First Fish First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim [Paperback]

Judith Roche (Author), Meg McHutchison (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2003

The arc of land and water forming the North Pacific Rim is a cut lace work of rivers running to the great ocean. The salmon, sacred to people who lived along the pathways of its journey, once engorged these rivers, but no more. Thirteen writers from cultures profoundly connected to salmon were asked to write about "the fish of the gods" from both a historical and a contemporary perspective. These writers from two continents and four countries are Ainu from Japan; Nyvkh from Sakhalin; Ulchi from Siberia; Okanagan and Coastal Salish from Canada; and Makah, Warm Springs and Spokane from the United States. Their writing celebrates the blessedness and mourns the loss of the salmon while alerting us to current dangers and conditions.

Editorial Reviews

Review

First Fish, First People provides an international sharing of respect for salmon, a refreshing alternative to the national grasping for a mere resource and to the multinational corporate monopolization of what may become a luxury food ... No journalist should write about salmon issues, and no politician or fisheries official should make a decision concerning salmon policy, before reading this book.
– John Steckley, CBRA --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Judith Roche is the author of two collections of poetry, “Myrrh/My Life as a Screamer” and “Ghosts". She has taught poetry at various universities and schools around the Northwest, and serves as Literary Arts Director for Bumbershoot for One Reel. Meg McHutchison is a project director for One Reel, a screenwriter, and a former editor of the literary art magazine Opinion Rag Oh Yeah? Uh Huh! and REFLEX, the NW forum on Visual Art. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 204 pages
• Publisher: University of Washington Press; 1st edition (June 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0295977396
• ISBN-13: 978-0295977393
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 8.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,021,163 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not enough stars on Amazons scale, February 12, 2001

By 

Edward Bosnar - See all my reviews

This review is from: First Fish First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim (Paperback)

This collection of poems, stories, narratives, folktales, oral histories and essays very aptly portrays the vital importance of salmon to the native peoples of the entire northern Pacific rim - not just as a food resource, but as a basis for their culture and a component of their identities. Several of the contributions, particularly an essay by Jeanette Armstrong, note how sustainable yield was applied in salmon fishing for thousands of years and how the discarding of this principle in modern times has led to the excessive depletion and near extinction of this species. Since I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, I am more or less familiar with the importance of salmon to the local economies and the Native American cultures of the region, so I found the sections of the book dealing with the Ainu of Japan, the Ulchi of eastern Siberia and the Nyvkhs of Sakhalin particularly informative and enjoyable. It is also a bit depressing to learn that like the U.S. and Canada (although not nearly as brutally), Japan and the USSR/Russia similarly mistreated the local populations by, among other things, limiting or restricting their access to traditional salmon runs and/or trying to force them to adopt non-traditional ways of life (assimilation). "First Fish, First People" may be attractively published, with striking cover art and attractive photos and illustrations, but it is not a coffee-table book - its diverse contributions, taken together, outline a philosophy of respect for and wise use of natural resources, as well as (and just as importantly) respect for different cultures and different ways of life. It is almost a cliche to say that it is high time that such lessons sink in at all levels of our modern globalized and hyper-industrial societies.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars International perspectives, September 21, 2000

By 

James Stripes - See all my reviews

This review is from: First Fish First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim (Paperback)

This book is a work of art, and provides evidence that the University of Washington Press, through its cooperation with other smaller publishers (such as One Reel) is doing the work that needs to be done in Northwest history and cultural studies.

This book is a collection of perpectives on salmon from representatives of the peoples around the pacific rim whose lives have centered on salmon for thousands of years. The contributors are talented indigenous writers from the United States, Canada, Japan, and Siberia. The engaging text is amply illustrated with historic and contemporary photographs, as well as drawings. The historic photographs are not the same ones that usually appear. For example, nearly every book on salmon in the nortwest has a twentieth century photograph of Indians fishing at Celilo Falls. Most books use the same photo. This book uses one that features in the forground the cable system that was used to get down to the fishing platforms, with the fishing platforms themselves in the background.

Some of the work in this book has been published elsewhere. But the context it is given here accentuates it in useful ways. For example, Sherman Alexie's poem, "The Place Where Ghosts of Salmon Jump," is engraved into a sculpture in Overlook Park behind the Spokane Public Library and is published in _The Summer of Black Widows_. But in this book it appears beside a nice photograph of the falls as it appears today, and a photo of Mr. Alexie standing on the footbridge above a section of the falls pointing downstream.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great read on Salmon as a cultural driver in the N.Pacific., March 31, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: First Fish First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim (Paperback)

Buy it especially for the Sherman Alexix poen at the beginning. It's touches the core of the Salmon environmental and cultural dilemna in the Northwest.