Last week, the Olshans stepped off a plane in Seattle with a sense of great relief. We stretched our cramped legs and took a moment to appreciate the ambient temperature — cool and dry, no air conditioning required, unlike the solar furnace we’d left behind on the East Coast. Refreshed, we started the long walk up Sea-Tac’s Concourse B, where we discovered, to our delight, a terrazzo floor inlaid with bronze salmon swimming off towards baggage claim.
The salmon is a very visible presence in the Pacific Northwest: a culinary staple, the basis of an important regional industry, and above all, a powerful cultural symbol. Who hasn’t admired the salmon’s suicidal determination to return to its home waters, fighting rapids, running gauntlets of fishermen, and eluding the claws of grizzlies along the way?
Underlying the salmon’s epic journey is an astonishing ability to adapt. The life cycle of the salmon starts in the pure headwaters of rivers; takes the salmon downstream all the way to open ocean, where it reaches maturity; and ends with the salmon’s heroic swim upriver to its birth waters to spawn.
The salmon’s physical transformation as it moves between the worlds of fresh and salt water made it a symbol of mystical transformation for the native Haida people, who dominated this region until the advent of Europeans in the late 18th century. The Haidas’ identification with the salmon took the form of myths in which men were turned into salmon, taught lessons of balance and sustainability, and then changed back again into men. But the similarities weren’t just mythical. Both the salmon and the Haidas nearly perished from their encounter with the white man: the salmon, in the 1970s, from overfishing; the Haidas, in the 1830s, from smallpox.
They both seem to be coming back these days. Salmon are under stress, but populations are rebounding. Meanwhile, Haida art has permeated Seattle, in the form of totem poles and distinctive animal graphics like the Seattle Seahawks team logo. Native art is even more prevalent in Vancouver, British Columbia, which is where I happen to be writing this column. Bill Reid, a Haida sculptor and artist, is a national hero here. His work is right on the money: you can see it on the back of every Canadian twenty dollar bill.
Just last year, the famous coastal waters between the U.S. and Canada, which I learned as Puget Sound, the Strait of Georgia, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, were officially renamed the “Salish Sea,” calling to mind their Native American/First Nation heritage. They did get to keep their old names, too, though.
It’s easier to change a name than it is to change attitudes. We visited a salmon hatchery on the Capilano River in North Vancouver. On a wood suspension bridge below the hatchery, I stood and watched a fly fisherman make a series of roll casts, each one more elegant than the last. He cast under the bridge again and again, presenting his fly perfectly to the edge of the roiling current. From my vantage, I could see dozens of exhausted salmon milling in a deep pool not ten yards downstream, but for some reason, the fisherman preferred the rapids under the bridge.
From time to time, a salmon would breach the surface with a taunting flash of silver. There were salmon everywhere: in the deep pools, skipping across the surface — even overhead, in the talons of a bald eagle, which startled all of us by swooping under the bridge like a daredevil pilot.
While I was standing there, mesmerized by the rhythm of the casts, another fisherman — Scandinavian, judging from his accent, but a long-time resident of Canada — leaned against the cedar railing and struck up a conversation. We chatted, lapsing into silence to admire the flawless casts unwinding on the river below. He told me he liked fly fishing for salmon. There was one frustration, though: the natives didn’t have to follow the same strict rules. “They’re allowed to build a weir along the river, which traps the fish. Then, all they have to do is lower a shopping basket and it comes up full of salmon. There I am, with my fishing permit that costs a fortune, and my gear, which cost hundreds of dollars, and all they need is a shopping basket. Which they probably didn’t even buy!”
He was a likable fellow, other than the ugly current of prejudice that shaped his final joke. I could see his point. Standing in his fancy waders with his expensive salmon tag, while completely modern Canadians claiming First Nation heritage scooped up all the fish, he imagined himself the victim of affirmative action.
He probably wasn’t aware that the Haida people have been building salmon weirs on that very river for more than five thousand years.
Of course, I was just a tourist. It wasn’t for me to say who was the interloper.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 18 August 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
