Juvenile coho salmon | Photo: USFWS
California's salmon are in trouble. In the course of their lives, they move between the Pacific Ocean's depths and mountain streams, passing through the state's estuaries and rivers along the way. That makes salmon uniquely sensitive to changes in every habitat they pass through. A forest clearcut or wildfire, or land clearing for suburban sprawl, can release silt into the fishes' spawning streams. The fish are vulnerable to toxic chemicals and microplastics while they're spending time in the ocean. Dams on the state's rivers block the fish's passage.
They also allow agriculture and urban water companies to remove much of the water from those rivers, leaving algae-slicked trickles and separated pools too warm for salmon to survive in. It makes no difference to the salmon whether that water ends up on a lawn in Riverside, an illegal pot grow in Humboldt County, or almond trees in the Tulare Basin: Either way, routine and excessive water diversions kill salmon.
The last 200 years have seen massive changes in most of California's habitats outside the deserts, so it's no surprise that California's salmon are suffering, and that some runs have vanished entirely. Without significant changes in the way we apportion water among several dozen thirsty constituencies, that decline is likely to continue.
But there's good news: California's salmon can recover, if we let them. And Native land management techniques can be an important part of their recovery.
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Before we examine how Native land management practices might help California's salmon recover, it's good to look at what the body of knowledge and skills often referred to as Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is, and what it isn't.
It's tempting, when talking about the suite of practices and technologies included in California Native peoples' TEK, to think of those practices as distinct and transferable to other cultures and ways of living. As Josh Garrett-Davis points out in his piece How Forest Burning Could Have Become Federal Policy, borrowing the merely practical techniques from Native cultural burning missed much of the point.
TEK isn't a library of techniques and technology from which modern-day land managers can pick and choose, cafeteria style, plugging one or two Native innovations into traditional Western management and always expecting the same results. Sometimes those techniques will work. Sometimes those techniques work less well when implemented outside of the cultural context they sprouted in.
Hupa man uses a dip net to fish from a Klamath River weir | Photo: Edward S. Curtis
As an example, consider the practice mentioned in a previous article in this series, in which Karuk people refrained from fishing for salmon until religious leaders completed a ten-day ritual ceremony. This practice meant that each salmon run started out with ten days of no fishing, which played a significant role in preserving the abundance of future runs.
State and federal wildlife authorities, which have the power to close fisheries, could adopt the superficial trappings of this practice, issuing regulations forbidding fishing in a spot until salmon had been passing that spot for ten days. But transplanted from the Karuk cultural context into the very different context of present-day California, such a rule might well have a very different effect. Karuk culture values both the long-term sustainability of the salmon run and the individual's ongoing responsibility to protect that run, a responsibility that sometimes extends to the smallest details of daily life. In a culture that prizes short-term, individual gains, a 10-day delay in fishing becomes something to evade or violate. In some places, such a delay might actually make things worse for a salmon run by creating incentive to cheat.
Watch Tending The Wilds segment on salmon, Keeping The River
Western minds may find the notion that TEK practices can't necessarily be lifted wholesale from Native culture hard to grasp. But for many Native practitioners of traditional landscape management practices, those practices are about much more than managing the landscape. They can be about fulfilling the individual's responsibility to his or her family and community. They can be about philosophical concerns that Western thinkers might compartmentalize as religion. They may be considered inappropriately incomplete if they aren't accompanied by acts that might to Western minds seem entirely unrelated: singing specific songs, for example.
The notion that Native landscape management practices can't necessarily be copied from Native culture may be hard to grasp. But those practices are about much more than managing the landscape.
Sometimes attempts to implement TEK practices learned outside the context of the culture that created the knowledge can lead to unanticipated problems. In her 2014 report Retaining Knowledge Sovereignty: Expanding the Application of Tribal Traditional Knowledge on Forest Lands in the Face of Climate Change, sociologist Kari Norgaard relays an account of just such a problem recounted by Leaf Hillman, Director of the Karuk Department of Natural Resources. Hillman told Norgaard of a coho salmon habitat restoration project on a Klamath River tributary. The agencies involved, who had been working with a Tribal TEK practitioner, were placing whole trees in the stream to provide resting places for the coho.
Arriving at one project location, said Hillman, the tribal practitioner knew that the agencies had made a misstep:
[T]hey had dropped a live oak into the tributary. Intuitively, the practitioner understood that this wouldn't work because live oak limbs and leaves are used to build fish dams due to properties that repel fish - this m
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Juvenile coho salmon | Photo: USFWS 
