🐟 Run4Salmon
Healing native rivers and lifeways + fundraiser print
A few years ago and even now, whales appear in my dreams. They look at me, with their big eyes pleading, before I wake up to the news of another whale washing up dead by blunt wounds from hitting shipping and oil tankers, or starvation with plastics in their stomach. It was clear they wanted me to do something, and I wasn’t sure what nor how.
Checking in with local native elders lead me to Run4Salmon, a prayer run led by Chief Caleen Sisk of the Winnemem Wintu tribe.
This collective of Indigenous women, activists, and allies have given so much energy and love to the vision of the salmon returning home. For over 10 years, they’ve followed the journey that the salmon used to take from the headwaters at Buyum Puyuk (Mt. Shasta) to the deltas of Ohlone Lands (Bay Area, California).
Due to the construction of the Shasta Dam in the 1930s, the Winnemem Wintu’s villages were flooded and the salmon haven’t been able to return to their spawning grounds. The lifecycles of so many beings, including humans and whales, have been drastically impacted by the dams and subsequent colonial water management still wanting to raise the dams even more, today. The environmental and cultural devastation is drastic.
Here you can hear Chief Caleen Sisk share about the tribe, the run, and their sacred salmon cosmology.
Our beloved mbgenerator had been supporting the run for a few years, and invited us to join in 2022. While paddling downstream with my family, I saw this story-map emerge.
I asked Chief permission to draw and paint it, and she asked me to work with her son, Pom, and educator Nichelle Garcia to bring the run to life.
For a year, I relayed drawings and questions to Pom and Nichelle as the painting progressed. We wove basketry patterns, origin story, prayer run, and visions for all people coming together to support the salmon returning home.
The ancestors often whispered to me what was supposed to come next; and I was a willing channel for this incantation of native lands and waterways returning to native stewardship. Sun and moon deities are frequent guides in my work; imprinted sometime in childhood and Andean ancestry.
The songs, dances, and prayers of a collaborative storymap transmit medicine in nonlinear time.
In this storymap, the water cycle is made whole again; dams are bursting; the oil rigs are relics of the past, strewn with flowers of future harvest.
Many hands of many tribes pull invasives from the banks of the river and plant baby cottonwoods to shelter young fry.
The whales return to feeding grounds; all creatures find a way back toward balance in rhythms of collective cooling, blooming, regeneration.
May all these prayers and more come through.
For thousands of years, Indigenous people have known how to steward these sacred ecosystems sustainably. Now, Trump has removed funding for this Winnemem-led effort to restore salmon to the McCloud river, and there’s now more at stake than ever.
Native stewards of traditional ecological knowledge are the best guides to guide watershed management as the rivers heat up and aquifers dry.
Please consider supporting the run through a generous donation if you can, or through the purchase of our 11” x 14” limited edition fundraiser print. This is an archival artwork on cold press watercolor paper. A beautiful reminder and support for native women-led remediation of life-sustaining ways.
Should you be in a position to support the tribe with a print purchase, please do! As of the publication of this post, there are 35 out of 58 left. Help us sell them out! All proceeds go directly to the tribe.
Thank you for reading.
Thanks for all you do in your corner for our beautiful home, planet Earth.