Calling Back the Salmon

A Resolution for Understanding, Healing and Action

Whereas, Pacific Salmon have played a major role in the evolution of the ecology of California—from the coast, to bays and estuaries, in the river systems, and in terrestrial landscapes, including the Sierra Nevada mountains—for 500,000 years;

Whereas, The Indigenous Peoples of California’s Coast, Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada developed the first human cultures on this landscape based on a reciprocal relationship to salmon that guided people’s spiritual and cultural practices and provided for people’s physical sustenance and nourishment for at least 10,000 years;

Whereas, The Gold Rush greatly upset the balance and natural order of this place, resulting in State and Federal policies that paid pioneering settlers a bounty for the murder of Indigenous men, women and children and landscape-scale destruction in the singular pursuit of a lustrous metal;

Whereas, The State of California and the United States accrued significant wealth through the Gold Rush, which charted the course of California’s economic preeminence and financed the Union’s success in the Civil War;

Whereas, The State of California and the United States collaborated on the world’s most ambitious re-engineering of California’s river systems in the development of the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project, ultimately eliminating 90% of salmon spawning habitat and seriously degrading the quality of the remaining habitat;

Whereas, The State of California and the United States attempted to mitigate for the destruction of wild salmon populations by instituting salmon hatchery programs that have proven to compromise wild populations of Central Valley Chinook Salmon, while masking the dire status of wild salmon;

Whereas, The Federal Government, though the US Army Corps of Engineers, operates an obsolete debris dam on the Yuba River (Daguerre Point Dam) that is known to kill salmon and hinder their migration;

Whereas, The Federal Government, through the US Army Corps of Engineers, constructed a “debris dam” on the Yuba River in 1941 that has never served its intended purpose, yet eliminated salmon access to some of the most productive salmon rivers in the Sierra Nevada;

Whereas, The collapse of the Central Valley fall-run Chinook in 2007 pulled the veil from 157 years of State and Federal policies that have served to push wild salmon to the brink of extinction, not unlike policies impacting California tribes;

Whereas, The Federal and State government—along with many of the people living here—to this day fail to acknowledge the existence of Indigenous People of California, despite resolutions and actions by local government, community groups and the Calling Back the Salmon Committee that call for the recognition of local Indian tribes;

Be it therefore Resolved, We call for the State and Federal governments to acknowledge that California’s wealth has come at extreme cost to Indigenous Californians, resulting in a loss of our cultural ability to live in a reciprocal relationship with salmon, which in turn has threatened California salmon with extinction;

We call for the on-going healing of the human relationships that have been wounded by the legacy of California’s Gold Rush, recognizing that this is a pre-condition for healing our relationship with salmon;

We call for the State and Federal government to legally recognize the tribes of this region and their rights to traditional cultural properties, including the restoration of their salmon heritage;

We call for the State of California to acknowledge that current water policies have created a gross imbalance—one so significant as to threaten the extinction of a keystone species in California’s ecology—and that actions which allow wild salmon to return to their spawning waters above dams are necessary to begin rebalancing our world;

We call for the clean up and removal of mining toxics in our waterways and behind dams, so that we can reclaim healthy rivers and human communities abundant with wild salmon.

We, the undersigned, recognize that apologies only begin the healing process and that through committed actions to work together to restore wild salmon we demonstrate to the Salmon People that we are committed to community healing, preparing the healing of land and water, and are therefore ready to call the salmon back home. Thus, we agree to make a commitment to take action in our daily lives to accomplish this healing, wherever and whenever opportunity arises.

Signed on this day, 2008