fishes and dances and basketball

Last week was an eventful one here in Mountain Village.  First off, the annual meeting of the Yukon River Drainage Fisheries Association was held here Monday through Wednesday.  Representatives came from the entire length of the river (close to two thousand miles upstream) and a wide range of perspectives, including commercial fishing, environmental issues, and native subsistence rights.  For three days they met and discussed the river and its fishes, management plans, and community outreach.  I got to sit in on a presentation by an anthropologist who is collecting wisdom from elders in different villages regarding indicators of when, where, and in what numbers the fish will arrive (such as which plants bloom when the salmon are beginning to run in a particular location) in order to incorporate these traditional environmental indicators into the modern scientific study of fish movements and behavior.  Her hope was to make officials and scientists aware of these additional tools, and also to perpetuate traditional cultural knowledge in the various communities.  To this end, her group had assembled a children's book about these traditional signs and were distributing it to classrooms, along with a bin of activities and lessons for teachers to use in class.

This was wonderful to discover, as I have spoken with friends (Johnny Mattis, I think, and Randy Swaty) as recently as December about the disconnect between the supposed experts on the ecology of a given area--field scientists with extensive theoretical knowledge--and local people who experience the place on a daily basis over the course of years, decades, and generations.  One of my students back in Big Bay, Hunter, went into a fervent description one day at school of the stream by his house and how much it had changed with the unusually high flow the previous spring.  He described in great detail how large the normally modest river grew, how the bottom and banks had changed following the heavy flow, how the course had shifted; he even compared the depth and volume with another nearby river to help convey the scale of the event.

Much as I would love to see Hunter go off and get a doctorate, then return to study his little river and keep it safe, I don't think his life plans include the stuffy halls of academia--he'd rather be outside.  But his profound awareness of the natural world and firsthand knowledge of that stream would be invaluable to any scientist who wanted to study it.  If only anyone would ask him.

Well, that turned out to be a bit of a digression.  The dancing and ball games will have to wait.  Spoiler:  we lost, but it was loads of fun!