Significance of Salmon

The many appearances of salmon throughout the collection evoke the ways that for many American Indians, salmon represent aspects of the cycle of life. This symbolic value seems to emerge, in the collection and in reality, in part because of the salmon's life cycle. Each year, salmon return to the place where they were spawned to themselves spawn, and then die. Though references to the death component of this cycle appear more frequently in the collection than references to other aspects of the cycle, there is nevertheless the sense that for the characters and for the author, the presence of salmon in their lives evokes the presence of death in life, and of life in death.