In Between Worlds
Amidst climate chaos, the Winnemem Wintu Tribe fights to keep a sacred promise to return their ancestral Chinook salmon to California waters, just as salmon runs across the world are collapsing. Guided by Chief Caleen Sisk, they must journey to New Zealand where miraculously, the genetic descendants of their salmon survived.
“Whatever happens to the salmon, happens to us.” So says Chief Caleen who leads the Winnemem Wintu tribe in fulfilling a promise her people made at the beginning of time: to forever speak up for the salmon.
Violently dispossessed from their lands, federally unrecognized & reduced to 126 members living in trailers outside of Redding, CA, Winnemem Wintu’s deliberate eradication tracks closely with devastating salmon declines dating from the Gold Rush & construction of state’s largest – Shasta Dam in 1945. For decades, the tribe fought for salmon enduring hunger strikes, broken treaties, lawsuits, police threats & empty government apologies, yet the winter-run Chinook salmon is all but extinct today & the largest waterway in California, the Sacramento River is insidiously polluted & almost entirely devoid of life.
Hope comes from unexpected sources. Through resurrecting an ancient war dance, the tribe re-discovered their salmon thriving halfway across the world, in glacier-fed rivers of New Zealand. This astonishing fact is proven by genetic testing & foretold by a 150 year old prophecy. Now, Chief Caleen & her son, Michael are on the frontlines of a historic struggle to bring our salmon back home, amidst the devastation of salmon runs collapsing globally from California, to Alaska, to Hokkaido, Japan, all-while over 157 species like bears, orcas, redwoods & humans depend on them for survival.
If successful, the tribe will spend months implementing the pilot program on a tiny stretch of the McCloud River, helping the salmon babies hatch & nurturing them to maturity. It is here, in the shady intimacy of the river, we are invited to witness a new friendship forming between fish & humans. As Michael & Caleen pass the responsibility of speaking up for the salmon to the youngest members of the tribe, we have an opportunity to unearth our mutual dependency & redefine what a meaningful relationship with nature looks like.
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