A long time ago, a young Haida boy was hungry and his mother gave him a piece of fish to eat. The boy looked at the fish, but refused to eat it, calling it moldy. Soon he went out to play with the other children. They were swimming in a nearby river. The boy joined them, but swam far out and drowned in the swift current. The salmon people caught his spirit and took it to their village under the sea.

Once in their village the fish changed into human form. The village was like his own with houses and children playing in a stream. The boy mentioned he was hungry, and he was told to take one of the children from the stream, cook and eat it. There was one condition, however: after eating it he had to return the bones, scales and whatever else was left to the stream. After the boy ate he heard a child crying. The child told his mother that his eye hurt. The salmon people asked the boy to be sure he had returned all the left over parts of the fish to the river. The boy looked on the river bank and found an eye he had missed before. He threw the eye in the water and the child stopped crying.

When the salmon people returned to the rivers in British Columbia in the spring, the boy went with them. He was caught by his own mother who recognized him by a necklace he was wearing. She set the fish aside and soon the boy's head emerged from the fish mouth. After a few more days the boy came out entirely leaving the fish skin behind. Thereafter, the boy became a shaman who brought his people the way of respect for the salmon.

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Last October, I watched Peter Hamar and Chris Runyard lower a Chinook salmon skeleton lovingly back into the great Columbia River, in our own way respecting the first fish we had caught during our annual autumn salmon harvest. Waves lapped up on the rocks and stole the bones away to the water world. Then there was a long moment of silence and a moment for us to each ponder the meaning of the ceremony.

For myself, the first salmon ceremony was a deeper look at the ecology of place and understanding the Columbia River through all four seasons. In the Pacific Northwest, the forests and waterways all depend upon the salmon to complete their cycles-- they start in the streams, swim to the ocean, get big with fish nutrients from the ocean, and then swim back upstream and die, effectively putting the ocean's nutrients into the soil of the riverbanks as far away as Idaho. It is no coincidence that the forests here are lush and green and teem with biodiversity-- the annual death of 30 million salmon on the Columbia River alone fed the herons, ospreys, sea lions, bears, people, then decomposed and fed the cedars and the firs.

It is one thing to understand an idea in your head, and another to understand because you are living in it. Although knowing the ecology of the place I live in is relatively easy in the form of academics, there is no substitution for spending years actually watching a salmon swim up the river, turn over stones in the riverbed to build a nest, and then do that amazing sideways wiggle that is fanning fresh water over the eggs.

My sense of this place is one of wonder. As I wander about my daily life, gathering willows on the river, I see an osprey dive and pick up a young salmon smolt out of the water. I see the bear tracks that lead away from the riverbanks and the bites taken out of these fifty pound fish. I watch these things as the alders drop their pale yellow leaves. They all form a single picture, a cinematic worldview that replays in my head.

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There is a word that captures this sense of place. It is a word that often has numerous connotations and is difficult to pin down. It is the word 'indigenous'.

It is no coincidence that a deep understanding of the place in which one lives is only accomplished by the indigenous people of the land. The story of Salmon Boy, for instance, is much more than a simple fairy tale with a moral. It is a cultural mentoring tool, a tool for passing down the ecology of a region in a smooth and digestible form.

An indigenous relationship to the land, to the place which you inhabit, means much more than environmental sustainability. It might mean that your life is filled with the vitality of being, rather than the exhaustion of problem solving. Imagine if every bird sound you heard pulled you into another world. You can hear the songs of the birds lifting up your spirit, telling you the neighbor's cat is nearby. Imagine if by looking at the color of the water you drink you would know how the next year's salmon season would be, and bothersome yellow jackers will be this summer.

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My favorite part about a sense of place is the eventual understanding that the natural world that supports us, but that we support it as well. When Europeans first walked onto shore at Jamestown, VA, they walked not into a pristine, wild forest, but into a permaculturist's dreamworld. The trees shaded veritable gardens of berry bushes and dropped chestnuts. One could gallop a horse through the open spaces in the forest. All of this was maintained by fire and hard work. Humans belong in the landscape. Nowhere is this sensibility clearer than when one starts to develop a sense of place, a sense of belonging, a sense of responsibility for the land itself and the people we live with on it.