Charlotte Coté shares stories about c̓uumaʕas, the river that brings nourishment to her people and territory

The lecture was recorded  |   Watch her UO Today interview

Indigenous scholar Charlotte Coté grew up in the Nuu-chah-nulth community of Tseshaht on the west coast of Vancouver Island along a river called c̓uumaʕas, meaning “cleansing or washing.” The river was named the Somass River by the white settlers who began moving into the Tseshaht territory in the mid-1800s. Coté recounts, “When I was young the miʔaat, our word for sockeye salmon, were so plentiful that there were shallow places in the river where you could walk, and you would feel the salmon swimming between your legs. Having this plentiful salmon supply made us dependent on it as an abundant and healthy food source, and many people in my community became avid fishers, including myself.”  

For Indigenous peoples, their relationships to the lands, waters, plants, and animals provide a sense of belonging, and their cultural identities are embedded within the land and waterscapes  they call home. On Thursday, October 6, 2022, at 7 p.m. in 282 Lillis Hall, Charlotte Coté will give a lecture titled “c̓uumaʕas. The River that Runs through Us” as the 2022–23 Robert D. Clark Lecturer. She will share stories from her Tseshaht community—stories of c̓uumaʕas, the river that streams through her ancestral territory like a life vein bringing to them the miʔaat, sockeye salmon, an important haʔum, cultural food, which provides them with nutritional and spiritual nourishment. She will discuss how, through harvesting, processing, and sharing miʔaat, Tseshaht reinforce their cultural bonds to their salmon relatives, to their ancestral waterways and homelands, and to each other. Maintaining these relationships is central to Tseshaht food sovereignty but, as Coté explains, realizing food sovereignty for Northwest Coast Indigenous communities such as hers comes with many challenges. Pollution, habitat destruction, fish farms, environmental degradation, and climate change threaten the ecosystems where these sacred relationships have thrived for millennia.  

Charlotte Coté is a professor in the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington. She has dedicated her personal and academic life to creating awareness around Indigenous health and wellness issues and to working with Indigenous peoples and communities in revitalizing their traditional foodways. In her recent book, A Drum in one Hand, A Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast (UW Press, 2022), Coté shares contemporary Nuu-chah-nulth practices of traditional food revitalization in the context of broader efforts to re-Indigenize contemporary diets on the Northwest Coast. She examines how cultural foods play a key role in physical, emotional, spiritual, and dietary wellness. Coté is the author of the book, Spirits of Our Whaling Ancestors. Revitalizing Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth Traditions (UW Press, 2010) as well as numerous articles. Coté serves as series editor for the UW Press’ Indigenous Confluences Series. She is the founder and chair of UW’s annual “Living Breath of wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ” Indigenous Foods Symposium. wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ is a Lushootseed word meaning Intellectual House. 

Coté’s lecture is the first in the Oregon Humanities Center’s 2022–23 “Belonging” series. Her lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be ASL interpreted. The lecture will also be livestreamed and recorded. The recording will be available on the OHC’s YouTube channel (youtube.com/c/OregonHumanitiesCenter). Register to attend in person or virtually. For disability accommodations, which must be arranged by September 29, please contact ohc@uoregon.edu or call 541-346-3934.