A Continuing Story:

Judith Williams' Art of Engagement

Curated by Phyllis Reeve

Artist's Statement

Salmon Stock is a video trilogy based on the active installation of a book, Salmon Our Heritage, about the fish species Salmo or salmon that inhabit the North Pacific Ocean. These once abundant creatures notable for their beauty, grace, fighting spirit, wondrous homing instincts and economic utility, have declined drastically in numbers.

By “Rivers Day”, September 28, 2003, the winch that drops the book was working in the Boiler Room Theater of the Gulf of Georgia Cannery Museum. During the following week the machine dropped and destroyed a second copy of Salmon Our Heritage at intervals between showings of a film on the history of the museum. A public round table discussion of the relationship of the project to salmon research, salmon farming and the future was held at the museum.
 

A new video “shadow” was made of the second book drop at the Gulf of Georgia Cannery and is in the editing process. While “this is the story of . . .” was shot in an empty shuttered venue, “shadow” records the book’s destruction on a public set with the interaction of the museum’s historical movie. The imagery is undercut by the repeated sigh of the boiler itself.

Section 3 of Salmon Stock, “net”, is still in the filming stage but much material was shot in 2000 and 2001 at the North Pacific Cannery Village Museum at Port Edward. The video is built around the image of a woman shortening a net at Port Edward in 2001. In that year fishermen were directed by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to use half nets in truncated ½ hour sets due to a shortage of salmon in the Skeena River - one of the BC coast’s major salmon runs.

The Salmon Stock project had its genesis in my work as Chairman of the Desolation Sound Salmon Enhancement Society which has cleaned and rehabilitated five salmon streams on West Redonda Island. We reintroduced the Coho once native to these streams with the help of the Department of Fisheries, the B.C. Fisheries Renewal Program and the Pacific Salmon Foundation. The fall of 2008 we will be taking broodstock from our own returning Coho for further stocking of Desolation Sound salmon habitat.

In the process of learning the salmon system and studying the relevant literature I found acres of reports, interminable “briefs” to the government and beautiful pictures of what was being destroyed. I came to the conclusion salmon had been studied to death and that many careers, both academic and bureaucratic, had been built on the backs of dwindling salmon stocks. I could not shake the sense that the accumulation of paper had helped destroy the stocks and that paper salmon were replacing the salmon cycle. The book I chose to illustrate this, Salmon Our Heritage, is a lushly produced effort by Cecily Lyons once secretary to various salmon industry executives. A sober effort to document the industry, it ignores eons of native harvesting and fish management techniques and nowhere gives voice to those of actual fishers who, during our round table at Steveston, spoke eloquently of their experience.

The book’s title and its content made it an ideal actor for the performance. The robustly sewn binding provided for a slow and painful appearing demise that mimicked the initially subtle and then accelerating stock loss. The increasing readability of the book available during its baroque deconstruction seemed to parallel my understanding of the salmon cycle as I had observed the physical decline of salmon reentering fresh water. The compromised immune systems of the still swimming fish can cause an actual loss of skin and flesh. After spawning their decomposing bodies feed a series of other creatures some of who will provide sustenance for young salmon.

Most people find the destruction of books abhorrent. It is my hope that the viewers of Salmon Stock find the economically driven destruction of salmon stocks and habitat equally objectionable and that they acquire the strength to influence our scientific, business and political leaders to preserve one of the wonders of the world.

Appendix A: SALMON ARE A WONDER

A talk given at the at the Gulf of Georgia Cannery Museum, September 29, in conjunction with Salmon Stock a dual exhibition/installation at the Richmond Art Gallery and the Gulf of Georgia Cannery Museum September/October, 2003

Salmon are a WONDER.

Salmon are leaping Coho, striped Chum, schools of crimson Sockeye and the graceful Pinks whose males transform into the livid, surrealistic, hook-nosed “Humpies”. Salmon are the wily, fat Springs that came to Desolation Sound each May like clockwork, and come no more. All these salmon species, at different times, end their sea journeys and, prompted by some ancient internal pattern, return up rivers and creeks to clean and rearrange the gravel, lay their jewel-like eggs in carefully banked redds and, at the end of their lives, become nourishment for an astounding range of animals and plants.

It has been my privilege, for the past 6 years, as Chairman of The Desolation Sound Salmon Enhancement Society to help some very dedicated workers restore the creeks in Refuge Lagoon on West Redonda Island and restock them with Coho. We rebuilt our lagoon dam, created a natural fish ladder so fish could enter and exit at will, turned logging roads back into the creeks they had once been, and then raised eyed coho eggs to smolts and placed them in the lagoon. The first year our Coho returned, a school of Chum joined them which was very fortunate as one of my project gurus, Terry Glavin, had told me --- as our DFO advisor had not --- that we needed both Coho and Chum to remake our system. As I learned more and more about salmon I became aware that no one thing could bring a specific run back - that, in fact, what we proposed to intersect with was a series of interacting systems. How did that work? Where did we fit in?

Well --- when we placed smolts in the lagoon creeks, every eagle in the vicinity turned up for lunch. The usually reserved herons looked downright enthusiastic and resident cutthroat trout took an up-close and confrontational interest in this possible addition to their diet. Seals lingered at the exit of the lagoon.

We were alarmed.

Heh! Our babies.

However, given our stated commitment to the whole island eco system we let them all be. The question was: would there be anything to return? When that time came, we watched and watched. Finally some straying Chum appeared. Well - that was interesting. Then came our Coho. Wow!

You set them free, they feed themselves, mature - and then they come back?

And, day by day and night by night, footprints left in the mud announced the arrival of animals who’d not seen a fish in our creeks for 25 years. There were martin and mice tracks, eagles lurked in trees. Carcasses were chewed to the bone. Coming to count spawners one day, I arrived to find paw prints next to a dead Chum hauled out on the bank. Pink flesh oozed out of puncture marks in its side and the tall grass of the creek mouth still quivered at the exit of a wolf whose late breakfast I had disturbed. Up stream, a small bird, the Water Owsell, bobbed on the gravel, ran under water, pecked out newly deposited salmon eggs and ran out chirping with satisfaction. How had it so quickly found the spawners?

West Redonda Island is home to black bear and cougar as well and it soon became clear that all these animals could sniff out a sashimi dinner. They’d instantly homed in on the returning fish, taken their share ---- and not more we hoped --- and gone off into the forest. There they would spread the marine nitrogen far from the streams. Birds would carry it further.

Salmon are creatures of the sea but, due their mounting of the vast inland river systems and creeks of British Columbia, they are also forest creatures. New tree core research has proven they benefit forests many, many kilometers from spawning sites.

Well, what of the eggs we’d seen so carefully deposited and fertilized in Refuge Lagoon? If the Water Owsell didn’t get them all, they’d become eyed eggs and finally baby salmon which, of course, must also feed. And this brings up the importance of the decaying carcasses on the creek banks. They bred grubs and insects that become food for the baby fish. No fish carcasses on the creek beds mean no grubs and bugs and a creek or river can become dead. But different species of fish spawn in different places and different runs at different times. The Chum who came to the Lagoon died right where they’d spawned but our Coho exited into the lagoon so their bodies decayed there. But, the Coho spawned above where the Chum had died. The Chum byproducts were, therefore, available as food for the newly hatched coho.

Now it might occur to you at this point that, if salmon are a lynch pin in this wide, wild food system, and they cease to participate in any given stream or river complex, the rest of the local creatures are going to be short of dinner and the surrounding forest short of fertilizer. What we will have is a bear looking for a handout.

Much is going to said about salmon farming this afternoon but I want you to hold a question in your mind. How could salmon raised in a pen, their carcasses sold far from this coast, replace the salmon in the extended salmon/animal/plant system? The Desolation Sound Salmon project, like dozens on the coast, was fueled by donated labour and seed money from the Fisheries Renewal Project. When the incoming Liberal government cancelled that project they announced a 5 million dollar fund for the study of fish farming. To privilege farmed salmon and neglect the care and protection of the wild system is to create an ecological gap. The two forms of salmon are simply not equivalent. And we do not need any more DFO reports, Federal commissions, doctoral theses or coffee table picture books of salmon spawning. We need protective action to allow the salmon to remain the lynch pin in its interactive structure.

As an artist and writer it is my job to find ways to present issues, images and emotions so they suggest how things might be seen differently. I asked myself how I could make you feel that the loss of the salmon stocks is a tragedy, not just an economic downturn, but the loss of a natural wonder. I wanted you to ask why these enormously clever fish, with an elaborate system they ran efficiently on their own, were being allowed to dwindle and be replaced by sickly fish we have to pay people to tend, feed and medicate. Could that make economic sense?

One day I went to the UBC Woodward library searching for the books and papers written on all aspects of salmon research. The relevant shelves groaned. What an incredible number of people had built their careers on the backs of salmon!

Oddly, it did not seem that what was written had really slowed down the decline of salmon stocks. Had it, perhaps, added to the decline? Alarmed, I decided it would be appropriate to publicly destroy a book I’d found called Salmon Our Heritage. Although there were many other candidates, the substantial, Salmon Our Heritage, written --- and rather well --- by Cecily Lyons, once secretary to fishing industry executives, seemed right. Privately printed on the very best paper and well researched, it unfortunately neglected to provide the point of view of the fishers themselves and it simply slid over the surface of several thousand years of accomplished native fishery and conservation techniques.

But, you know, I like books. I write them, I even hand bind them. It hurts to destroy that book. That discomfort is important.

As you have, or shall see, Salmon our Heritage, at the will of a small electric winch, rises slowly and falls fast, its disintegration almost imperceptible at first. Then it crumples and starts to break down. At the end it rapidly gives up form and coherence, rips and scatters its pages. It becomes debris. The disintegration mimics the life of the salmon but, tragically, it also mimics the fate of the salmon stocks.

I hope the book’s fate makes you aware. Maybe it makes you angry. Hopefully it makes you want to let wild salmon be. Perhaps it will inspire you to act to protect their right to their system. I hope you see yourself as but one consumer in that whole interactive system and that you need that system to maintain the viability of your environment and the purity of the air you breathe. Be selfish. Save wild salmon and their habitat for yourself.

You need Wonder.
 

Click to open Judith Williams' Desolation Sound Salmon Enhancement Society Research Report

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