What do you think?
Rate this book
Totem Salmon : Life Lessons from Another Species
Part lyrical natural history, part social and philosophical manifesto, Totem Salmon tells the story of a determined band of locals who've worked for over two decades to save one of the last purely native species of salmon in California. The book-call it the zen of salmon restoration-traces the evolution of the Mattole River Valley community in northern California as it learns to undo the results of rapacious logging practices; to invent ways to trap wild salmon for propagation; and to forge alliances between people who sometimes agree on only one thing-that there is nothing on earth like a Mattole king salmon.
House writes from streamside: "I think I can hear through the cascades of sound a systematic plop, plop, plop, as if pieces of fruit are being dropped into the water. Sometimes this is the sound of a fish searching for the opening upstream; sometimes it is not. I breathe quietly and wait." Freeman House's writing about fish and fishing is erotic, deeply observed, and simply some of the best writing on the subject in recent literature.
House tells the story of the annual fishing rituals of the indigenous peoples of the Klamath River in northern California, one that relies on little-known early ethnographic studies and on indigenous voices-a remarkable story of self-regulation that unites people and place. And his riffs on the colorful early history of American hatcheries, on property rights, and on the "happiness of the state" show precisely why he's considered a West Coast visionary.
Petitions to list a dozen West Coast salmon runs under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act make saving salmon an issue poised to consume the Pacific West. "Never before, said Federal officials, has so much land or so many people been given notice that they will have to alter their lives to restore a wild species" ( New York Times, 2/27/98). Totem Salmon is set to become the essential read for this newest chapter in our relations with other wild things.
House writes from streamside: "I think I can hear through the cascades of sound a systematic plop, plop, plop, as if pieces of fruit are being dropped into the water. Sometimes this is the sound of a fish searching for the opening upstream; sometimes it is not. I breathe quietly and wait." Freeman House's writing about fish and fishing is erotic, deeply observed, and simply some of the best writing on the subject in recent literature.
House tells the story of the annual fishing rituals of the indigenous peoples of the Klamath River in northern California, one that relies on little-known early ethnographic studies and on indigenous voices-a remarkable story of self-regulation that unites people and place. And his riffs on the colorful early history of American hatcheries, on property rights, and on the "happiness of the state" show precisely why he's considered a West Coast visionary.
Petitions to list a dozen West Coast salmon runs under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act make saving salmon an issue poised to consume the Pacific West. "Never before, said Federal officials, has so much land or so many people been given notice that they will have to alter their lives to restore a wild species" ( New York Times, 2/27/98). Totem Salmon is set to become the essential read for this newest chapter in our relations with other wild things.
248 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
12 people are currently reading
254 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
December 11, 2012
This is one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read. I particularly appreciated the idea/need to "rediscover ourselves as people of place"; the awe to look at one species in such depth; how powerful it is to build movements collectively with people who may at first seem "on the opposite side"; and the power of the earth and environment to recover in spite of human efforts to do otherwise.
I went through an intense process while reading this book of feeling extreme grief about the losses incurred by industrialization/agriculture/colonialism - particularly about the loss of things I never even knew about. And somewhere while reading this book, I also read part of a book by Thich Nhat Hanh about death, in which he says that things are not dead or gone, but rather the conditions change. I found this idea immensely helpful in relation to environment, place, species, etc - that life is always there, but sometimes the conditions do not allow it. Life will "be back" so to speak, when the conditions are there.
I went through an intense process while reading this book of feeling extreme grief about the losses incurred by industrialization/agriculture/colonialism - particularly about the loss of things I never even knew about. And somewhere while reading this book, I also read part of a book by Thich Nhat Hanh about death, in which he says that things are not dead or gone, but rather the conditions change. I found this idea immensely helpful in relation to environment, place, species, etc - that life is always there, but sometimes the conditions do not allow it. Life will "be back" so to speak, when the conditions are there.
March 31, 2021
A good read for anyone working in salmon conservation, fisheries or living in Humboldt County and California in general.
Here's a quote that I think represents the book as a whole:
"Engaging the lives of wild salmon in a single watershed has created a situation wherein the peoples of our place have begun to experience themselves as functional parts of the place itself".
Of course the book is a little dated now in terms of restoration data, but it is awesome to learn about the roots of the community-based restoration efforts of the Mattole, and to know that they are carrying on strong today is hopeful. I appreciated House's recognition of his own whiteness in this wild landscape originally stewarded for generations by the Mattole people.
I loved reading about House's experiences handling and observing live salmonids. I could feel the smooth scales, taste the rain, smell the carcasses mingle with the fresh, rain-soaked mosses, and hear the caudal fins smacking against the inside of the trap box while I read House's words. Made me miss being in the creek and reminded me of how grateful that I have had the privilege to work with wild salmonids.
This was a pleasant read for me and I especially enjoyed the epilogue. :)
Here's a quote that I think represents the book as a whole:
"Engaging the lives of wild salmon in a single watershed has created a situation wherein the peoples of our place have begun to experience themselves as functional parts of the place itself".
Of course the book is a little dated now in terms of restoration data, but it is awesome to learn about the roots of the community-based restoration efforts of the Mattole, and to know that they are carrying on strong today is hopeful. I appreciated House's recognition of his own whiteness in this wild landscape originally stewarded for generations by the Mattole people.
I loved reading about House's experiences handling and observing live salmonids. I could feel the smooth scales, taste the rain, smell the carcasses mingle with the fresh, rain-soaked mosses, and hear the caudal fins smacking against the inside of the trap box while I read House's words. Made me miss being in the creek and reminded me of how grateful that I have had the privilege to work with wild salmonids.
This was a pleasant read for me and I especially enjoyed the epilogue. :)
June 1, 2025
I read this book lent from Meg with her annotations, which was special. I read it in the Salmon River on rocks or the bank in the town of Salmon, ID where I do work focused on salmon conservation. This book shows that salmon runs and community among humans are part of the same (currently unbalanced) system. This is a lesson I’m learning and want to continue to keep central in my life and career. I could think about salmon forever. I am also learning a lot about the importance of building a relationship with the land you live on during my time in Salmon, and this book echoes that very well. It is everything I hope for in many many ways.
February 26, 2018
Salmon, who spend most of their lives hidden from us in the vast oceans, return to us to instruct us and feed us. They focus our attention on some of the smaller increments of our natural world—the streams that run through our rural homes or beneath our urban structures—at the same time as they instruct us regarding the indivisible relationship of one locale to another and the life lessons to be learned from other species. (199)
It doesn’t take an expert in the manipulation of statistics to understand that the survival of the entire human species depends on a sustainable relationship to the local expression of the processes of the biosphere. From everything one can learn through the nearly impenetrable veil of modern history, prehistoric humans acted out this latter assumption for most of our species’ time on Earth. The very roots of the word indigenous mean “of a place.” But the seductive social mechanics of the relatively recent Industrial Revolution have been so successful that even as we humans have exhausted our sources of sustenance, we have convinced ourselves that there is no other way to act. We have engaged in a process of purposeful and systematic forgetting; we have lost previous models of a more elegantly balanced life among humans, and we have convinced each other that it is fruitlessly utopian to imagine any other way of life. (49)
As an adjective, the word wild is used so indiscriminately as to muddle our thinking. Wild youth. Wild hair. Wild beast. But if the word is fastidiously defined to describe a homeostatic, self-organized relationship that does not require management from outside itself, then it can provide us with a meditation large enough to occupy a lifetime. By this definition our breath is wild. Our heartbeat is wild. Our digestive systems are wild, made up as they are of multiple organism largely defined by their mutual function. Any cubic foot of healthy soil is a relational cell of the wild of such complexity as to define rational analysis. By engaging the health of another species, by engaging salmon as an expression of our own survival, could we turn ourselves and our neighbors in the direction of a wilder, self-organizing relationship to each other and to the world close at hand? (133–4)
After ten thousand years of a different set of relationships between people and place, the reconstructed landscape with its purely economic rationale [has] become the only context in which human social organization could imagine itself. (141)
Consensus needs to be understood as the practice of community-building in the context of living places. Its appropriate analog is not politics but the processes of natural succession. It is an ongoing collective meditation that allows for conflicting ideologies to gradually be dissolved by a growing sense of mutuality. (200)
When we begin to focus on what might be right—the appropriate contexts, scales, and economies in which human communities might immerse themselves in local expressions of the planet—we find ourselves creating new language. As a species, we have become a population of refugees, longing for homes we remember only faintly, as we remember dreams. The process of reconstructing and immersing ourselves in our own specific places at times resembles the effort to recreate the memory of a victim of amnesia. (213)
To a certain degree (and it is a measure of our intelligence to be aware to what degree), the indicator of our success is not the avoidance of co-optation but to have designed strategies that cannot be co-opted without a fundamental change on the part of the larger socioeconomic system. (214)
February 15, 2022
Nuanced and informative account of a local and regional ecosystem and how the community took up its stewardship in a unique way. A useful model of local stewardship; gives me hope.
June 6, 2012
"My straining senses slow down the sound so that each of its parts can be heard separately. A hiss, barely perceptible, as the fish muscles itself right out of its living medium; silence like a dozen monks pausing too long between the strophes of a chant as the creature arcs through the dangerous air; a crash as of a basketball going through a plate glass window as he or she returns to the velvet embrace of the water; and then a thousand tiny bells struck once only as the shards of water fall and the surface of the stream regains its viscous integrity."
"I flick on my headlamp and the whole backwater pool seems to leap toward me. The silver streak that crosses the enclosure in an instant is a flash of lightning within my skull, one which heals the wound that has separated me from this moment -- from any moment. The encounter is so perfectly complex, timeless, and reciprocal that it takes on an objective reality of its own. I am able to walk around it as if it were a block of carved stone. If my feelings could be reduced to a chemical formula, the experience would be a clear solution made up of equal parts of dumb wonder and clean exhilaration, colored through with a sense of abiding dread. I could write a book about it."
And here it is.
The Mattole River, where this story takes place, flows from the northwestern tip of California's Mendocino County, first a dozen miles northeast and then about sixty miles northwest through remote rural Humboldt County to its mouth at Petrolia. What keeps the river from reaching the Pacific Ocean any sooner is the King Range rising precipitously from the "Lost Coast", a stretch of beach frequented only by hikers and the occasional small plane. Getting to the Mattole from the freeway is at least an hour's drive on winding country roads.
This watershed, like much of southern Humboldt County, was logged in the fifties and sixties, and in the late sixties and seventies a substantial portion of it was sold to urban refugees, "reinhabitants". Over the next three decades, quite a few of them committed to the task of restoring the watershed to health. Two of these were David Simpson and Freeman House who together conceived and founded the Mattole Watershed Salmon Support Group. "Totem Salmon" tells the story of this work.
Salmon is an indicator species. Their health, as a population, closely tracks the health of the watershed to which they return. If you want to know how well a river valley is doing in the Pacific Northwest, look at the salmon runs, if there are any left. The principal enemy of the salmon is silt, produced by erosion usually from badly built roads and culverts, and from logging. Salmon need clean gravel in the streambed for eggs to survive and hatch. Well forested valleys with little erosion provide the best stream habitat for hatching and rearing salmon.
In 1950, before logging, it is recalled by the older Mattole valley residents, that, when they were running, "you could walk across the river on the backs of the salmon". In 1980, before restoration work began, the runs were down to perhaps 200 fish. More, those fish were the last wild salmon run in the state.
Looking back after reading the book, one could see the first phrase, "I am alone...", as a key to the work. Rooted in an explicit sense of self, spiraling out through sensory subtleties of immediate nature, to the larger cultural complexities, Mr. House melds what are usually seen as distinct worlds into a coherent portrait of a personal and multi-species reality. Like the salmon traversing the several worlds of ocean, river, air and creek, the personal, philosophical, cultural, historical, administrative, ecological, and cosmic threads are finely woven into a narrative yielding a shimmering presence of spirit and nature.
The book is a deeply enjoyable memoir of a long personal relationship with salmon. Along the way we see the history of the Euro-American relationship with this species, and that of the Native-American people who were here managing these watersheds long before. We learn of the state and federal administrative context of salmon management and the history of our, first, ignorance, and then, study of the anadromous species and their rivers. In clear and moving images, and with affection and humor, we see the people on the Mattole River who have joined hands for eighteen years to rescue this last wild run of salmon from extinction. Lastly we see the hopeful results and the tenuous circumstances of their work.
We might expect it to be a text for salmon restoration, and while the specifics are there they are widely scattered throughout the book. More attention is given to the wider question of how we got here, and how we can get through this to a more wholesome, rooted, and appreciative life in our particular place. If it is a text -- and Mr. House would say it is not -- it is a meta-instructional one, showing a way to become a people who will do the right thing for the watershed and thus for the salmon. The personal explorations in the book demonstrate by example the message beneath the text: by immersing ourselves in the reality of our local valley we can rescue both the health of our watersheds and our sense of ourselves. In the end, we see that they are the same journey; the salmon reflect to us our understanding of self and place.
The epilogue quotes Paul Schell, Mayor of Seattle, "Ironically, as we work to save the salmon, it may turn out that the salmon save us."
"I flick on my headlamp and the whole backwater pool seems to leap toward me. The silver streak that crosses the enclosure in an instant is a flash of lightning within my skull, one which heals the wound that has separated me from this moment -- from any moment. The encounter is so perfectly complex, timeless, and reciprocal that it takes on an objective reality of its own. I am able to walk around it as if it were a block of carved stone. If my feelings could be reduced to a chemical formula, the experience would be a clear solution made up of equal parts of dumb wonder and clean exhilaration, colored through with a sense of abiding dread. I could write a book about it."
And here it is.
The Mattole River, where this story takes place, flows from the northwestern tip of California's Mendocino County, first a dozen miles northeast and then about sixty miles northwest through remote rural Humboldt County to its mouth at Petrolia. What keeps the river from reaching the Pacific Ocean any sooner is the King Range rising precipitously from the "Lost Coast", a stretch of beach frequented only by hikers and the occasional small plane. Getting to the Mattole from the freeway is at least an hour's drive on winding country roads.
This watershed, like much of southern Humboldt County, was logged in the fifties and sixties, and in the late sixties and seventies a substantial portion of it was sold to urban refugees, "reinhabitants". Over the next three decades, quite a few of them committed to the task of restoring the watershed to health. Two of these were David Simpson and Freeman House who together conceived and founded the Mattole Watershed Salmon Support Group. "Totem Salmon" tells the story of this work.
Salmon is an indicator species. Their health, as a population, closely tracks the health of the watershed to which they return. If you want to know how well a river valley is doing in the Pacific Northwest, look at the salmon runs, if there are any left. The principal enemy of the salmon is silt, produced by erosion usually from badly built roads and culverts, and from logging. Salmon need clean gravel in the streambed for eggs to survive and hatch. Well forested valleys with little erosion provide the best stream habitat for hatching and rearing salmon.
In 1950, before logging, it is recalled by the older Mattole valley residents, that, when they were running, "you could walk across the river on the backs of the salmon". In 1980, before restoration work began, the runs were down to perhaps 200 fish. More, those fish were the last wild salmon run in the state.
Looking back after reading the book, one could see the first phrase, "I am alone...", as a key to the work. Rooted in an explicit sense of self, spiraling out through sensory subtleties of immediate nature, to the larger cultural complexities, Mr. House melds what are usually seen as distinct worlds into a coherent portrait of a personal and multi-species reality. Like the salmon traversing the several worlds of ocean, river, air and creek, the personal, philosophical, cultural, historical, administrative, ecological, and cosmic threads are finely woven into a narrative yielding a shimmering presence of spirit and nature.
The book is a deeply enjoyable memoir of a long personal relationship with salmon. Along the way we see the history of the Euro-American relationship with this species, and that of the Native-American people who were here managing these watersheds long before. We learn of the state and federal administrative context of salmon management and the history of our, first, ignorance, and then, study of the anadromous species and their rivers. In clear and moving images, and with affection and humor, we see the people on the Mattole River who have joined hands for eighteen years to rescue this last wild run of salmon from extinction. Lastly we see the hopeful results and the tenuous circumstances of their work.
We might expect it to be a text for salmon restoration, and while the specifics are there they are widely scattered throughout the book. More attention is given to the wider question of how we got here, and how we can get through this to a more wholesome, rooted, and appreciative life in our particular place. If it is a text -- and Mr. House would say it is not -- it is a meta-instructional one, showing a way to become a people who will do the right thing for the watershed and thus for the salmon. The personal explorations in the book demonstrate by example the message beneath the text: by immersing ourselves in the reality of our local valley we can rescue both the health of our watersheds and our sense of ourselves. In the end, we see that they are the same journey; the salmon reflect to us our understanding of self and place.
The epilogue quotes Paul Schell, Mayor of Seattle, "Ironically, as we work to save the salmon, it may turn out that the salmon save us."
Read
February 12, 2025I found this so much more engaging and captivating than I had anticipated. I really liked the first sections of the book and the more personal descriptions--his observations, his moving through the water. I think there's some momentum lost towards the final third of the book. Still amazing and enlightening and reminds me of fun woodsy uncles.
I almost cried
I almost cried
August 28, 2021
Re-read an old classic...inspirational
February 27, 2015
"In one ancient language the word memory derives from a word meaning mindful,
In another, from a word to describe a witness,
In yet another it means, at root, to grieve.
To witness mindfully is to grieve for what has been lost" (and to be present for all that is)
Freeman House
- I hope I never forget this great book. I'm striving to become " indigenous "! Even though I will never be local. I hope my roots I've planted and keep on planting; will live on and on for generations. With Thanks...
In another, from a word to describe a witness,
In yet another it means, at root, to grieve.
To witness mindfully is to grieve for what has been lost" (and to be present for all that is)
Freeman House
- I hope I never forget this great book. I'm striving to become " indigenous "! Even though I will never be local. I hope my roots I've planted and keep on planting; will live on and on for generations. With Thanks...
August 22, 2009
Book is about a guy who organizes a set of people to try to save the salmon on a northern california river.
This book is actually really interesting. he has a bit of a breathy writing style, but outside of that really interesting stories about:
- early salmon biology theories and breeding debacles
- government bureaucracy
- grass roots marketing
- salmon
worth any northwesterner reading to understand such an important topic from the ground level better.
This book is actually really interesting. he has a bit of a breathy writing style, but outside of that really interesting stories about:
- early salmon biology theories and breeding debacles
- government bureaucracy
- grass roots marketing
- salmon
worth any northwesterner reading to understand such an important topic from the ground level better.
May 24, 2012
I loved this book for a variety of reasons. First because it is so beautifully written. Second because Freeman House is telling an interesting and important story about how the salmon habitat restoration ideas evolved in his personal region and has now spread to many other watersheds. Third because the delightful stories about the colorful characters who live and work near him.
It is the best of science writing, living history, and entertaining reading all at once. Poetic.
February 19, 2008
In the 70's and 80's we owned a place on a small tributary to the Mattole. This book really captures the people and the sense of place in the Mattole Watershed. When someone writes about a place I know, I often find myself irritated because I notice small things that the author got wrong. I found none of this in Totem Salmon.
August 20, 2008
This was a wonderful literary story set on the Mattole River, where I grew up. The author chronicles a ragtag team of environmentalists who come together against all odds to save the salmon in a forgotten river on the Lost Coast.
January 25, 2008
A community works to save the salmon and a river. Uplifting.
October 15, 2008
Great book about ecology and the ecology movement in small community in northern california. definite implications for my life in oregon and inspiration.
Read
December 18, 2020One of my favorite books. It's so lovely, lyrical, regional, historical, personal.
Want to read
January 5, 2009I've read the first 1/3 of this. Good so far, but don't have the time to finish it for now.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews