Salmon Dreaming

Wading, exploring, fishing, and feasting along the river, Christie Green blends immersive fieldwork with natural history and environmental inquiry to reveal how salmon navigate the world around them as climate change threatens their habitat and lifeways.

Inspired by her geologist stepfather’s pioneering work mapping the Alaska Range in the 1950s, Christie Green returns to her home state to trace the journey of wild salmon from the headwaters of the Kenai River to Cook Inlet and beyond to the Pacific Ocean.

During her multiyear exploration of the Kenai watershed, Green encounters Indigenous wisdom keepers, multigenerational Alaskans, geologists, ecologists, artists, storytellers, and historians who illuminate the relationships between people and salmon that have sustained Alaska for thousands of years. Green weaves scientific observation with lived experience as she follows this keystone species in search of alternative ways to navigate the world and, ultimately, reimagine our place within it.

Set against unprecedented environmental change, Salmon Dreaming reveals how embodied wisdom cultivated through generations spent fishing, harvesting, storytelling, and sharing meals is as vital as science in confronting the ecological crisis of rising water temperatures. Following Chinooks, Reds, Silvers, and Humpbacks as they return to the Kenai year after year, Green offers a profound meditation on homecoming, kinship, and our relationship with the greater-than-human world.