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.”

During the next several months, Ryberg sought out tribal elders and discovered that knowledge of the Maidu First Salmon ceremony had not been lost. That same year, in October, when the few remaining fall-run Yuba salmon were ascending the river below Englebright dam, the ceremony was performed in the Maidu language, for the first time in over 150 years. It was a modern ceremony, inclusive of two historically oppositional cultures and the reality of a barricaded and highly plumbed river system.

At sunrise, Maidu traditional hunters, who had fasted and prepared for this day, were sent out to spear a single adult Chinook. This sacred fish, weighing close to 40 pounds, was wrapped in a ceremonial blanket and carried by the hunters and additional spirit runners ten miles upstream and around the dam. They ran past the most critical spawning habitat remaining for Yuba salmon, the last operating hydraulic mine and, after a boat ride across the reservoir, arrived around midday at Bridgeport State Park. There they were greeted by hundreds of people and the fragrance of smoking salmon, brought by Yurok people from the Klamath River and roasted the traditional way, on redwood sticks. During the ceremony, all participants circled the fire and sent their intention out to the Salmon People that their return to this area is welcomed by the human community. Some of the ceremonial fish was fed to elders, some returned to the river. Everyone feasted.

Honoring the cross-cultural origins of the nascent idea, and aware that the restoration of salmon to the upper Yuba would require a unified effort by everyone concerned, SYRCL, the tribe, and others formed the Calling Back the Salmon Committee, with equal representation of Indian and non-Indian people. It brought together individuals with specific regional knowledge of fisheries biology and ecology, history, archeology, and media, as well as indigenous knowledge. It has been meeting regularly ever since, and has delved into issues that have long divided the local community.

The Calling Back the Salmon Ceremony has become an annual event, and will take place again on October 10, 2009; all people are welcome. I will be one of the spirit runners, as I was last year. This ceremony is a prayer to the Salmon People, offered in acknowledgement that to be ready to receive them we must heal the wounds we have inflicted on each other and on the earth. Here in my home watershed, I find that a reconciliation is taking place. Boundaries between areas of knowledge that seemed to clash are melting away as we realize that we can include all effective approaches that are rooted in understanding of place. With our many differences, we join in a community united around a common goal: calling back the Yuba River salmon.

Derek Hitchcock is an ecologist who works for the South Yuba River Citizens League.