The Gift That Returns, and the First Fish Honoured

The salmon's dramatic life, its long journey home upstream against the current, its leap over falls, and its death after spawning, made it a natural emblem of perseverance, sacrifice and the renewal of life through death. Among the peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast the salmon is honoured as a giver of life whose annual return sustains whole communities, and the First Salmon rites, in which the first catch of the run is treated with ceremony and its bones returned to the water so that the salmon may come again, belong to those living traditions and are described here from the outside. Wisdom, endurance and the life that is given and renewed all gather to the fish that comes home to die and to begin again.

Pacific salmon runs have collapsed severely across much of their range in the past century, chiefly through dam construction blocking spawning migration, and several distinct populations are now listed under the US Endangered Species Act; the removal of the Elwha River dams in Washington state, completed in 2014 in the largest dam removal project in American history, allowed salmon to reach spawning grounds they had been blocked from for a century, a rare case of a major river being deliberately returned to something closer to its original state for the fish's sake.