Storying on the Coquille River
A Digital Humanities Approach to Human and Non-human Communication and Prevention of the Fall Chinook Salmon Extinction
Daa-nii-ya to the Coquille River where stories, peoples, animals, and non-human objects have flowed for millennia. In the digital adaptation of the river that follows, you will find history and knowledge the river has supported and produced, as well as the challenges the river now faces. Currently, the Coquille River is the site of the decline (nearing the critical point of extinction) of the Coquille River fall Chinook salmon. In 2010, there were 30,000 known spawners in the river. In 2018, just 500 adult spawners were recorded. There has been only a slight variance since then, with 275 adult spawners seen in 2019 and 879 spawners seen in 2020. To combat this decline, new understandings of the Coquille River and the fall Chinook salmon need to be nurtured to encourage care and restoration of the whole river basin. As you follow the flow of the river below, you will find the multimedia art, text, and further learning resources related to and inspired by the river. Once you reach the end of the river, there will be an interactive map detailing points of interest regarding the imminent extinction of the fall Chinook salmon and the Coquille Indian Tribe’s efforts to prevent it based on our relationships with salmon as kin.
Salmon
Coho and Chinook salmon, relatives of the Coquille people from the ocean, are the essential characters and teachers of the river. Salmon teach about sacrifice, giving themselves as food for millennia. When their sacrifice is not respected, and their environment not protected, they will no longer return. One way that the Coquille people respect the salmon is through the First Salmon Ceremony where we take only one of the earliest returning salmon and cook that salmon in the ground. After, we engage in a ceremony to return the fish to the river with the rest of the spawning salmon to acknowledge and respect their sacrifice. We do this in the hope that thousands of salmon will return in the following years.
Salmon also teaches us that life can be a numbers game colored by luck and beholden to the perils of systems. Included is a link to a video, “The Odds,” produced by a group from the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon that narrates the lifecycle of salmon. Notably missing is that humans have increased river temperature from shrinking riparian zones, polluted the river, and introduced invasive species, further diminishing the odds that salmon may return each year. The Coquille River Fall Chinook Salmon is now facing extinction. In the second half of the StoryMap below, their story is detailed further.
The Odds
Dentalium
Dentalium are off-white tusk shells that are coveted by many Indigenous Nations, particularly those located in what is now known as the Pacific Northwest. Dentalium open social worlds because of the shells’ many uses and significance. They can be strung in symbolic jewelry (as a marker of social status and familial ties), used as currency (in individual and strand form), and as technologies to intermediate between peoples and non-human beings like salmon. Dentalium was moved along rivers (via trade), worn by people traversing and living on the bounty of those rivers, and physically gifted to the rivers. For example, dentalium necklaces are offered to rivers in salmon ceremonies as gifts to ensure salmon abundance and to generate and nourish relationships with our non-human kin. Dentalium is forever part of the anatomy of rivers that absorb their gifts.
von-Kármán Vortex Street
A von-Kármán vortex street is a phenomenon in fluid dynamics where vortices are shed behind an obstacle in a flow field. Obstacles can cause a pressure imbalance that results in a constant, periodic series of vortices being shed. This process of shedding creates a pattern that is typically repetitive and swirling in nature. An object in a river, for example, would cause a vortex behind it. This specific visualization is intended to artistically depict what occurs behind a rock in a flowing river to illustrate our attempts to understand their intelligence and dynamics. The intelligence of the rocks and waters, and relationality between them, among a field of other environmental objects and natural phenomena, can never be fully comprehensible by humans. We never truly apprend nature, only perceptions of our relationality with it, but it would serve us well to emphasize different intelligences and the complexities of mother nature.
Karman Vortex Street time-varying FTLE visualization
Plant Architecture and Biophilic Design
We draw inspiration for architecture and engineering from patterns, materials, and designs we see in nature. The Gherkin in London, for example, is built to have a ventilation system that is comparable to sea sponges and is supported by a lattice-like exoskeleton with unique air and light capabilities. Or, a cedar longhouse with knots and grains exposed. This can reflect biophilic design, or stylistic conventions that connect people to nature in built environments, though the term itself is fraught because the two are not separate. We do, however, tend to make metaphorical connections between biological structures and synthetic systems. We regularly describe the internet and networked communication as rhizomatic, webs of spiders, or mycelia, the networks of fungi filaments that afford plant communication and terrestrial superhighways. The way we learn to communicate with, see, compare, and describe nature is shaped by social contexts and has profound implications for how we understand relationships in our worlds. Sometimes, we try to translate living things into digital environments (as is the case with this river story map project) to afford new ways of seeing and appreciating particulars for their complexity. It is a worthwhile practice to consider how metaphors and comparisons render the living world and to learn to see in new ways.
The River's Melody
When walking through natural landscapes, we often comment on the “bird songs” that surround us, or on how cicadas hum during the summer, often singing songs of love as they seek out a mate. Many musicians take advantage of the musical elements of our environment through a practice of sampling: hearing a sound in the world, recording it, and using the sound as any number of things. What this practice highlights is that music is not an object that exists separate from us; music is a way of listening to the sounds around us. Tenning tells us, “languages arise out of Land; language is our relative; it speaks to us as learners in many different verbal and nonverbal ways” (Mowatt et al. 2020, 20). Music then, as a language (though certainly not a universal one, as it varies greatly across time, place, and culture), must arise from the land as well. For example, the light pitter-patter of rainfall has acted as inspiration for countless compositions. The musical composition presented above came from listening to the Coquille river, paying close attention to the rhythmic patterns and melodies the river presented, and adapting them. The song ends with the unedited, original recording of the river, with the hope that everyone will begin to listen to the world around us differently, more musically, and ask ourselves what the river (and the world) is trying to express to us.
Click the "Unmute" button above to listen to the song.
Distribution of Wild Chinook Salmon, Smallmouth Bass, and Striped Bass in the Coquille Basin
Below, you will find an interactive map of the Coquille River Basin with highlighted locations of interest and the distribution of salmon and bass. On the top left side of the map, there are three tabs you can access. The first provides a map legend, informing you of what each element of the map represents. The second allows you to turn on and off map layers so the map only shows what you want to see. The final tab shows information, which is tied to the red points on the map. As you click on the red points of interest on the map, the information tab will fill in a description of the location and its history. Also in the top left are buttons that allow zooming in and out and a home button that will reset the view of the map to its original position. In the top right corner are options for sharing the map view via Facebook, Twitter, or a direct link to the page.
We express gratitude to those who have navigated this StoryMap, taking a digital step into the Coquille River. To help the salmon, the Coquille Indian Tribe suggests writing about concerns to the Governor of Oregon, Kate Brown , getting involved with community partners such as the Coquille Watershed Association, and spreading word about the crisis. To learn more from the Coquille Indian Tribe please access the online K-12 place-based curriculum produced as part of Senate Bill 13: Tribal History Shared History . Particularly relevant are Grade 4 Lesson 5 Plan: Coastal Lifeways , Grade 8 Lesson 2 Plan: Coquille Potlatch Culture , and Grade 10 Lesson 3 Plan: Survivance and Tribal Government . Lastly, more information on salmon and the tribes and nations in what is now known as Oregon can be found on the Oregon Department of Education website.
