Paper short abstract:

While Indigenous peoples have practiced reciprocal care with Pacific salmon for millennia, colonial policies disrupted these practices and replaced them with efforts to control salmon. Current interactions with salmon are challenging dominant modes of caring and demand a different relationship.

Paper long abstract:

As a keystone species in decline, Pacific salmon has received plenty of care along the West Coast of Canada over the last decades. Most of this care emerges from a Western Scientific background trying to control salmon as well as their habitat through technological advances – hatcheries and habitat improvement. Many of these attempts to care for declining salmon populations have not shown any success or are even seen as causing negative effects on salmon stocks. These approaches to salmon enhancement are based on the colonial disruption of Indigenous peoples care relationship with salmon which emerged over millennia and constituted a reciprocal relationship between salmon and humans. Here, the needs of humans to eat, share and trade salmon were not in conflict with caring for salmon but an important part of this relationship. Working with an Indigenous community as well as non-Indigenous actors on the West Coast of Canada, I will explore what caring for salmon means for humans as well other non-human actors in the 21st century. What emerges is the argument that intimate interactions between salmon and humans are needed to constitute holistically caring for salmon. When people lose their relations and interactions with salmon, caring becomes an abstract matter of trying to control the unpredictable nature of salmon and bears the danger to reduce salmon to a commodified food source. Pacific salmon is irreplaceable for those who care and this paper will explore how different actors are trying to return to practices of reciprocal care.