Neighbors Along the Riverbed | Mickey L.D. Morgan
NOAA Fisheries and the Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design (AICAD) are proud to present ‘Neighbors Along the Riverbed,’ the work of visual and community practice artist and care worker Mickey L.D. Morgan.
Mickey L.D. Morgan is passionate about neighborliness, believing that every human and non-human parts of an ecosystem are essential to all of our lives. This is the work and opinion of the artist, and does not necessarily reflect the views of NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region.
The Project
Natural streams once braided the California landscape, connecting coastal floodplains and estuaries to the headwaters of river systems. Now, the river networks are under increasing pressures from urban and suburban development. Many cities grew around rivers that historically supported healthy salmon and steelhead populations. This increased concentration of people adds infrastructure that reduces natural habitat and increases toxic stormwater runoff. Many salmon populations that once relied on these streams as vital corridors for both up and downstream migration are now listed as threatened or endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.
Neighbors Along the Riverbed is a community-based art project designed to encourage people in urban and suburban areas of coastal California to practice salmon conservation and habitat restoration. The artist’s main strategy to accomplish this is by framing this work as neighborliness and placing salmon, steelhead, and waterways as equally important parts of our communities.
The project was created for the 2022 AICAD/NOAA Fisheries Art + Science fellowship, which awarded grant funding to an artist to help promote habitat conservation for endangered and threatened salmon and steelhead in urban California. Morgan chose to focus on the communities of Berkeley, Fremont, Hayward, Oakland, San Diego, and San Francisco. These lands are the ancestral homes of the Muwekma Ohlone, Chochenyo, Ramaytush, Tamien, Kumeyaay, Chumash, Kizh, and Fernandeño Tataviam.
There are seven threatened and endangered species of salmon and steelhead that move between the Pacific Ocean and their inland natal headwaters in coastal California streams: California Coastal Chinook, Southern Oregon Northern California Coast Coho Salmon, Central California Coast Coho Salmon, Southern California Steelhead, South Central California Steelhead, Central California Coast Steelhead, and Northern California Steelhead. This project promotes conservation of these species by creating connections between people and fish.
Neighbors Along the Riverbed is composed of conversations with community members about salmon conservation through the lens of ecological justice. These conversations were made into podcasts, and are presented alongside site-specific drawings based on maps of salmon and steelhead migratory pathways. Please take the time to enjoy, learn, and be changed by these podcast episodes and the site-specific drawings, all publicly available and open access.
Podcasts
Neighbors Along the Riverbed
In their own words, community members share what they know about local salmon and steelhead, barriers to habitat conservation, and what they believe is needed to help preserve these species. From these conversations, Morgan created an eleven episode podcast series. The conversations are intertwined with Morgan’s research and highlights the complex nature of conserving habitat for the seven species of threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead in California.
Each episode is between eight and thirteen minutes, with transcripts available in the episode descriptions. The theme music is by Shai Gropper and the salmon roe picture used for podcast cover by Debbie Frost via NOAA Fisheries.
Episode 1: Introduction
Introduction to the podcast series Neighbors Along the Riverbed, part of a community-engaged art project created to get people who live in urban coastal areas of California involved in supporting our salmon neighbors, specifically to the benefit of seven populations of threatened and endangered native salmon.
Episode 2: Accessibility
Neighbors share perspectives on how a lack of accessibility creates barriers to salmon and steelhead conservation and habitat restoration, and the benefits of making both the knowledge of and the steps to helping salmon accessible.
Episode 3: Anadromous
Salmon and steelhead are anadromous, meaning they migrate between freshwater and saltwater. These fish are experts at transitions and persistent in their migration, because of this, people connect to them in many different ways that are explored in this episode.
Episode 4: Barriers
What prevents people from being able to promote the conservation of local salmon habitat? What prevents salmon and steelhead from moving through our cities on their migration?
Episode 5: Awareness
Before promoting the conservation of salmon and steelhead habitat it is important to acknowledge the importance that these fish hold within their communities, and to understand when people know about them.
Episode 6: Ideal World
Imagination and hope are often overlooked when addressing social and environmental challenges. In this episode neighbors imagine what it would look like if we lived in an ideal world for salmon conservation.
Episode 7: Interconnectedness
Vital to the core of Neighbors Along the Riverbed and shifting attitudes around salmon habitat conservation and restoration is understanding how interdependent each part of our neighborhoods are with each other.
Episode 8: Native Fish, Local Scales
For the threatened and endangered fish that are focal in this project, being native to the areas they move through is an essential factor in their conservation.
Episode 9: New Normal
Pushing back against the idea that a “new normal” is something immovable, speakers share how being resigned to the way things are in salmon conservation is not mandatory and how they go about choosing to create something else.
Episode 10: What We Can Learn
When we take salmon and steelhead seriously as neighbors we find that they are the source of information and lessons that will lead to their conservation. And, in doing so, we find that they are also sources of information and lessons that can help us in their conservation.
Episode 11: Conclusion
It’s ok to keep it small, keep it local. The efforts that we put into helping endangered and threatened salmon neighbors on a local level affects our watersheds and oceans, and vice versa, it adds up for the health of our ecosystems. Everything counts.
Site Specific Drawings
The other body of work created during this fellowship is a series of drawings of waterways that are significant to the migration of salmon and steelhead. In a light blue color, the images are traced from pictures taken at these places by the artist or pulled from other sources. The shape of a waterway can hold significance. Channelization and culverts may produce straight lines, which present barriers for salmon and steelhead migration, while the historical waterways have a more organic shape.
Morgan would like to thank every single person they talked to while staying in California, who helped to enrich this project, neighbors who participated and did not. They hope that Neighbors Along the Riverbed continues to serve communities and invigorate people to become invested in the lives of their salmon and steelhead neighbors. Thank you and please share this with others throughout your communities.
Site Specific Drawings Credits
Bugbee, Richard. “The Indians of San Diego County.” Kumeyaay, 2019 https://www.kumeyaay.com/the-indians-of-san-diego-county.html.
Google Maps, Google, https://www.google.com/maps/.
“History.” Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation.
“Kumeyaay Timeline.” Kumeyaay, https://www.kumeyaay.com/kumeyaay-timeline.html.
Kumeyaay, https://www.kumeyaay.com/.
“Land Acknowledgments on Our Homelands.” Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians, 27 July 2022, https://www.tataviam-nsn.us/landacknowledgment/.
Native Land Digital, 8 Oct. 2021, https://native-land.ca/.
“Ohlone Land.” Centers for Educational Justice & Community Engagement, UC Berkeley, https://cejce.berkeley.edu/ohloneland.
“Parcel Lookup Tool.” San Diego Geographic Information Source, https://sdgis.sandag.org/.
“People of the Willowhouse.” Kizh Nation, 29 Aug. 2022, https://gabrielenoindians.org/.
“Stormwater Engineering Division: Spreading Grounds Information Hansen Spreading Grounds.” Public Works LA County, https://dpw.lacounty.gov/wrd/SpreadingGround/information/facdept.cfm?facinit=20.
“Stormwater Engineering Division: Spreading Grounds Information Rio Hondo Coastal Spreading Grounds.” Public Works LA County, https://dpw.lacounty.gov/wrd/SpreadingGround/information/facdept.cfm?facinit=27.
“Stormwater Engineering Division: Spreading Grounds Information.” Public Works LA County, https://dpw.lacounty.gov/wrd/SpreadingGround/information/.
“Temescal Creek Watershed.” Alameda County Flood Control District, 9 Nov. 2022, https://acfloodcontrol.org/the-work-we-do/resources/temescal-creek-watershed/.
ThemeZaa. “Tribal History.” Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, http://www.muwekma.org/maps.html.