Bring the Salmon Home! Karuk Challenges to Capitalist Incorporation

Abstract

With capitalism's introduction, Karuk people have experienced radical declines in the productivity of Klamath River salmon fisheries, dire impoverishment, and a new order of threats in the form of hunger and diet related diseases. We use interview, survey, medical and archival data to describe how capitalism has been an unsustainable system in the case of the Karuk because it is organized around market extraction and destroys cultural knowledge and behaviors that served to keep fish harvests sustainable. Using world-systems theory, we propose a fifth frontier exists, that of health. Despite the impacts of 150 years of direct genocide, Karuk people continue to survive and are revitalizing culture and community, which supports the idea that capitalist incorporation is not fully complete but partial. Karuk resistance and revitalization is epitomized in the campaign to remove four dams on the Klamath River and thereby 'Bring the Salmon Home' to the upper basin.