboring Columbia River peoples far north of the Winnemem, but the histories run parallel – almost as if someone planned them that way.)

Reunion on the Rakaia

To recap, some 25 members of the Winnemem Wintu tribe from the McCloud River region, whose salmon were extirpated by the dead slackwater above Shasta Dam, went to New Zealand to apologize to the salmon on the Rakaia River, desendants of eggs taken 150 years ago from the McCloud, and to respectfully ask them to return. Note the Winnemem are apologizing to the salmon not for anything they did, but for a sin of omission – their failure to stop the construction of Shasta Dam. Of course, there was never any chance they could have stopped it.

The Winnemem seem to have been extremely well received by New Zealanders, Maori and other. An account of the Rakaia ceremony as reported on TVNZ’s Maori language Te Karere:

(Minor error: the Winnemem did not make the decision to ship eggs to NZ. As errors go, it is nothing compared to the ridiculous image that one NZ station used to illustrate the story: a salmon in a Great Plains war bonnet. Roughly equivalent to illustrating a story about Venetian gondoliers with a pic of a Scotsman in full highland regalia.)

The Winnemem visit also spawned reflection on the state of New Zealand’s own rivers, most of which are not afforded the special protections given the Rakaia.

Our river’s fish could do with at least an apology

You’ve got to wonder which is more of a fantasy, the Winnemem Wintu with their apologies to the salmon, or the feel-good but “yeah right” approach to our never-ending natural resources? Someone is most certainly in la-la land. And I don’t think it is the people who have come halfway across the world to apologise to the fish.

Not quoted at length only because I am running on too long here as it is; the article is well worth reading, and the point is well made. It isn’t hard to imagine the vulture American pop media’s take on people talking to fish, never mind that they recently went through a week long orgasm over a religion involving talking to three invisible gods in one, none of whom actually come back every year – jumping jesus is what, two thousand years late now? – none of whom you can see and touch and smell as you can the salmon, none of whom provide tangible good as the salmon do every year without fail until some group of morons blocks their path, none of whom have any relevance to the world we actually live in unless you are a pedophile in need of cover.

Even a “balanced” version of the Winnemem’s introduction to Euro-American “culture” reads like the script of Little Big Man – and that timeline doesn’t even mention the Kaibai Creek Massacre of August 17, 1854, when 42 Winnemem men, women, and children were murdered by white settlers unhappy with the tribe’s prior occupation of an attractive piece of land.

Let the Winnemem themselves bring us up to date concerning recent complexities.

Sadly, this history is merely typical. The compensation that never materialized, the treaties observed by the tribe but not by the signatories in DC. What could be worse?

Well, the situation of the Sinixt is arguably worse. Split by a 49th parallel they had never heard of and forbidden to cross the new border, subsumed into other entities by the whim of the American govenrment, declared extinct in Canada (the only group so dishonored by the Canadian government) and their supposed “memory” “honored” with an absurd totem pole completely alien to the Sinixt culture.

And deprived of their primary source of food, the Columbia River salmon. At least they were never promised anything, like the Winnemem, still waiting today for the promised, agreed upon compensation for their land flooded by Shasta Dam, still waiting for the recognition promised in a treaty a hundred and fifty years ago. Or the Colville, promised money, land, and cheap electricity. Many years later, they finally got the electricity after everyone else, and many lawsuits later they got a few cents on the dollar for their land.

 

Morton’s Migration

After years of research documenting the utter destruction of British Columbia’s wild salmon runs by the lice and disease spread by the largely foreign-owned salmon farming industry and years of trying to work with the industry and the government that is supposed to oversee it but instead coddles and protects it, Alexandra Morton has had enough. She now has one simple message for the salmon farms: GET OUT!

On the 23rd of April, Morton will begin her march from the sea to Victoria, through the length of Vancouver Island. She needs and deserves all the support and encouragement we can give her in whatever way is available to us.

Petition to Protect Wild Salmon

We the undersigned stand against the biological threat and commerce of industrial net-cage feedlots using our global oceans. The science is clear: these operations risk wild salmon populations by intensifying disease and deplete world fishery resources to make the feed. They privatize ocean spaces and threaten our sovereign rights to food security.

Stop buying and selling industrial net-cage farmed salmon. Salmon Farms GET OUT of our Oceans.

Sign here

The good news is that support for Morton is snowballing. One expression of support from a most welome source:

Alexandra,

…I am deeply honored to be asked to support such a sacred cause as the protection and defense of our precious wild salmon stocks.

At some point, I hope to participate in this historic journey and walk with you.

Grand Chief Stewart Phillip
President
Union of BC Indian Chiefs

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