Preserving Traditional Foodways

Coastal tribes along the North Pacific were traditional salmon nations that relied on the cultural wild-salmon-way-of-life between oceans. Wild salmon were essential to the spiritual core, energy, food sovereignty, and economies of our people. Wild salmon were also key for commerce, bartering and maintaining status among tribes.

In many places along the coastal temperate rainforest, where the wild salmon were once plentiful, now there are few or none. Old growth forests were a cathedral for wild salmon runs. Wild salmon are forest animals. They swim upriver to spawn and die in the forests, then are born upriver in clean, clear waters and swim out to sea until they return to the forest to start all over again. Through this journey, salmon bring vital nutrients from the sea to the rivers and forests upstream. As forests have been decimated around the world, so goes the wild salmon.

The wild salmon cycle has been disrupted; traditional Native harvesting and salmon spawning habitat are suffering from habitat degradation, over-extraction, and now, climate change, ocean acidification, ocean warming, ocean rise, and uncontrollable fish hatchery development. Without traditional wild salmon runs, traditional Native practices, such as fish wheels, weirs, customary fish traps and platform dip-netting, will all be lost from living memory.