Kiona has fished for Chinook salmon for decades on his family’s scaffold at the edge of the falls, using a dip net suspended from a 33-foot pole.
“Fishing is an art and a spiritual practice,” says Kiona, a Yakama Nation elder. “You're fighting the fish. The fish is fighting you, tearing holes in the net, jerking you off the scaffold.”
He finds strength, sanctity, even salvation in that struggle. The river saved Kiona when he returned from Vietnam with post-war trauma, giving him therapy no hospital could |
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