Salmon is life: a lesson in Indigenous education
By Sidney Coles
While watching sockeye salmon leap into hand-held nets, Wet’suwet’en hereditary chief Na’Moks leaned in and said to me, above the sound of the roiling current, “the fish feed the people, the bears, the trees and the air. The salmon are life.” That’s it. Then he turned and kept watching the fish leaping through the churn of blue-green water.
I was standing on the jagged rock formation at Witsët Canyon during a recent visit to the territory as his guest. And it was one the most important pieces of information I received from him.
Far too often, non-Indigenous people dismiss Indigenous knowledge as simplistic rather than as a deeply relevant scientific commentary on our present environmental reality and relationships.