FreemanHouse.Net // Totem Salmon

Freeman House
TOTEM SALMON
Life Lessons from Another Species

Discovering salmon proves to be a path to self and community, to a large spiritual and natural etiquette, and to a sense of place that knows every small local stream even while embracing the whole North Pacific. As someone said, "To work on behalf of the wild is to restore culture." This grave and delightful book--both personal and cosmic--shows how that works. — Gary Snyder
author of The Practice of the Wild

"Freeman House writes lyrically, with disarming candor and exquisite literacy of place, joining a rare community of writers like Terry Tempest Williams and Barry Lopez who can reveal so much of who we are by gently expaining how much we have lost and stand to lose." — Paul Hawken

ABOUT THE BOOK
Part lyrical true-life adventure, part social and philosophical manifesto, Totem Salmon tells the story of a determined band of locals who've worked for over two decades to save one of the last purely native "races" of salmon in California. The book—call it the zen of salmon restoration—traces the evolution of the Mattole River Valley community in northern California as it learns to undo the results of rapacious logging practices; invent ways to trap wild salmon for propagation; and forge alliances between people who agree on one thing—that there is nothing on earth like a Mattole king salmon. House's discussion of indigenous fishing rituals and land ownership shows us precisely why he's considered a West Coast visionary.

Thanks to a recent federal listing that includes a dozen West Coast salmon runs on its endangered list, saving native salmon is today an issue poised to consume the Pacific West. "Never before, said Federal officials, has so much land or so many people been given notice that they will have to alter their lives to restore a wild species" (The New York Times, 2/27/98). Totem Salmon is set to become the essential read for this newest chapter in our relations with other wild things.

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ABOUT FREEMAN HOUSE

photo:
Lynn McCullough.

Freeman House is co-founder of the Mattole Watershed Salmon Support Group and the Mattole Restoration Council. He gained his education in economics through his experience as a commercial fisherman and tugboat owner-operator; in art and social dynamics while running with the diggers in sixties Frisco; and in community and watershed rehabilitation through living in the Mattole river valley of Northwestern California for more than twenty years. He also attended classes at Oregon State University and the University of California, Berkeley. His education in the natural world began with his birth and continues.

READ An interview from The New Catalyst | The case for the watershed as an organizing principal | In The Name of the Salmon

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Totem Salmon available on-line from:
BarnesandNoble.com or Amazon.com (cheaper)

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