This paper represents the first part of a larger study examining salmon conservation among indigenous Atayal peoples, national park managers, and conservation scientists in Taiwan, where the Formosan Landlocked Salmon (Oncorhynchus masou formosanus) once a major food source for the Atayal is now faced with possible extinction. The fish has become a national symbol of conservation in Taiwan, and serves as a bellwether for climate change. This is an issue with wide-ranging significance and particular impacts upon the indigenous peoples of the Asia-Pacific. The fish became land locked not because it cannot reach the ocean physically, but rather as temperatures warmed after the last ice age, preventing it from returning to the ocean as downstream sections of rivers became too warm for it to live. Today as global climate change proceeds, the fish has become further threatened with extinction due to habitats shrinking with warming rivers and increasing severity of typhoon events. The proposed paper focuses on and highlights historical and ethnographic analyses of indigenous Atayal perspectives regarding the fish, viewed as a disappearing ancestor in local practice and belief. In this work, I proceed by acknowledging the notion in recent scholarship that perhaps the only way forward in a period of rapid human induced global environmental change is through the notion of a more-than-human anthropology and methodology of listening to non-humans in the ecosystems surrounding us There are longstanding relationships between Taiwan’s indigenous peoples and non-human animals, and paying attention to these relationships reveals new and important gaps in conservation science. However, industrialization, colonialism, and urbanization are slowly eroding these relationships and alienating people from the wild forests and rivers around them. Historically, Atayal people maintained close relationships with the Landlocked Salmon as a food source, acknowledging it as an ancestor that could share details with them about its riverine habitats. This paper thus works to highlight what forms of agency have historically been ascribed to the fish and related aquatic river species and animals by indigenous peoples. In parts thanks to a Japanese colonial scientist, Ōshima tadashi Mitsuru, who first “discovered” the Landlocked Salmon, we know that historically Atayal people maintained deep relationships with the fish through not only consumption but also songs, stories, and other folk customs. Mitsuru’s work is recognized by Aayal themselves as leaving behind one of the last written or living memories of times when their people maintained active relations with the fish as a food source and ancestor before its population decline and move towards extinction. In this paper I weave together these histories with contemporary ethnography among the Atayal on contemporary perspectives about this aquatic ancestor, as this indigenous group has become more directly involved in habitat restoration, monitoring, and fish recovery, hoping to strengthen and bring back the relations they once maintained with the fish.

Keywords: Taiwan, salmon, indigenous, climate change, Atayal

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Brendan A. Galipeau is currently an assistant professor in the Institute of Anthropology at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. His research interests and publications focus on environmental and economic anthropology of hydropower development, agricultural practices, and non-timber forest products in Southwest China, and more recently on indigenous Austronesian ecologies in Taiwan. He is currently at work on a book manuscript under contract with the University of Washington Press, tentatively titled Crafting a Tibetan Terroir: Wine Production, Identity, and Landscape Change in Shangri-La.