MEDITATION ON SWIMMER THE SALMON

Atlantic salmon come up river as many as thirteen times. Pacific salmon make it only once. Body spent, tail silvering downstream from the river of birth, this great fish is consumed by all kinds of predators. Ignominious end—to the white mind—one-time shot at life, consummated by utter loss.

The Pacific salmon lives briefly, dies briefly, yet lives long in continual cycle of return. Kwakiutls saw the fate of Swimmer as their own: fingerling moves downstream to the sea; spent male and female turn about and die. Both swept to the sea. As you start, you end; no difference. When a hunter of the sea died, the Kwakiutls believed he went to the land of the killer whale. When a land-hunter died he went to the home of the wolves. A slave was sent to the home of the owls. Twins born in a village were Swimmers. So it is life is blessed with birth and death. A person alive is always dying.

THE PEOPLE

They were truly of the sea. The area they live in now is called the Northwest Coast and it covers a strip of land from the northern tip of California all the way up to British Columbia and Alaska. One edge of this landscape is coast bordered by seascape and on the other side is mountains. The climate is rainy and damp, the land itself shaggy and narrow, in places too narrow for the building of lodges. Yet the beauty of the Northwest culture for the Indian tribes (the ones mentioned in poetry in this book are the Kwakiutls of British Columbia; the Haidas and Tlingits of Alaska) was the leisure time afforded them by the plentitude of fresh food from the sea. The supply was unlimited and varied from whale to smelt and from halibut to seal. The Indians of this region did not have to wander or wonder where their next meal was coming from, for everything of bounty came from the limitless ocean. In the midst of such graciousness came furs which the white traders and traders from the East prized and, in addition, some of the finest and most decorative art in wood, copper, slate, basketry, and clothing that the world has ever seen. Nonetheless, the world of the Northwest Coast was not without its intimation of danger. Tribes fought bitterly over the sites to found their villages and this was one of the few places in North America where land was at a premium within the Indian culture itself. Thus war carried a devastating premium: it emphasized the right to live more than the will to conquer. The game of courting honor and counting coups by attacking a warring tribe, so common in the Plains tribes, was uncommon in the Northwest where war was a bitter business designed to eliminate a contestant for space.