Six-quart basket of blue light

Word already had a word count?! That WORKED?

The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.

The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.

There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.

The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.

I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.

To give them a little credit, so many woodpeckers have a red head and black and white spotted body. And the red bellied woodpecker does have a dusting of red on its belly!

❌ “historians will call them friends” devalues historians and forces complex relationships into modern simplicities, also devalues friendship/platonic forms of love

Let the Garment envelop you; experience its heft and splendor. The original Garment pattern was knit in the round, from the bottom up, and designed for someone six feet in height. A simple adjustment of the number of stitches you cast on will allow you to customize the length. Follow The Garment on Instagram: @HeftAndSplendor Update, Aug 9, 2026: Many thanks for all the Garment enthusiasm in recent days! In response to sensible feedback, I’m developing and testing two alternate versions of the pattern: one for children, and the other a top-down version. I’m not entirely sure why I chose to make the first The Garment bottom-up—it almost certainly makes more sense for sizing, etc., to make it top-down—although I will say that casting on 300 stitches for the bottom of a The Garment feels like quite a leap of faith into the great unknown. In any case, both new versions of the pattern will be included in the update and sent to everyone who’s already bought the original pattern.

The pattern for the Garment costs only five usd so if you are a knitter and you want to make something beautiful and baffling, there you go. I do almost want to learn to knit so I can make the Garment.

i have often wondered this, bc it threw me off enormously as a child, bc the rivers I had personal experience with were the Huron river in Michigan and the Soque river here in north Georgia, pictured:

And I was thus utterly baffled by stories where rivers were these massive and incredibly dangerous things that were impossible to ford. I was always like... like, I believe you, but I have no way of envisioning this based on the rivers I have met.

Now as an adult, the largest river I've met personally is the Colorado, which is indeed a different scale than the ones I'm more personally acquainted with, but also I have now seen footage of, for example, the fucking Yellow river: