Barbara Blake, vice president of the Ocean Conservancy, former Juneau Assembly member, and former aide to former Gov. Bill Walker, delivered an address Friday, during which she proposed that an oral tradition of Natives should be considered the “Indigenous Law of the Sea,” and that salmon are relatives to Alaska Natives.
Her talk, titled “Weaving the Currents: Writing an Indigenous Law of the Sea,” challenged attendees to reconsider global approaches to ocean and environmental stewardship and instead acknowledge the primacy of indigenous people, and how they should ” dictate” how the sea, rivers, and land are managed. She was not specific when it came to explaining how China and Russia would go along with it, or how the other 8 billion people living on Planet Earth would agree to indigenous primacy.
Speaking to a sparsely attended room at the Sealaska Heritage Institute’s Spring Lecture Series, Blake emphasized that what she calls “an Indigenous Law of the Sea” is not a new framework, but a long-standing system of governance rooted in Native traditions and values, all through oral tradition. Indigenous law is the real law, she said, even if it is not written down.
“The laws that we carry and the laws that underpin how we treat the ocean, how we treat the waters, how we treat our beyond human relatives are the laws how we operate in the world,” Blake said. “They’re not written down like the laws you see in the Constitution of the United States or the Constitution of the State of Alaska. They’re handed down from generation to generation.”
She described this body of law as one of remembrance and reconciliation, not innovation. “Thinking about this work is not creating new law, but it’s a remembrance and it’s a reconciliation of the law that we always carried,” Blake said. “Just re-instituting the law that governed this place for a millennia.”
Blake urged the audience to imagine a world where these Indigenous laws and values were not only remembered, but actually were dictates. “What would it look like today if we pulled those laws forward into maybe a written form, maybe a verbal form, and the rest of the world said yes, we will abide by those laws as well?” she asked.
It was toward the end of her lecture when she repeatedly called salmon the relatives of indigenous people. Here’s the clip of her talking about them as relatives (not visible on mobile phones, sorry):
Blake also quoted Jonathan Samuelson, a Yup’ik and Tlingit presenter who participated in the recent Indigenous Law of the Sea gathering.
“Our waters speak their own language,” Samuelson was quoted as saying, “and we as indigenous people are the interpreters of that language for the world.”
Blake, too, said only indigenous people could interpret the water.
Blake explained how Indigenous communities, by spending time on the waters and land, are attuned to changes brought by climate change, unlike non-Natives. “The ocean is speaking to us. Our rivers are speaking to us. Our land is speaking to us. And what are those things telling us? What are our salmon relatives telling us about how the world is being treated?” she asked.
Throughout her lecture, Blake said indigenous peoples have a duty to what she called “our beyond human relatives.”
Presumably salmon, but no one in the audience questioned why they are eating their relatives.
“We know we have a responsibility to our oceans … our waters and our lands and our beyond human relatives,” she said. “That has been our responsibility that has been passed down for generations.”
“For thousands of years we’ve carried all this knowledge—15,000 years carbon-dated proof of existence in this place. We know our stories go back before that,” Blake said. “Our stories of creation are from these lands and from these waters.”
She also said that indigenous babies are born with the knowledge of this law.
She made the argument that it’s time to write down the “laws” and then get the world to agree to them.
Blake acknowledged that indigenous people have different “laws,” depending on where they live and that each of these sets of “laws” are legitimate.
Watch the one-hour lecture here:
We live in scary times, where anthroplogical hominon progress is weirdly being both questioned by ancestral speculation & moot supplant of progressive institutional guidance. Maybe this just another idiosyncrasy of something deemed as “WOK”. Other parts of the “democratic world” seem to be riding the same parrot. Certainly democracy enables freedom speak, which in today’s world is rife with speculation, fantasy and conspiratorial thought. Non-native speakers take to the podium like this lady has and often do today. It is happening in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Too frequently such propositions are being adopted, indeed institutionalised. Yes, still another factor of failing “democracy”?
This represents a common error that typifies recent thought: the idea that if it ‘feels good’ emotionally, it must be right. It ignores practicality, so the person can ‘feel good,’ but can never work in reality.
Way cool, Barb!
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Salmon are relatives to Alaska Natives …so who’s getting smoked on the rack, damn did we just eat Auntie? …wow, systemic racism’s bad enough, now we got systemic cannibalism?
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Barb, who’s related to dog salmon?
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Earth to Barb, if you write down the “laws” don’t you need battleships or something to get the world to agree to them?
The liberals are always telling the native people about thing that they know absolutely nothing about. There were no writing laws. The only thing that mattered was substance.
Atavistic chimera best summarises such illusory.
The Sasquatch was here before our current natives, I think they should make the laws.
Pretty clear that only Raven can make the law, since Raven is the creator. Or is he the trickster? Yeah, let’s do what Raven says. That totally makes sense.
Oh yeah, and Tlingits lived short and brutish lives before contact with modern cultures. If they survived childhood, they might live to 30 or 50 if they were lucky. Now, they live into their 70s. So let’s all go back to prehistoric culture. Let’s take slaves and kill neighboring tribes. That will be fun.
Since white people invented the airplane (snow machine, computer, etc.)…………… you can write the rest. Obviously, this premise is absurd. We are all in this together and no one with common sense is trying to hurt anyone else when it comes to resource policy and resource allocation, like fish. Sure, mistakes have been made but we are human. Now, we should all be (and for the most part we are) working on fair solutions to the issues at hand.
What a hilarious (if not so chillingly delusional) joke. First, we are all indigenous to the earth. The oceans span the globe and all water recirculates. Every single one of us originate from one earthly region and all of us migrated. We also all are effected by the natural process of climate change and all have to adapt accordingly. I would even say those of us not living in overly governement dependent village communities might even be better at adapting as we have no one taking care of us. I have spent time in villages and I am sorry, there is not a whole lot of evidence of intentional stewardship, certainly no more than any other community. I am sure there is definitely some psssed down wisdom that should be considered but it seems our ‘seas’ are more governed by greedy politics, and very little wise real stewardship.
With all due respect to the traditions and values of Alaska’s indigenous peoples, this sort of statement is cultural rubbish. This woman is being more ridiculous, if it were possible, than the Alaska Federation of Natives when it contended that Alaska’s native urban residents deserve a ‘subsistence priority’ to harvesting fish and game on all rivers and lands of this state. These people give ‘culture’ a disagreeable name.