To Restore Salmon, Follow the Creator's Plan, Not Frankenfish

An op-ed about genetically engineered salmon by the Winnemem's chief and spiritual leader Caleen Sisk-Franco appeared in the California Progress Report today.

In the piece, she discusses the danger posed by the GE salmon, and also how bizarre it is that the government would support this dangerous plan while remaining skeptical about our own far safer plan to restore the salmon to the McCloud River.

Here's an excerpt, and you can read the full column here.

One day coyote noticed fox was smoothing sticks and fashioning them into children who would help him find food. Coyote was filled with envy and soon started to build his own family.

Impatient and greedy, coyote made his children with rugged, knobby sticks and built them much larger than him, thinking they would hunt more food this way.

When he finished, however, his roughly-hewn children disobeyed his orders, turned against him and beat him up.

My tribe, the Winnemem Wintu, is a traditional salmon people who come from Mount Shasta in California, and we learned long ago from coyote it’s dangerous to mimic the Creator. It’s a lesson yet to be learned by AquaBounty, the Massachusetts company behind the genetically engineered salmon likely to be approved by the FDA this month.