Salmon and His People: Fish & Fishing in Nez Perce Culture

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Summary: What a book about fish should be
Review: Books about fish customarily fall into two categories: biology texts that treat the animals like biochemical systems and fishing books that treat them like cunning prey (the better to rationalize the angler's heroism). "Salmon and His People" is another kind of book entirely-a complex look at how the salmon has figured in Nez Perce tribal origin stories, tribal history, tribal religion, tribal stewardship, and how the animal has fared under the dubious stewardship of the Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation, and National Marine Fisheries Service.

The voices telling this complicated story are multiple, as are the perspectives: tribal storytellers, biologists, fishermen, children, policymakers. Salmon is not treated as an isolated creature but is instead viewed within a finely wrought network of other water animals.

I cannot praise the ambition and achievement of this book highly enough. Because the Nez Perce view the fate of the salmon as part of a regionwide environmental disaster, "Salmon and His People" also becomes an elegy for that lost river, the free-flowing Columbia. Several recent books (Blaine Harden's "A River Lost," Wm. Dietrich's "Northwest Passage," Richard White's "The Organic Machine") have addressed the devastation of the Columbia and its fisheries, but none of these is as heartful and creaturely an account of what the damming of the Columbia has meant to the peoples and animals of the river. The Nez Perce are particularly qualified to write an account of the Columbia's devastation because their lands are upstream of most of the eighteen dams on the mainstem Columbia and Snake, and much of their section of the river lies within the Hanford Reach, that unhappy zone once occupied by the federal government's plutonium-production plants. (The Hanford Reach is also the only undammed section of the Columbia River.)

Beautifully illustrated with color plates on almost every page (the registration could be better), "Salmon and His People" will challenge most readers to think about fish more deeply. The book is the second in a series of Nez Perce nature guides; it was written by Dan Landeen, environmental specialist for the tribe, and Allen Pinkham, a tribal elder and former chairman of the Nez Perce Tribe Executive Committee, and published by Lewis-Clark State College's Confluence Press.

I have no connection to the Nez Perce Tribe or the Confluence Press. I write for fishing magazines, and in my experience this is a singular book.