Jay Julius, former chairman of Lummi Nation and president of Se’Si’Le wrote this piece for Earth Day in the Sierra Club magazine about salmon and orca extinction and the WA Catholic Bishops’ Statement on Caring for Creation in the Lower Snake River Region. He writes, “We need to ask the question: According to what higher moral authority are these extinctions allowed? What is the price to be paid by the Salmon Nations, whose lifeway, cultural identity, and spirituality relies on our salmon relatives?”
Read the full article here
By W’tot lhem (Jay Julius)
April 22, 2023
I am here on Swa’lax (Orcas Island) with other members of our Indigenous-led nonprofit Se’Si’Le (“Our Grandmother”) to work on our book, Right and Respectful Relations. It is good we are here, where the Lummi people (or Lhaq’temish, as we call ourselves) lived for countless generations back to the ancestral before-time of Xales (“the Transformer”) and where our Ancient Ones live on in sacred songs, oral histories, and in the spirit of place. Like other members of the Lummi Nation, I am often out on these waters in the company of our ancestors and with our elders such as scha’enexw (“the salmon”), qwe’lhol mechen (“the killer whales”), and all our other relations in Xw’ullemy (the Salish Sea).
We call these other forms of life our elders because they are the ones who came first. We humans were the young and weak ones who could not survive without their generosity, their pity and compassion, and their spiritual strength. I sometimes wonder what qwe’lhol mechen would say if they could speak about their two-legged relatives on the land. I believe they would ask us if we know we are destroying their home and their way of life, and also starving their families and driving them to extinction. I believe they would ask why we have forgotten an inviolable and sacred obligation we made to them long ago.
We have not forgotten or forsaken this sacred obligation, this covenant. Like our Xw’ullemy relatives, we the Lhaq’temish are also living through a catastrophic disruption that arrived just six generations ago to our lands and waters that is driving our Xw’ullemy to a catastrophic ecological collapse. The salmon are disappearing from their ancestral waters. And this is happening everywhere, from the Yukon River in Alaska, to the Fraser River in British Columbia, to the Columbia River, down the West Coast to the Sacramento River, and across the Bering Sea to the Russian Far East. We need to ask the question: According to what higher moral authority are these extinctions allowed? What is the price to be paid by the Salmon Nations, whose lifeway, cultural identity, and spirituality relies on our salmon relatives?
Read the full op-ed on the Sierra Club Magazine website