In Between Worlds

For millennia, the Winnemem Wintu — once 14,000 strong — lived along the McCloud River honoring their ancestral covenant with the salmon. A sacred alliance where two species, humans and salmon, helped each other survive.

In 1945, the largest dam in California, Shasta Dam, permanently blocked the salmon’s path to their spawning grounds and flooded Winnemem Wintu villages, decimating both humans and fish. Only 126 Winnemem Wintu survive today. They are federally unrecognized.
After decades of resistance, in 2004, the tribe rediscovered the genetic descendants of their salmon halfway across the world in the glacier-fed waters of Aotearoa New Zealand. This astonishing fact was foretold by a 150-year-old Winnemem Wintu prophecy and confirmed by genetic testing.

Now, Chief Caleen Sisk leads her people in a powerful alliance with the Kāi Tahu Māori to bring the salmon back home. But they face steep odds: 150+ sample-collection relays across the Pacific within 48-hour windows, new pathogen testing protocols, first-ever TEK-based volitional passage, and fragile alliances spanning scientists, government agencies, and private landowners, amidst rising authoritarianism and ecological collapse.

And during this time, the young leaders, like the tribe’s future Chief Nina, step into their responsibility while learning to hang on to that sacred fire in their hearts. Will they succeed in building a new world, perhaps one where salmon and people can once again help each other survive, at a time when it matters most?