Notes on Hope

Hope is the spell my parents cast on me when I was born. 

My first and last names were already chosen for me before I arrived, two weeks late on a blistering Monday toward the end of August. Hope is the word my parents sandwiched between the two and whispered over me upon meeting me at birth. I don’t know why. I don’t know how they knew I’d need it, or if they knew I’d need it, but they gave it to me all the same: a word for a name. A talisman perhaps. An invitation for sure.

The Salmon Know Where Home Is

In mid-October, just days after the last of four dams on the Klamath River was removed, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife biologists identified a fall-run Chinook above the last of the former dam sites. A press release from ODFW on October 16 noted that the fish became “the first anadromous fish to return to the Klamath Basin in Oregon since 1912 when the first of four hydroelectric dams was constructed, blocking migration.”

“The return of our relatives the c’iyaal’s is overwhelming for our tribe. This is what our members worked for and believed in for so many decades,” the article quoted Roberta Frost, Klamath Tribes Secretary. “I want to honor that work and thank them for their persistence in the face of what felt like an unmovable obstacle. The salmon are just like our tribal people, and they know where home is and returned as soon as they were able.”

The most beautiful expression of place attachment I’ve come across in my years of searching for it emerges from the relationship between Pacific Northwest Tribes, this place, and salmon. Nothing is immovable in the face of hope like this. Not even hundred year old concrete edifices precisely engineered as blockages.

(This is my prayer in an election week.)

This Room is on Fire. We Can Put it Out.

Look, in talking about the downsides of cynicism and the upsides of hope, I am in no way wanting to paper over the real harm and destruction and corruption and pain that saturate our world. Hope is not the same as optimism. Optimism is the belief that things will be better. I think of that as rose-colored glasses and something that can make us even complacent. 

Hope is the notion that things could get better. It often coincides with a lot of dissatisfaction with the way things are now. I think that hope can be a feeling that inspires us to challenge these structures, to challenge the forces in our culture that are doing harm. I think of hope as a fiery and often radical emotion, something that’s not saying, ‘This is fine,’ in a room that’s on fire, but rather, ‘This room is on fire. We can put it out.’

—Jamil Zaki, Professor of Psychology and Director of Stanford’s Social Neuroscience Lab, in an interview with Shankar Vedantam for Hidden Brain.

Second Ceremonial Salmon Harvest to Happen on Undammed Elwha River

The stories live on of salmon, barred from all but the bottom four miles of a river system a hundred miles long, battering themselves to death on the concrete of the Lower Elwha Dam. 

In the autumn of 2023, the Elwha Klallam, who’d agreed to a moratorium on fishing the Elwha River in the years immediately preceding and following dam removal, were able to fish for coho in their usual and accustomed places on an undammed waterway for the first time in a century.

Just before the ceremonial fishery opened, I attended an event where Vanessa Castle, Lower Elwha Klallam Tribal Member and fisheries and wildlife technician, spoke of what the forthcoming harvest meant to her. The short film Wild Hope was screened, a documentary about the regeneration of the river system featuring Castle. “Fighting for dam removal was a long and grueling process for my ancestors,” she said as the film opened. “I wish they could see it now. See what has happened here and how our lands have been healing.” 

A week later, an article in the Seattle Times quoted Castle from the riverside where she cast for coho: “This completely filled my spirit to be back on the water again, to be able to exercise my treaty rights just as my ancestors did and fought for,” she said. When the ceremonial fishery closed, 177 coho had been harvested.

Another limited ceremonial fishery will open to tribal members on the Lower Elwha this year. Recovery efforts and monitoring continue with the hopes that a commercial coho fishery will be possible in the next year. Chinook have been slower to repopulate and remain threatened in the Elwha River system and throughout Puget Sound. 

E.O. Wilson on Hope

“Everything in life depends on how well the future is conceived,” wrote E. O. Wilson in a 1999 essay for Orion Magazine entitled Hope and Mystery. He conjectures that “if even one person in a thousand survives because she had the genetic predisposition to persevere against discouraging odds, then natural selection will install hopefulness as a hereditary quality, as a necessary companion of intelligence.” Life is more likely to find a way to survive when hope foundations its intelligence. What a beautiful thought.

Wilson concludes, “Humanity’s relation to the rest of life is unimaginably complex, and includes the deepest of all mysteries on this planet. Those who embrace it own the gift of a bottomless well of hope.”

What’s in a Name?

Hope is the spell my parents cast on me when I was born and I am beginning to embrace it. I am beginning to recognize it in the insistence of life, despite discouraging odds and mean conditions. I am beginning to see it in the ways people are adding their energies to life’s insistence. I am beginning to understand hope as a disposition toward action born from a keen attention to what is and a wild imagination as to what might be. 

“Seeing this ecosystem come alive again is a beautiful thing and rewilding this territory from the removal of these dams is a step in the right direction for our people to heal,” Vanessa Castle reflects in Wild Hope. In the coming scene she leads a group of tribal children through an outdoor classroom, “the first generation in over a century never to have seen the Elwha dammed.”