Knowing the Salish Sea Through 3 Strands

Each quarter, a group of students, faculty, and staff at WWU convene an environmental justice reading group to read and discuss recent texts. This quarter (Fall 2019) the group is reading Robin Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. The following entry reflects the group’s discussion last week.

 

Knowing the Salish Sea Through 3 Strands

By: Morgan Scott and Amanda Hunt

 

         The Salish Sea region is a beautiful tapestry of many intertwined threads and narratives of social, cultural, and class groups, marine species, land dwelling species, and the diverse topography of the landscape itself.  The Indigenous and settler communities of both Washington State and British Columbia whose narratives are woven in this tapestry have historically and presently struggled to collaborate on solutions to boundary issues, such as: salmon fisheries management and preservation, and political zoning and regulation differences. How can international communities with conflicting ways of knowing come together to face shared environmental issues? In Dr. Kimmerer’s literary masterpiece, Braiding Sweetgrass, she discusses how the three strands of sweet grass form a metaphor for how indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teaching of plants can form a new, collaborative outtake on environmental management, and both individual and communal relation to land and place.

         All communities and jurisdictions along the shores of the Salish Sea are working to mitigate the rapid changes caused by urbanized societies. Based on Dr. Kimmerer’s ideology of the Three Strands, perhaps the right step toward improving present ecological threats is to combine different ways of knowing. Indigenous values, knowledge and opinions have been historically rejected and excluded in the settler government decision-making bodies, evident in the current state of Salish Sea management. The resident Orcas and Pacific Salmon face critical populations lows, the quality of the marine water is declining, hazardous industrial wastes can still be detected in certain areas, the list goes on. By joining traditional objective scientific and indigenous wisdom and practice, we may be able to pursue new holistic answers to questions that were previously shrouded in assumed disconnectedness, and begin to take steps towards mending the relationship between settler populations/systems and present day thriving indigenous communities.

         One example of the Three Strands intertwining to hopefully reconcile broad issues is the Salish Sea Campaign, which aims to face the dire issue of possible Resident orca extinction in the next decade. During the summer of 2019, the Lummi Nation launched the Salish Sea Campaign to partner with other Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups to call for “several initiatives to include a study on the cumulative impacts of human-caused stressors to the Salish Sea; a moratorium on any new stressors until salmon populations have been restored to 1985 levels; ceremonial feedings of the qwe’ lhol mechen — the Lummi name for orca, meaning “our relations below the waves” — and the development of a multi-phased pilot project to save the Southern resident orcas” (Walker 2019). By combining research and monitoring from both the Sierra Club and the Whale Sanctuary Project with Indigenous wisdom of the Suquamish and Lummi tribes, the bridge between both ways of knowing – two braids – has placed hope back into the hearts of all who cherish both the orcas and the health of this sea.

         Borders are constructed and artificial. When it comes to the health of this land and its many relations, we must investigate and begin to deconstruct when appropriate the established cultural and political boundaries between groups to become a diverse but coherent Salish family. For as Dr. Kimmerer mentions in the Planting Sweetgrass Preface, sweetgrass “thrives along disturbed edges” (Kimmerer p. 1 2013), and the greater Salish Sea region is certainly a disturbed area. By employing this idea of combining different ways of knowing, we as small community members can hopefully begin to understand further the issues which affront this large and disturbed region. By continuing to ask tough questions from multiple different frameworks, and not just from a scientific or similar traditional lens, but a holistic one incorporating the voices of far more than just settlers vs Indigenous, we can begin to understand the work that must be undertaken to listen to and work with this region and all of its inhabitants.

 

 

Works Cited:

Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Published by Milkweed Editions.

Walker, R. (2019). Seven ways tribes are repairing the Salish Sea and Washington Waterways. Indian Country Today. Retrieved by https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/news/seven-ways-tribes-are-repairing-the-salish-sea-and-washington-waterways-VRALLUa5hkqZ9WD-rUqT4Q/