![]() ![]() “Everything we do has connection to salmon, to áama,” he says. The lack of fresh-caught ceremonial salmon was deeply upsetting. We always like to say the health of the river runs parallel to the health of the people of that river. By the late 1990s, Reed says, there simply weren’t springtime salmon to catch for the Karuk pikyávish rituals, and he had to ask a friend from another tribe to obtain the salmon used ceremonially. Soon enough, spring salmon runs went from countless fish-so many that one could walk across the river on their backs, according to the stories Reed’s mother told him as a child-to almost none. It was the last straw for fish already dealing with three other dams, habitat degradation from the logging and mining industries, and commercial fishing. Reed was born in 1962, around the same time that the Iron Gate Dam, which was completed in 1964, cut those early salmon off from hundreds of miles of their ancestral habitat. In that way, the ceremony acted as a form of fisheries management, fulfilling the charge of “fixing the world,” says Reed.īut salmon no longer leap up Ishi Pishi each spring-or not many of them. Part of the ritual calls to the animals to return, and tribe members don’t start fishing for salmon at Ishi Pishi Falls until the ceremony is complete-a delay that traditionally allowed some salmon to make it past the falls and up into the headwaters of the Klamath before harvesting began. The timing of the ritual is supposed to line up with the arrival of áama, the first salmon entering the Klamath to return to the waters of their birth, where they will spawn come autumn. Reed also refers to the annual tradition as the spring salmon ceremony.
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