Uploaded January 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
What is the meaning of a canoe, a fish camp, a dam? What is the significance of a salmon, to a development corporation, or to a peoples whose millennia old culture has revolved around that relative? The Natural History Museum (nonprofit) has launched a powerful visual narrative project, bringing together stories of Bristol Bay, the Salish Sea, the Klamath River and the Snake River. United by their resistance to development projects that threaten their cultural preservation and subsistence food systems, the Yupik, Alutiiq and Dena’ina peoples of Bristol Bay, the Lummi Nation, the Yurok Tribe and the Nez Perce Tribe enter into a regional dialogue that unsettles Western conceptions of land, food, and objecthood. Through leadership of community members, the emergent digital storytelling and interactive journalism project focuses on four Native-led salmon struggles, as Native relationship to land is mobilized as opposition to extraction, and the storytelling power of cultural objects reestablishes cross-regional narratives of reciprocity and intergenerational care. This reveals both similar and diverse techniques of subversion and victories of sovereignty by these groups, and opens the potential for future transnational collaboration. Through this work, we see great opportunity for network building and collective emergence as Indigenous groups across the Pacific Northwest discursively and psychically reclaim their lands, cultures, and identities.
https://alumni.wwu.edu/event/salmon-people-tracing-indigenous-resistance-across-pacific-northwest
What is the meaning of a canoe, a fish camp, a dam? What is the significance of a salmon, to a development corporation, or to a peoples whose millennia old culture has revolved around that relative? The Natural History Museum (nonprofit) has launched a powerful visual narrative project, bringing together stories of Bristol Bay, the Salish Sea, the Klamath River and the Snake River. United by their resistance to development projects that threaten their cultural preservation and subsistence food systems, the Yupik, Alutiiq and Dena’ina peoples of Bristol Bay, the Lummi Nation, the Yurok Tribe and the Nez Perce Tribe enter into a regional dialogue that unsettles Western conceptions of land, food, and objecthood. Through leadership of community members, the emergent digital storytelling and interactive journalism project focuses on four Native-led salmon struggles, as Native relationship to land is mobilized as opposition to extraction, and the storytelling power of cultural objects reestablishes cross-regional narratives of reciprocity and intergenerational care. This reveals both similar and diverse techniques of subversion and victories of sovereignty by these groups, and opens the potential for future transnational collaboration. Through this work, we see great opportunity for network building and collective emergence as Indigenous groups across the Pacific Northwest discursively and psychically reclaim their lands, cultures, and identities.
https://alumni.wwu.edu/event/salmon-people-tracing-indigenous-resistance-across-pacific-northwest
