Kooskooskie Commons implies a town square where people gather to hold conversations, celebrations, and conduct commerce - create community -- through common dreams, desires, and concerns.
Those exchanges happen through the circulation of stories. The image of the sprial construction of a Native American basket as a series of connecting circles demonstrates how the stories simultaneously hold or cradle the energy of the commons and also serve as its center - the heart of the commons.
The Kooskooskie Commons, Inc. is a nonprofit, member-supported cultural and ecological education organization. We believe that healthy, biologically diverse landscapes support stable, sulturally diverse communities, and that healthy communities remember and celebrate the source of their sustenance.
The organization has been called into being by the precarious position of a significant source of widespread cultural sustenance, the wild Pacific salmon. Year by year, more and more salmon runs are designated as "threatened and endangered," according to the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) guidelines. Soon it is likely that most river systems in the Inland and Pacific Northwest will be under the scrutiny of ESA management.
Kooskooskie Commons proposes a pathway which says, "let's approach, at the cultural level, the call to restore the salmon." We can then bring to bear all the splendor cultures everywhere have developed to honor and celebrate the source of their sustenance: stories, the arts, sports, and recreation. When we join salmon with customary culture, we will put salmon back into the mainstream of daily life.