Since 1991, most of the salmon runs in the Northwest have been listed as threatened or endangered. Yet without the salmon there would be no Pacific Northwest as we know it. In Salmonlands producer Barbara Bernstein takes us on a journey into the land of salmon, why they are so significant to the culture and community of the Pacific Northwest, and what it will take to keep them from disappearing. Salmonlands looks at the many ways that salmon serve as a metaphor the Northwest region's historic abundance - that in turn supported a rich cultural tradition - as well as the actual source of that abundance. Native people appreciated that salmon carry nutrients from the ocean back to the headwaters of their birth and in turn the animals that feed on the salmon carcasses, often carrying them some distance from the streams, help spread these nutrients throughout the forest. Salmonlands reveals a landscape in which much of the salmon's historic habitat is now degraded, denuded or inundated, where the same dams that flooded rich salmon fisheries also drowned thousands of ancient rock images that were, along with salmon, central to the culture and spirituality of the Northwest tribes. The tribes? arduous campaign to reclaim and restore some of these rock images becomes a metaphor for the struggle to restore healthy salmon runs, as in the words of Louie Pitt, a Warm Springs Indian: "We're still here, alive and large. We don't have to be these perennial victims all the time, victims and just woe, the poor Indian, we can actually make things better and get our message across, so hey, it's a new day. We can look at ourselves and see what else we can do to help our way of life, which includes staying the course with salmon." Salmonlands was originally broadcast on KMUN July 17, 2005 and has been heard on public stations around the country since then.

Since 1991, most of the salmon runs in the Northwest have been listed as threatened or endangered. Yet without the salmon there would be no Pacific Northwest as we know it. In Salmonlands producer Barbara Bernstein takes us on a journey into the land of salmon, why they are so significant to the culture and community of the Pacific Northwest, and what it will take to keep them from disappearing. Salmonlands looks at the many ways that salmon serve as a metaphor the Northwest region's historic abundance - that in turn supported a rich cultural tradition - as well as the actual source of that abundance. Native people appreciated that salmon carry nutrients from the ocean back to the headwaters of their birth and in turn the animals that feed on the salmon carcasses, often carrying them some distance from the streams, help spread these nutrients throughout the forest. Salmonlands reveals a landscape in which much of the salmon's historic habitat is now degraded, denuded or inundated, where the same dams that flooded rich salmon fisheries also drowned thousands of ancient rock images that were, along with salmon, central to the culture and spirituality of the Northwest tribes. The tribes? arduous campaign to reclaim and restore some of these rock images becomes a metaphor for the struggle to restore healthy salmon runs, as in the words of Louie Pitt, a Warm Springs Indian: "We're still here, alive and large. We don't have to be these perennial victims all the time, victims and just woe, the poor Indian, we can actually make things better and get our message across, so hey, it's a new day. We can look at ourselves and see what else we can do to help our way of life, which includes staying the course with salmon." Salmonlands was originally broadcast on KMUN July 17, 2005 and has been heard on public stations around the country since then.