Two short documentaries about our Tribe’s journey to justice and salmon return will be screened at the Indian Education Film Festival, which is being held at the Shasta Learning Center (Old Nova), Friday – Sunday, Nov. 4-6.
We’ll screen the 15-minute promotional short for Will Doolittle‘s upcoming feature documentary Dancing Salmon Home about our journey to New Zealand to sing and dance for our salmon as well as our efforts to bring them home.
We’ll also show Will’s 22-minute film, Ceremony Comes Home, about our 2006 Coming of Age ceremony for Marine Sisk, which was disrupted by recreational boaters who motored through the McCloud River site and heckled us and our guests.
The films will be followed by a question and answer forum with tribal members. Tickets can be brought for $1 at the door, and we will also have our jewelry and our Sacred Salmon Cards for sale.
All proceeds will go towards our efforts to return the salmon, protect our sacred sites and our fight for justice.
Location:
Shasta Learning Center, 2200 Eureka Way , Redding , 96001
Winnemem Wintu Spiritual Leader and Tribal Chief Caleen Sisk-Franco published an opinion piece in the Redding Record-Searchlight today stating that the Tribe supports local ranchers and sees them as allies in Central Valley salmon recovery.
We have many stories about the thick salmon runs that once spawned in the McCloud River; we remember how the land and the water used to be when the salmon were here; we more than anyone know what will be lost if all of our salmon are lost.
Many of the ranchers on Cow Creek have held their family land for a few generations, and I imagine they heard yarns from their grandpas and great-grandpas about the salmon runs that used to charge through their land.
Their oral history might not stretch as far back as ours, but I bet a love for salmon exists in the hearts of many of those ranchers. That is why my tribe would like to work with them as salmon allies.
Caleen wrote the piece in response to an Oct. 11 story – “Ranchers wary over fish barrier count on Cow Creek” – about a recent meeting between U.S. Fish and Wildlife and Cow Creek ranchers, who are worried about the agency’s effort to survey salmon barriers on the waterway they depend on for irrigation.
Though we are investigating other swimway options, one way we believe our migrating McCloud River salmon could get around Shasta Dam is via Cow, Little Cow and Dry Creeks. See the map below:
Arron Sisk fillets a Trinity River salmon last fall. We have to rely on receiving salmon from other tribes because of the Shasta Dam.
Winnemem Wintu Tribal Member Ricardo Torres will discuss the Tribe’s efforts to return our salmon home to the McCloud River at the 2011 Community Food Summit tomorrow, Sept. 13, at the Sacramento Native American Health Center (SNAHC). Torres is also Chair of the SNAHC Board of Directors.
Scheduled for 10 a.m. – 1 p.m at the SNAHC building, 2022 J St., the summit is part of the “Let’s Move! in Indian Country” initiative which is a joint effort between First Lady Michelle Obama and Indian Health Services to improve nutrition and wellness in native communities.
But our access to salmon has been limited, and we believe it’s important for our physical health that salmon become a regular part of our diet again.
A growing body of research supports what indigenous people have long known, it’s in a salmon people’s genes to eat salmon.
“Salmon are the ultimate source of good health for California Indians that has been missing from our diets for generations,” said Spiritual Leader and Traditional Chief Caleen Sisk-Franco. “We need salmon back in our rivers and back in our diets for balance to return to our world.”
The Human Right to Water, which would guarantee all people affordable access to clean water and sanitation, is an important cause to the Winnemem, as we believe the right must also include spiritual access to water.
More than 20 Winnemem, coincidentally, were at the state capitol Wednesday where we successfully helped lobby for the unanimous passage on the Senate floor of Assembly Bill 1221, which would help federally unrecognized tribes improve water quality and sanitation in their communities.
“Water is sacred, water is Life for all,” commented Caleen Sisk-Franco, Chief and Spiritual Leader of the Winnemem. “Just as all need to breathe Air, so should be the waters be for all, not just those who market water and ruin the rest in poor planning.”
Sunrise Ceremony at the Meadow with Mt. Shasta in view.
This year’s Coonrod Ceremony, held at our sacred meadow near Mt. Shasta, was one of the most powerful and largest ceremonies in years, said Winnemem Wintu Spiritual Leader and Traditional Chief Caleen Sisk-Franco.
“It was a wonderful ceremony. There was so much goodness and happiness, and that made it very powerful,” Caleen said. “We enjoyed all of our friends who attended, new and old, and we enjoyed every minute with their good hearts and good prayers.”
It was also a ceremony with many special guests. Members of our Maori family – John and Gloria Wilkie and Pauline Reid of the Waitaha Māmoe Fisher People – traveled across the Pacific to be with us for ceremony and support our efforts to bring the McCloud salmon home from the Rakaia River in New Zealand. Along with them came Dirk Barr, New Zealand Fish and Game’s manager of the salmon hatcheries, who said the people of New Zealand want to return the salmon to the Winnemem, the salmon’s original people.
Aztec Dancers joined us in dancing to restore fire and water and fight climate change.
Indigenous leader and writer Winona LaDuke also attended and charmed us by telling the tale of how she helped return her Tribe’s sturgeon to the lakes back home in the Midwest, a success story we hope to replicate with our quest to return our salmon to the McCloud River (Winnemem Waywakit). Representatives from the Hawaiian embassy also traveled to our ceremony, and pledged to support our salmon project.
On Friday, the Winnemem and many of our supporters took the place of our missing sacred fish during the spiritual salmon trek at the McCloud Falls. At the lower falls, we jumped off 15 to 20-foot cliffs into a churning pool. At the Middle Falls, an impressive sight at 50-feet tall and 100-feet wide, our salmon people swam under the waterfall, just like salmon who are about to start leaping up the falls. Then at the Upper falls, everyone had to brave the cold, glacial water and grab a rock from the bottom
Because of the Shasta Dam, the salmon haven’t been able to spawn in the McCloud River since World War II. So it’s our job as salmon people to swim the river for them.
The Winnemem, our Maori allies, and Winona LaDuke meet about McCloud salmon with Brian Ellrott and Gary Sprague from NOAA
NOAA, they said, is interested in working with the Winnemem and looking at our plan to use natural creeks to move salmon around the Shasta Dam.
Ellrott said NOAA believes that for wild salmon to survive climate change, they will need to have passage around big dams like Shasta, so they can return to the chilly waters of mountain rivers like the McCloud and Upper Sacramento.
NOAA is investigating using trap-and-haul methods to get salmon around the dam, but he said the Winnemem’s plan could provide a more cost-effective method. But both he and Sprague said they would need to learn more about the Winnemem’s plan.
“Right now, there is not a lot of support for wild salmon restoration,” Ellrott said. “We’re going to need all the allies we can get.”
According to the Winnemem’s plan, the salmon would travel around the dam using Little Cow Creek and Dry Creek. A channel, about a quarter mile in length, would have to be constructed to connect Dry Creek to the reservoir, Sisk-Franco said. From there, the salmon would have to swim through Shasta Lake, the dam’s reservoir, to get to the McCloud River waters.
The tribe and NOAA scientists went on discuss hypothetical ways to guide the spawning salmon and salmon smolts through the reservoir. They also discussed potential obstacles such as a PG&E hydroelectric project that currently diverts water from the McCloud, making the flows too low and the water too warm for spawning salmon.
The NOAA officials and Winnemem expressed a mutual desire to work together on these issues.
“We want to work with you as brothers,” Winnemem Tribal Member Mark Miyoshi told Ellrott and Sprague. “We want to work together to save life, to be with life, to bring salmon back. That’s what we want.”
A week later, the Winnemem and our New Zealand supporters traveled to Sacramento and met with more NOAA staff, including the Endangered Species Act Specialist, a staff attorney and the Sacramento River basin manager.
The NOAA officials again expressed a great desire to collaborate, but also said they needed more information about the origins of the salmon in the Rakaia River, which we will work on providing. We are confident NOAA will eventually be satisfied with our evidence that the Rakaia salmon are descended from McCloud River salmon.
They also explained some of the regulatory framework they have to work through, especially the Endangered Species Act, and how we will need to work together to make sure the Winnemem’s salmon restoration plan also produces the goals that they’re mandated to accomplish.
While there are some issues to work through, we are greatly encouraged by these initial meetings, and NOAA and the Winnemem have begun working on a Memorandum of Agreement to outline the nature of our partnership.
NOAA officials have already made plans to visit our village and take a tour of the creeks in late September.
The time has come for our salmon return, and we believe we made some important steps this past week.
During Coonrod, we jump off the McCloud Lower Falls and follow the path of the salmon so the river remembers our sacred fish are supposed to be there.
Our annual Coonrod Ceremony will be held Aug. 11-14 at Coonrod Flat near the town of McCloud. We are ready for all our visitors including our dear friends from New Zealand: John and Gloria Wilkie, Pauline Reid, and Dirk Barr, manager of the Montrose Hatchery which helps our McCloud River salmon thrive over there in the Rakaia River.
They were instrumental in making our visit to New Zealand to sing to our salmon a successful one, and now they are continuing to support us in our quest to return our salmon home.
We have also have several native dance groups coming to dance and strengthen our prayers for the return of the salmon. We will also unveil an old time Fire and Water dance to help bring the Earth into balance.
If you’ve been invited, take I-5 north of Redding, exit left on Highway 89 to Pilgrim Creek Rd. Turn left on Pilgrim Creek Rd, go about 9 miles, and look for signs on the right to Ceremony grounds.
Traditional Hereditary Chief and Spiritual Leader Caleen Sisk-Franco arrives on the other side of river, ready to receive the girls when they swim across.
After printing a story about the postponement of our Bałas Chonas (Coming of Age Ceremony) because of the threat of public interference, the Record-Searchlight published two editorials supporting our fight to hold the ceremony in peace.
But simply as a matter of decency, the law ought to give federal officials the power to recognize bona-fide traditional ceremonies and make modest, occasional accommodations for them when appropriate. We’re not talking about closing down Lake Shasta here, but a 300-foot section of a lake that when full has 46 square miles available for boaters.
In the second “Hecklers need a rite of passage”, publisher Silas Lyons writes eloquently about his admiration of the ceremony and questions the integrity of the boaters who have intruded in past years.
These Winnemem Wintu girls have an opportunity to experience the rite of passage, and thousands of years of experience testifies to the truth that they’ll be better for it. So will their community. The tribe’s determination to try to have the ceremonies, and to do them right, is an inspiration.
We thank the Record-Searchlight for their coverage and support. We will need it as we continue to fight for a mandatory closure in 2012.
Filmmaker Will Doolittle has produced a short documentary about the Salmon Ceremony we held June 6 at the Glen Cove spiritual encampment. Natives and non-natives alike have occupied the shellmound burial ground site for nearly two months to protect it from being razed by the local recreation district.
Glen Cove is located on the banks of the Carquinez Strait, which links the Sacramento Delta to the San Francisco Bay. The ecologically rich estuary is a vital part of the salmon’s life cycle, and, tragically, thousands of endangered Chinook salmon and millions of splittail have been killed recently by the Delta Pumps, which divert vast amounts of water to industrial agriculture.
As Traditional Hereditary Chief and Spiritual Leader Caleen Sisk-Franco said:
“We’re on a journey to bring back our salmon, to sing to the salmon, to bring them home again, to clean the waters up and down the state, so they can continue to be here.”
Also, check out the site for Will’s 60-minute documentary, Dancing Salmon Home, about our journey to New Zealand, the first step in returning our salmon back to the McCloud. The documentary is currently in production.
Sitting upon a rocky perch, high above the McCloud River canyon, Winnemem Wintu Tribal Member Michael Preston takes a GPS reading at the sacred Eagle Rock.
With help from the DataCenter, the Sacred Land Film Project and the Pacific Institute, the Winnemem Wintu Tribe was trained to use Global Positioning System (GPS) devices and software this past weekend for a new effort to use technology to protect and reclaim traditional lands and sacred places.
In addition to collecting geographic data and creating maps, the Tribe will also gather oral histories and personal memories of traditional sites. This will improve the cultural knowledge of the entire Tribe as well as build strong evidence for the Tribe’s cultural, spiritual and generational ties to their sacred places.
Collecting all this data will also help correct errors early “explorers” made in mapping Winnemem territory, errors that to this day are often used to hinder or obstruct the Winnemem’s voice in development projects within their homelands on the McCloud River (Winnemem Waywakit) watershed.
“It’s time to put the Winnemem back on the map,” said Traditional Hereditary Chief and Spiritual Leader Caleen Sisk-Franco.”We used to believe we had to keep these locations secret to protect them. But now houses are being built in places we’d never thought we see them. Development is coming, and I think we have to collect this information and decide what we need to share in order to protect our sacred places.”
Under a recently approved plan by the Greater Vallejo Recreation District, the shellmound, a traditional burial ground, would be desecrated to add a parking lot, a bathroom, several paved trails and grade the area to provide views of the water to nearby homeowners.
Glen Cove is located on the coast of the Carquinez Strait, a natural tidal channel that connects the Sacramento Delta with the San Francisco Bay.
The Delta, an ecologically rich and diverse estuary, is vital to the life cycle of California salmon, which use it to gain strength and acclimate from fresh water to salt water and vice versa.
The Winnemem held a salmon ceremony at Glen Cove June 5, singing and lighting the sacred fire to help the salmon find their way through the Delta’s man-made perils.
Protectglencove.org published a well-done story about the ceremony with important links:
Caleen Sisk-Franco, Winnemem Wintu Chief and Spiritual Leader, explained why the Winnemem were holding a ceremony for at Glen Cove:
“This is the estuary that we rely upon. Its really kind of a magical place. Here, the salmon change their whole way of being, from salt water to fresh water. Our salmon are swimming through here, and so we should do our part: to stand up and speak for the salmon. Thats why we were given voices.
To learn more about the ceremony, Glen Cove and the Delta, view the slideshow below.
Two short documentaries about our Tribe’s journey to justice and salmon return will be screened at the Indian Education Film Festival, which is being held at the Shasta Learning Center (Old Nova), Friday – Sunday, Nov. 4-6.
