The salmon people

At a Glance

• Central figures: A young man from a coastal village, the Salmon Chief who rules beneath the sea, and the Salmon People - a nation of beings who live as humans under the water and become fish when they enter the rivers.
• Setting: Pacific Northwest Coast tradition, widely told among the Salish, Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth, and other peoples of the region; the story takes place in a village on the shore and in the underwater world of the Salmon People.
• The turn: The young man offends the Salmon People by treating their bones carelessly, and he is taken beneath the water to live among them and learn what the salmon require of humans.
• The outcome: The young man returns to his village carrying the knowledge of how to honor the salmon - by returning their bones to the water so they can be reborn - and teaches his people the proper way.
• The legacy: The First Salmon Ceremony, practiced across many Pacific Northwest Coast peoples, in which the first salmon caught each season is honored, its flesh shared among the community, and its bones returned whole to the river.

The boy threw the backbone into the fire. He had been eating on the beach with the other children, pulling meat off a roasted salmon with his fingers, and when he was done he tossed what was left into the coals. The vertebrae blackened and cracked. An older woman saw it and said nothing, but she looked at the water for a long time.

His name does not survive in every version of the telling, but his carelessness does. Among the Salish and neighboring peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, the salmon were not simply fish. They were a people - a nation living in longhouses beneath the ocean, as real and organized as any village on shore. Each spring they put on their salmon robes and swam up the rivers to offer their bodies to the human beings who depended on them. This was a gift freely given. But a gift has conditions.

The Empty Weir

That year the salmon did not come. The weirs stayed empty. The drying racks stood bare against the sky, and the village ate what little it had stored - dried berries, roots, the last of the oil. The elders knew why, or suspected. Someone had been careless with the bones. The salmon would not return to a people who burned what should have been given back to the water.

The young man did not believe this. He was hungry, and hunger made him angry rather than reflective. He walked down to the river mouth and stood in the shallows and shouted at the water: where are you? He kicked at the stones. He waded deeper. A current caught his legs - not a natural current, but something with direction and pull, like a hand closing around his ankle - and he went under.

The Longhouse Beneath the Sea

He did not drown. The water opened around him the way a door opens. He found himself standing on a path that led to a great longhouse built of something that was not quite wood and not quite shell. Inside, people were sitting at a fire. They looked like people. They wore cedar-bark clothing. They had faces, hands, children playing near the walls.

The chief of the house was tall and his skin had a faint silver quality in the firelight. He looked at the young man without surprise.

Sit down, he said.

The young man sat. Food was brought - not salmon but other things, sea things. He ate. He stayed. Days passed, or what felt like days. He learned that the people in the longhouse were the Salmon People. They lived here as humans all winter. When spring came they would put on their robes - their salmon bodies - and swim up the rivers. When humans caught them and ate them and returned the bones to the water, the bones drifted down and the Salmon People could reassemble themselves. They would wake again in the longhouse, whole. But when the bones were burned, or thrown on land, or scattered - that person could not come back. They were gone.

The chief showed him a girl sitting near the wall. She was missing a hand.

Someone in your village threw her hand-bones into the bushes, the chief said.

The young man recognized the shape of her face but could not say from where.

The Missing Eye

Another person sat further back, half in shadow. When the firelight shifted, the young man saw that this person had no left eye. The socket was dark and closed.

A child in your village stuck a fish-eye with a stick and left it on a rock, the chief said.

The young man thought of himself on the beach, the backbone cracking in the fire. He did not ask the chief about it. He did not need to. Somewhere in this longhouse, or not in this longhouse - no longer in this longhouse - was the person whose spine he had destroyed.

He stayed through the winter. He ate with them. He played with their children. He watched them prepare for the spring run. They took their robes down from where they hung along the walls - silver-sided, pink-fleshed, heavy with oil. Each person’s robe was their own body. They shook them out and checked them the way a man checks a canoe before a long paddle.

The Spring Run

When the time came, the chief told the young man he would go with them. They gave him a robe. He put it on and felt his body change - his spine lengthened, his arms flattened, his vision shifted to the sides of his head. He was in the river. The water tasted of snowmelt and stone. He swam with the others, hundreds of them, driving upstream against the current with a strength that was not entirely muscular. It was will. It was obligation. It was the promise the Salmon People had made to the human beings on the shore.

He felt the nets. He felt himself pulled from the water. He was on the bank, flopping, and the air was a shock after the green weight of the river. A woman’s hands held him. She looked at him and screamed - because inside the salmon shape she could see his human face. She knew him.

They cut him open and found a boy inside. He was wet, changed, thin from the winter, but alive. He sat up on the riverbank and told them everything.

The Bones Returned

He taught the village what the Salmon Chief had shown him. When you eat the salmon, save every bone. Every fin, every skull-plate, every spine. Lay them out carefully on cedar boughs. Carry them to the river. Place them in the water facing downstream so they can find their way home. Do this for the first salmon of the season with particular care - share its flesh among the whole village, and return its skeleton whole.

The village did as he said. The following year the salmon came back in numbers that the oldest people could not remember seeing. The weirs filled. The drying racks bent under the weight.

Every spring after that, when the first salmon was caught, the people laid it on fresh cedar and spoke to it. They thanked it. They shared it. They carried its bones to the river and set them in the water, and watched the current take them down toward the sea, toward the longhouse where the Salmon People were waiting to be whole again.