The play is a result of what has been the start of an ongoing native and non-native community dialogue.

The centerpiece is a fish, whose importance to the native community ranges from subsistence to spirituality.

“Salmon Is Everything” is a play developed from interviews and personal stories and insights of tribal people, who have been directly affected by the 2002 fish kills on the Klamath River.

The play also includes the perspectives of farmers and ranchers in the Upper Klamath Basin.

“Salmon Is Everything” will be staged Friday through Sunday at 7 p.m. in the Studio Theatre at Humboldt State University.

Admission is free, with a discussion afterward led by Karuk Cultural Resources Director Ron Reed, Native American Studies faculty, Marlon Sherman and Kathy McCovey and the cast.

The performance is a community-university collaboration and includes Karuk, Hupa and Yurok actors, as well as students, faculty, staff and community residents.

The Klamath Theatre Project was initiated by Theresa May, HSU theater faculty, along with Sherman of Native Environmental Studies and Phil Zastrow of the Indian Teacher Education Program.

The goal of the project was to develop a performance piece, using theater’s “power” to move people, who may not perceive the salmon crisis’ magnitude, May said, during an interview last week.

May’s students conducted interviews with tribal and non-tribal people, visited the mouth of the Klamath and also sacred sites. They were also given creative writing assignments to express their connection with place.

“’Balance’ was once of those themes and ‘sacred’ was one of those themes,” May said. “Some of the writing the students did was beautiful and profound.”

The research was more than gathering information.

“Some of the research had to do with looking into our own heart and our relationship with the natural world and with values that are often demonstrated more in the Yurok, Karuk and Hupa cultures than they are in our own,” May said. “I really wanted it to be an inward journey with all of the students involved and ultimately for the audience an inward journey in questioning our deepest values and information on the topic.”

May has previously worked on salmon issues in Seattle and been affiliated with environmental theater.

For “Salmon Is Everything,” she compiled the project’s actual interviews and pieces of creative writing and created the script.

The play has eight main characters.

“We’re following individual characters,” May said. “They may find resolution in their own heart, … but the play does not pose a resolution. …

“The play explores relationships and primarily explores the possibility of community and love and that sense of community extends to the natural world. … It doesn’t pose a political or ecological solution.”

Zastrow performs the role of Andy, a biologist.

He said he recalls that when the project began “many of the ITEP students and some non-ITEP students were at our kitchen table on a weekly basis working on the project.”

He said he was drawn to participate because its resulting performance can become an important dialogue that links cultures.

“I believe in theater as a way to get some points across,” Zastrow said.

His character, Andy, is a “bridge” between the Upper and Lower Klamath regions, he said.

Andy utters three lines that are telling on a larger scale, he said.

“Indians have always made good use of the tools the Creator gave us. Science is a tool. If we can use it to help the salmon, that’s a good thing.”

Andy is a Yurok/Hupa, and so is Zastrow.

In the play, an Anglo student asks how Indians can view salmon as a “relative” when they eat the fish.

Andy responds: “I told them salmon are our relatives, because we have lived an amazingly bonded way since the beginning. The connection goes much deeper than food.”

Zastrow said he is not a spiritual leader, so when asked about salmon and spirituality he said that what he thinks is not meant to be comparable to that uttered by a leader.

“It’s like my understanding is that we’re all related and we’re all from the same tree and so, yea, we do provide help to each other, sustenance, but it’s also our responsibility to protect the fish,” he said. “They have a right to exist on their own independent of what we think.

“Do I walk down to the river and lock eyes with a salmon and it sends something to my brain, no, I don’t. Yet I want the species to survive.”
 
In “Salmon Is Everything,” individual characters may seem to reach a resolution, but no solution is posed to what will be an ongoing dialogue about salmon, its relevance extending from subsistence to spirituality. Submitted photo/HSU