Salmon and Sturgeon
Greetings everyone!
I have spent most of my adult life working with fish, beginning with my summer job working with Salmon up on the Klamath River for the Department of Fish and Game while attending Humboldt State University. Disillusioned by the way western science actually works, and what my dreams of being an “environmentalist” were and what the reality was, I changed my major to Art. Yet I still continued working with fish, and through my work doing fisheries field studies, focusing primarily on fish passage in relation to dams and diversions, I have spent thousands of hours on boats in the Sacramento/San Joaquin River system, I know the river intimately. I ended up working with white sturgeon at UC Davis on a sturgeon fish passage study, and my encounter with the sturgeon, these ancient fish that have been around since the time of the dinosaurs, broke my heart wide open, and I knew I had to do something different, that there was a reason I never studied the sciences, and the sturgeon told me I had to do something different, to stop hiding from what I could really be doing. So I left the UC Davis fish lab to attend a masters program at Naropa University, where I focused on Indigenous Science and holistic ecology. The title of my thesis is “Remembering Our Future: The Search For The Salmon Of Wisdom”.
With the recent Salmon runs here having been decimated, I knew it was time for me to “do” what I have been wanting to do for a long time. My dreams have been speaking to me too, I dream of fish almost every night, and recently had a dream that I was running for the Salmon, as a form of prayer for their healing and so they could run again. So in honor of the Salmon and my dreams, I am creating the Salmon Wisdom Healing Project, and my first action I personally take is to actually run for the salmon, as my prayer for them and their healing, and so that they may find their way home again. If anyone would like to join me in running as prayer and as an offering to the Salmon, please let me know. We can also walk or sing and dance for the fish. I will make a journey up the Sacramento River road, the route the Salmon take when they migrate back upstream, to make an offering to the Salmon for their healing. I will also be collaborating with my friend who is a fisheries biologist with the Department of Fish and Game, and we will be giving a presentation on Salmon as well as offering a series of healing workshops.
