Hole Digging Time

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 Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry.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.

In Scotland 'good conservation practice' and care for all native species includes eating venison. The big predators of the British Isles were wiped out centuries ago so the only 'predator' of deer is humans. Without managing the deer, their population would explode out of control, they'd eat everything in sight, wipe out a lot of incredibly important habitats and therefore wipe out a lot of other species and eventually over populate to the point that they starved and suffered themselves.

Deer also invade agricultural land and destroy crops and are involved in 74,000 car accidents every year and cause god knows how many issues on rail lines.

A huge amount of work and regulation goes into doing the deer cull as humanely as possible and a lot of research is looking at potential schemes for birth control but the population is large enough that Scotland only has closed seasons for females and all males of all species are open season all year round.

the grammarian Aelius Herodianus in the 2nd century CE writes "οἱ δὲ Αἰολεῖς... ποθέω ποθήω οἷον καὶ ποθήω καὶ μάομαι", which means "and the Aeolians... [spell] potheō 'I long' as pothēō, for example, 'and I long and I seek'"

and the scholars look at that and say "the dialect sounds like Sappho and Alcaeus, and those four words sound like the sort of thing that Sappho would write" and they slap a fragment number on it and say that that's Sappho Fragment 36

and Dan Beachy-Quick translates it "and longingly I long and searchingly I search…"

and different people do different things with those four words and some of what they write is good poetry and someone on instagram attributes "longingly I long and searchingly I search" to Sappho

@kallistoi i really appreciate your making this point!

as you might imagine from my description of the scholarly practice of compiling fragments in this post, i do think that the work of "sappho" as we know it is a construction of not only literary translators but also scholars and the ancient textual tradition itself. this body of work was very likely not all composed by the same author, and the ancient editors who assembled it may also have had inclusion criteria like "well, the dialect is aeolic and the subject matter sounds kind of feminine". (a version of this also applies to every other archaic greek poet and every other fragmentary writer.)