Salmon and the Adaptive Capacity of Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) Culture to Cope with Change

Change due to natural disturbances and disasters, population growth and decline, economic crises, and environmental and climate change creates significant cultural challenges.¹ Rapid change and the transformation it brings also involve complex relationships between sovereign tribes, resources, and the global system. This article explores how salmon and the Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) people who depend upon them survive given invasion and treaty making, population decline and growth, destruction of salmon habitat and damming of streams, and impending climate change.²

Salmon and Nimiipuu survival are interdependent, and without salmon the Nimiipuu say their culture will die. The Nimiipuu revere salmon as a cultural keystone species, which, for the Nimiipuu, are those species that they rely upon “most extensively to meet their needs[,] . . . are the species that become embedded in cultural traditions and narratives[,] . . . and [are] the ones on which they focus in their immediate activities and conversations.”³ As cultural keystones, Nimiipuu and salmon have forged long-standing economic and spiritual relationship and have coped with continuing change since at least the last Ice Age and perhaps even before that time.

Horace Axtell, a Nez Perce elder, commented in September 2008 on the relationship between water and salmon and Nimiipuu culture: “According to our spiritual way of life, everything is based on nature. Anything that grows or lives is part of our spiritual life. The most important element we have in way of life is water. The next most important element is the fish because the fish comes from water.”⁴

This emphasis on the interdependency of salmon and Nimiipuu culture requires some clarification. The research presented here draws from more than a decade of my ongoing collaborations as an anthropologist working with the Nimiipuu and tribal programs and before that with a lifetime of dedicating myself to the understanding of rivers, including serving as a professional fly-fishing guide for more than ten years in the Nimiipuu watersheds of the Snake and Columbia Rivers. I also draw insight from a careful reading of the published literature in Native American and Indigenous studies and related cognate fields of anthropology, history, geography, and ecology.

Thus, the centrality of salmon to Nimiipuu culture demonstrates that human-animal relationships of this magnitude are not overly simplistic or static, nor are they, as some say, a last-ditch effort to gain hold of salmon with tribal sovereignty in some linear, political-cultural context. Rather, the Nimiipuu have adapted in the face of change for more than four hundred generations and twenty-five hundred salmon generations.

In short, the central assertion of this article is twofold: (1) nothing is forever, and change is constant; and (2) the Nimiipuu have retained their adaptive capacity through many substantial changes, and Nimiipuu culture is the strength from which adaptive capacity emerges. Nimiipuu survival is not about trying to sustain some condition from a changing state; rather, Nimiipuu survival is about constant adaptation to the changing needs of Nimiipuu society and culture as a dynamic system. Moreover, the main interest in adaptive capacity is that neither resilience nor sustainability necessarily provides adaptive capacity, while culture does. Resilience and sustainability connote returning to or maintaining some previous state. The Nimiipuu have adapted to dramatic population, environmental, and sociopolitical changes. Thus, what are the features of Nimiipuu culture that make it adaptive?

Nimiipuu Culture as Adaptive

A long and diverse history provides many insights into Nimiipuu adaptive strategies. First, the Nimiipuu have maintained an Indigenous knowledge system of water and migrating salmon that has been told in tribal narratives since the people have lived in the drainages of the Snake and Columbia Rivers. This realization focuses on Nimiipuu and salmon responding to periods of great change and how they reorganize themselves to cope with that change. Moreover, the Nimiipuu and salmon migrate across many jurisdictions and scales and swim through many cultures and environments, linking together complex social, political, and economic relationships. Second, the Nimiipuu’s encounters with salmon suggest that “local knowledge, environmental values, place attachments, and cultural landscapes are all functionally interdependent,” so sovereignty in...