The Virtual Salmon Ceremony

An earth-indigenous elder story is an attempt to recount your own hero’s journey from the beginning of time. The process begins by grabbing old snapshots and scrapbooks and by peering into the depths of your computer, your memories, your traditions, as well as indigenous knowledge and scientific advances to scout for new connections and new answers to big questions like Why are we here? and How should we behave?

Earth-indigenous elder stories start with the big bang and the beginnings of life on earth some 3.7 billion years ago in the belief that we are all on this spaceship together and humans are the highest expression of a chain of DNA that connects everything alive. Our special gift, from an evolutionary point of view, is that we are homo narrans, the storytelling animal. Creating new stories allows humans to adapt to rapidly changing environments, and even a quick look around our spaceship suggests we need better stories, fast! That’s the job of an earth-indigenous elder.

This is an earth-indigenous fish story. Like any fish story, this tale could turn out to be a whopper. My guess, however, is that it will reveal one—and point to a solution. We shall see!

First Casts

My story starts with a faded snapshot that hung in my grandparents’ bedroom in Houston, Texas, and then in my mom’s bedroom in Menlo Park, California. The photo is of me at about 4 years old wearing my favorite outfit, an Indian costume with a feathered headdress. What you don’t see is the bamboo pole in my hands or the line connecting the pole to the barbed hook with worm wriggling beneath the surface of my grandparents’ pond. That’s where I learned to fish.

The next picture is with my uncle Grainger Hunt when he taught me to fly-fish on the Yellowstone River in America’s first national park. My uncle is a biologist and an extremely tall Texan. As he tells the tale, the biggest trout he ever saw took my very first cast and ran through all my fancy floating line and almost through the backing line before the fish spun around and came straight back at me like a torpedo. That fish was huge, gets bigger with each telling, and of course it got away.

A more epic fly-fishing adventure happened years later after my uncle put a radio tag on an adolescent bald eagle that was born on a cliff above the Salt River in Arizona. Adolescent eagles take a grand “fly-about” before finding their own territory, and one of my uncle’s projects was to map those adventures to help save our national bird. Meanwhile, I convinced Sports Illustrated that following the eagle would lead us to some unknown fly-fishing paradise.

So when my uncle called to say our eagle had flown the nest, I grabbed my fly rod, caught a jet to Phoenix, and climbed aboard his Cessna 182. While we had a fine time chasing the eagle, my problem story-wise is that our bird flew to where I learned to fish on the Yellowstone River. It struck me that there are no secret places where only eagles go to fish.

Harpooning

My next fishing adventure for Sports Illustrated was called “Dogfights over Fish,” about flying in a smaller plane off the coast of Cape Cod with a bluefin tuna spotter-pilot named Trip Wheeler. Trip had previously spotted a giant bluefin tuna that was harpooned by his boat crew and flown to Japan where the single fish sold on the sushi market for a record $25,000. Such sales sparked a gold rush: Spotter planes filled the skies and all kinds of people bought fishing boats, including the guy who accidentally harpooned a dolphin in front of the whale-watching fleet. One thing I learned from that story is that managing a fishery gets really difficult when greed is rampant. Nowadays, the Guinness World Record for a single bluefin is north of $3 million.

The next image, from June 2007, is of a pair of bald eagles perched high in an alder on my land at Ti’lomikh Falls on the Rogue River in southern Oregon. It was the morning after Grandma Agnes Baker Pilgrim’s first salmon ceremony in this place, where a ceremony honoring the returning salmon had been conducted by her tribe, the Takelma, as well as neighboring tribes for thousands of years before whites arrived. During the ceremony, Grandma Aggie cooked salmon on redwood skewers around an open fire, and about 200 people feasted on fish. Then three of us who had been ritually cleansed in a sweat lodge dove off a rock called the Story Chair at the base of Ti’lomikh Falls to return the skin and bones of the fish we ate to the bottom of the pool—just as the Great Dragonfly directed thousands of years ago. That day felt magical, and then the eagles showed up—the first I had seen in the area. The alder where they perched was beside the cooking fire, so Grandma had obviously called them with salmon smoke.

A few years later, in June 2012, we took Grandma Aggie by raft to the Story Chair for a now-famous photo in which she held a wand of eagle feathers as a blessing. That, too, was magic because by then Grandma had become a saint to me. Meanwhile, something else had happened. America had become full of eagles. We saved them because we made them sacred.

The Most Expensive Fish?

Lately I’ve been wrestling with an uncomfortable idea: that Rogue River salmon are now pricier than bluefin—and Grandma Aggie’s salmon ceremony was an inadvertent form of greenwashing. Here’s why:

Thousands of years ago, hungry people were killing each other over salmon at Ti’lomikh Falls. So the Great Dragonfly declared that the salmon had to be caught gently with a dipnet from the Story Chair by an elder who decided when it was time to fish and how many fish could be caught so salmon would always be plentiful and no person would go hungry.

That careful management of the fishery worked. A dipnet dropped in the pool was said to take two men to lift, and neighboring tribes traveled 100 miles for the ceremony, expecting a huge feast and to return home with food. Such success over hundreds of generations created a sacred bond between people and salmon, a bond that spread across America as an obligation to share food so that no one went hungry.

Unfortunately, for decades the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) has not allowed fishing in Ti’lomikh Falls or dipnet fishing anywhere in Oregon. So when Grandma Aggie restarted the ceremony, the salmon she cooked came by truck from the Columbia River. That created two problems: Buying salmon is expensive, which made the ceremony unsustainable. Worse, the Columbia salmon created the impression that the Rogue fishery is in great shape. As I look back over 20 years of living at Ti’lomikh Falls, my sense is very different.

When I dove into the pool during the first ceremony in 2007, I didn’t see any fish. In fact, I’ve done a few ceremonial dives since then and never saw a fish. Maybe our diving spooked the fish, but I’ve seen only one fish leap the falls. Just one! Since my first ceremonial dive, $40 million has been spent removing dams and $20 million more was spent to cool the river with shade trees and tens of millions are now being spent to upgrade sewage treatment plants—yet my fear is that netting a salmon from the Story Chair has become like winning the lottery. I asked ODFW to let us net a fish for the ceremony and was told that state laws and tribal politics made netting fish impossible. Not even for Grandma, who traced her lineage back 22,000 years.

The Virtual Salmon Ceremony

So instead of hosting another salmon ceremony on my land, I took the net off an old dipnet frame and extended the pole by 20 feet to make it reach to the bottom of the pool. Then I figured out how to connect an underwater koi pond camera to the net frame to see fish rather than catch them. And yesterday, I lashed the net, a car battery, inverter, and my laptop to my kayak and set off to trace Grandma’s 2012 raft voyage to the Story Chair. Being 65 now and alone, the short trip proved extremely difficult and almost went very wrong. But I wanted to feel something of what the then-87-year-old Grandma experienced while balanced on a raft where falling in would have almost certainly have been lethal. Taking a seat on the Story Chair to manage the fishery has to be earned.

Eventually, I did get my video net to the bottom of the pool, and I learned that if we had tried to net a salmon for the ceremony, we would have failed. No fish! Grandma, were she alive, would have freaked. Had we eventually netted a $100 million salmon, she would have apologized to it profusely, given it a kiss, and returned it to the pool.

The Rogue fishery won’t come back tomorrow no matter how many dollars we throw at restoration. And the solution isn’t keeping people out of the river. On the contrary, the answer is more people in the river, people both playing and also making the beds for salmon spawning because the fish are sacred. My next job as an earth-indigenous elder is to put cameras in the pool so we can log in to see if the pool is once again filling with salmon.

This article appeared in the Sept/Oct issue of Spirituality & Health: A Unity Publication®. Subscribe now.