Salmon

There is a moment every year, up on the spawning grounds, when the shallows go red. Not the water, the fish. The sockeye have made it home, thousands of them packed into the same gravel where they hatched, and they have turned a deep red for the occasion. In Halq'eméylem the sockeye is sthéqi, and the word Stó:lō means river. The people here are the people of the river, so the return of the salmon is not just a fish run. It is the year turning over.

A sockeye spends most of its life out at sea, silver and quiet. Then something turns it around. It climbs hundreds of kilometres up the Fraser and its creeks, against the current the whole way, and as it goes its body changes, the silver burning off to red and the head going green for the last stretch of its life. It does not eat on the journey. It is spending everything it has to reach the one stream that made it, spawn, and start the whole thing over.

For the people of this river, sthéqi has always been more than a meal. The salmon were treated as relatives who chose to give themselves so the families along the water could eat through the winter, and the first fish of the season was welcomed back with real care, a thank you and a wish for the rest of the run to follow.

It is the shape of leaving and coming home, of a gift that returns on its own every single year. That is sthéqi, finding its way back.