Aug 6, 2025
The Jomon Venus, one of my first attempts at gouache from 2023 :)
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The Jomon Venus, one of my first attempts at gouache from 2023 :)
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Cultural Inspiration of the Salmonids
I was watching Rassicas' deep-dive on Salmonids and not very long in they touch on the idea of the Salmonids being inspired by the Coast Salish people. I'm currently working on a personal project of mine that takes a lot of inspiration from Native American peoples, and as a Native American myself the topic interests me, so I decided to look a little deeper into the art of the Salmonids and the Coast Salish hoping I may find some inspiration. I found a whole lot more though, and it actually changed the way I viewed a part of one of my favorite franchises. So I'm going to go over what I've discovered starting with the basics.
Salmonids are an intelligent sapient species.
a. They wield weapons and operate advanced machinery.
b. They have a unique culture with music, art, and spiritual beliefs.
c. They have a society that has been recognized by the Octarians, hence the deal between them and the Octarians to trade power eggs for machines.
Little Buddy has been referred to as a pet before (and there’s even one render of an Inkling holding a chum on a leash) but I believe this to be inaccurate and non-canonical. It would be, in laymans terms, fucked up to have a sapient adult on a leash as a pet, so both things can’t (or shouldn’t) be true, and we have way more evidence of Salmonids being sapient than them being pets.
Salmonid art is inspired by the indigenous art of the Ainu or the NWC Native Americans
a. Many of the stickers in the Grizzco shop heavily resemble NWC indigenous art. They have the prefix "TS" meaning "Tribal-Style"
b. The wooden carving of a bear used to represent Mr. Grizz is a pretty clear parody of the traditionally Ainu Kim-un-kamuy “Mountain God” sculptures. The Ainu revered bears as deities visiting the human world in an animal form. These bears are also mockingly referred to as "tourist bears" as they are often produced en-masse as souvenirs for tourists visiting Hokkaido. I think the symbolism here goes pretty hard.
c. Salmon are also considered Kamuy “divine beings” as chep-atte-kamuy that visit the world in fish form. They appear frequently as motifs in Ainu art.
d. For the Ainu, consumption was not viewed as inherently cruel, but as an exchange between the humans and the divine.
Inkipedia is under the belief that the Salmonids art is inspired by NWC Native American peoples, but I don't think this is the whole story. I think that the cultures are similar on the surface due to the similar ecologies of the northern forest coastal environments. The reasons Inkipedia gives for this (the use of formline-esque art & the divine cycle of life and death particularly in relation to salmon) are also both traits shared with the Ainu, and it would make a lot more sense geologically since the events of Splatoon take place in Japan. There is a lot of speculation about the Jomon (the historical predecessor to the Ainu) and the Ainu potentially influencing Northwest Coast cultures, possibly even through the Aleut or other peoples of the North Pacific as intermediaries, but there just isn’t a ton of evidence to work off beyond oral tradition. For that reason, and also that it is a fictional culture that could be inspired by many sources, it is also quite likely a combination.
I see generally where the inspiration comes from with the culture of the Salmonids, but I think the way it is handled is a careless perversion of indigenous culture. They do not have personal names and instead individuals are referred to titles based on their tribes. Salmonids are not afraid of dying and regard their death and furthermore their consumption as spiritual fulfillment. In a developer interview, it was said that the Salmonids wield cookware because they want to make themselves look “tasty.” They do not just accept consumption and death as part of the cycle of life, they take pleasure in being consumed. To me, this reads as a race that was designed to be happy with being exploited and even dehumanizes themselves, which makes some sense from a game design perspective, but the implications that arise when borrowing imagery from real-world oppressed cultures are concerning.
As a footnote as this is conjecture and moreso theorycrafting, it is possible some of the events of Return of the Mammalians was inspired by Ainu culture as well. A traditional ritual of the Ainu people of Hokkaido is the Iomante “bear-sending ceremony,” where a bear is captured in the mountains, raised for 1-2 years and treated with respect, and then ceremonially killed and the meat shared communally. This was viewed as sending the bears spirit back to the realm of the divine. The idea of “sending a bear to the gods” kinda goes with sending a bear to space, in my opinion. Maybe this implies that the people of Alterna were Ainu descendants?
"Carrie's Jomon Romantic Trip🚗🚢🚞🛫"
Dogū (Clay Figurine). Japan, 1000-300 BCE.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Jomon Clay Pottery
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The Jōmon Period (縄文時代), the time of hunter-gatherer culture in prehistoric Japan. Pieces created during this time period are identified with the name “Jōmon,” meaning "cord-marked" or "cord-patterned," because of the way pottery was decorated by impressing cords onto the surface of jars or containers.
The Ainu are an Indigenous people of the North Pacific — historically centered on Hokkaidō and the surrounding islands (including Sakhalin and the Kurils) — whose cultural, linguistic and material traditions are strikingly different from those of the Yamato Japanese and who many scholars and community members link to ancient northern-Asian and Jōmon-era populations; their identity is built from a mix of seafaring and inland hunting economies, complex ritual life, and distinctive arts and technologies. Their language, Ainu, is not related to Japanese and is classified as an isolate; it survived for millennia in several regional varieties but suffered severe decline under state assimilation policies in the 19th and 20th centuries and is now endangered even as revival efforts (language classes, recordings, and cultural programming) have grown in recent decades. Traditional Ainu lifeways combined river and sea fishing (salmon, trout), coastal and forest foraging, and hunting (notably deer and bear), and their cosmology is animistic and centered on kamuy (spirits) with a long-observed ritual of sending back a captured bear’s spirit — the well-known “bear-sending” or iomante ceremony — along with highly developed crafts (wood carving, embroidery, woven clothing) and distinctive body adornments such as the old practice of women’s mouth tattooing and other markings that signified adulthood and ritual status. Over the modern period the Ainu endured harsh assimilationist laws, loss of land and resources, epidemics and discrimination that reduced visibility and interrupted cultural transmission, but from the late 20th century onward there has been a determined cultural renaissance — museums, community schools, artisanship revival, and public festivals — and a growing legal and political recognition of Ainu rights: national parliamentary resolutions in the 2000s and, more concretely, a 2019 law and related government measures aimed at promoting Ainu culture and socio-economic revitalization (including the establishment of the national Ainu museum and cultural park Upopoy). Today the Ainu experience is plural — some continue traditional practices in rural communities, many live in urban Japan and Russia and negotiate mixed identities, and activists and scholars emphasize both the traumatic legacies of past policies and the creative resilience of Ainu language, ritual, and art as living, evolving forms of belonging and knowledge.
Ornamented pottery in the "Fire Flame" style, dating to the Middle Jomon period (ca. 2500-1500 BCE). Found at Sasayama, Niigata Prefecture, Japan; now in the Tokyo National Museum.