The People

Voices of Salmon Nation

Peter Donaldson

Performer, educator, master storyteller and community organizer PETER DONALDSON spoke with us in September of 2006 about his Salmonpeople Tour and about creating our own stories through individual action.

I see myself as the Johnny Appleseed of Salmon Nation. As a storyteller, my primary work in the world is to gather and share stories of what’s possible. No more divisive complaining. No more blame. It’s time to write a new story and broadcast it like seed. This work must be carried out with the savvy of a businessman, the patience of an orchardist, and the conviction of a backwoods preacher.

The watershed of my ministry flows from three tributary streams: performer, educator, and facilitator. Much of it starts with a decision I made a decade back not to form yet another non-profit organization. I find my energy is better spent continuously organizing around what needs to get done.

With the first stream, I tour community and professional theatres throughout the bioregion with a one-man show called SALMONPEOPLE. With the second stream, I work with schools and colleges and teachers to integrate science, civics, economics, history, and communication with the principles of sustainability. With the third stream I design and facilitate community-based campaigns through which local coalitions learn to measure what matters, based on indicators of sustainable behavior.

SALMONPEOPLE is a one-man show revealing the ecological and economic interdependence of salmon and people as expressed in the past, present and future story of Salmon Nation. The story is told through a modern day everyman named Cyrus who finds himself employed at the local dam driving his tanker truck to transport spawners up past where a fish ladder never got built.

Cyrus has been scratching his head lately about this whole endangered species thing, and his personal, self-taught lessons in ecology-economics are a triumph of the vernacular, a synthesis of complex patterns and changing values in the name of common sense for the common good.

The story that Cyrus tells in SALMONPEOPLE is my calling card. It‘s how I learn and how I contribute at the same time. It’s my curriculum. I try to help communities think through this new kind of curriculum. There is a framework of questions and a whole set of tools that are spilling out into the world from all directions. I’ve come across many of these tools just in the last year. Three leap to mind, the Cascadia Scorecard, see-it software from Real Living Solutions and the Sustainable Oregon Schools Initiative. We’re living inside a solutions merry-go-round. Pick a horse!

The Salmonpeople Tour launches an iterative process. A local citizen champion gets excited about the show and wants to bring it to the community. I say, okay, let’s plan a year in advance because one of my criteria for bringing it to your town is that there be at least 10 local organizations that want to be involved. If we think we’re going to create some local energy, let’s use it. While in town, I’ll teach a bit in the local schools presenting a menu of offerings such as “The Salmon Nation Seminar,” or “Human History According to Salmon,” or “The Sustainable School Workshop.” Maybe I’ll speak at the local Rotary. Maybe we’ll have a sustainable feast to experience first hand the best of what the community has to offer from the local foodshed.

Getting an indicator conversation going in town means that we can start making some connections to how we’re educating our kids. We have a report card that we expect our kids to do well on, and through the indicator process we have a community report card that we expect adults to perform well on. It seems useful – essential really – to align one with the other. Youth need to be valued. They want to feel they are part of the big story going on.

At the end of the day, I try to model full-bodied citizenship. One who loves to learn, one who listens for the good story, the system shifting, the solutions rising, the breakthrough, the twist, the risk, the right thing to do – one who hears a good story and knows how to tell it.

With the Salmonpeople Tour, I’ve chosen to take all of this quite literally, putting myself on stage and in community trying to work out this story. That’s my art. I try and model being a storyteller because we all are just that: storytellers, each and every one of us. We all tell our children stories about how the real world works just by how we live each day.

Similarly, I try to model being a citizen scientist. I can’t make very good choices about what I buy or how I vote, and I can't understand the wake of my decisions unless I really start to understand some basics in science and how systems work. I have to be a little curious about chemistry and biology and geology and meteorology.

I also try to model being a spiritual person. As if church was happening all the time, so much so that maybe it didn’t even require a building. I keep thinking about the days of the longhouse when religion and science and good theatre were all the same thing. The First Salmon Ceremony is exactly that: the shaman as fish biologist marking the opening of the season, the village prayer of thanks to the sprit of the salmon, and a reason for the carver and the dancer and the singers to put together a really good, really important story.

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