In my early thirties, I began to grow weary in my work as a field biologist. I had been moving from one place to another every two years or so, learning an entirely new ecosystem and culture each time, but feeling fundamentally an outsider at the end of the day. I had sat around evening fires with Bushmen at the edge of the Okavango Delta in Botswana, with Hmong villagers in a remote forest in northern Thailand, and had worked in Panama and Costa Rica on forest restoration. Though I had learned a great deal as I moved about, I found myself yearning for the wisdom that could only be attained through long-term intimacy with a place, the kind of wisdom I had perceived among indigenous people I had come to know.

So I returned to the San Francisco Bay watershed, where my family had been living for six generations, and where I had grown up in the Sierra foothills above Nevada City. My goal was to begin a lifelong study of the natural and human ecology of my native region.

My first job was as environmental programs director for the North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians of the upper San Joaquin River watershed. It gave me an opportunity to begin reconciling a dissonance between ecological science and traditional knowledge, which had been troubling me ever since I walked out of the University of California, Berkeley, degree in hand, and found that the natural world did not fit neatly into the categories I had studied. Working with the tribe required a merging of traditional and modern knowledge. Under the guidance of elders, we tended the landscape in traditional ways to enable plants valuable for cultural uses, such as basket weaving, to thrive. At the same time, we cleared brush and rehabilitated the soil using scientific fire prevention principles and knowledge of soil microbial dynamics.

Three years ago an opportunity arose to work in my native Yuba watershed, at a time when an unprecedented collaboration between Indians and non-Indians had just begun there, born out of a shared goal of restoring salmon to the upper Yuba River. A non-Indian man, Bill Jacobsen, had recently relocated to the area from western Marin County, where he had been intimately involved in the successful reestablishment of Coho salmon to a tributary of Olema Creek. This process involved reducing the physical barrier where the creek flowed under Highway One, and the consistent carrying out of a ceremony passed down to Jacobsen by a Suquamish elder from British Columbia, intended to call the salmon in from their adult feeding grounds in the Pacific Ocean to a section of creek where no salmon had been seen in 70 years. In the winter immediately following these modifications (1999-2000), significant numbers of Coho were spawning upstream of the former barrier.

After settling in the Yuba watershed, Jacobsen talked with Jason Rainey, a Yuba watershed native serving as director of the South Yuba River Citizens League (SYRCL), and they agreed that a ceremony on the Yuba required a Native American presence. Don Ryberg, chairman of the local Tsi-Akim Maidu Tribe, agreed to participate. On a cold January morning in 2006, Jacobsen conducted the ceremony on the middle reaches of the South Yuba River, above Englebright Dam, which blocks all passage of anadromous fish. At the end of the ceremony, Ryberg said: “That was all fine and good, but the salmon on the Yuba don’t speak Suquamish, they speak Maidu.”