Person

Enrique Salmón

Also known as: Enrique Salmon

Rarámuri (Tarahumara) ethnobotanist, scholar, and head of the American Indian Studies Program at California State University–East Bay. Salmón's signature contribution to the Western ecological vocabulary is the term *kincentric ecology* — the orientation in which plants, animals, soils, waters, and weather are **relatives** rather than resources. He coined the term with fellow Native scholar Dennis Martinez in the late 1990s and articulated it formally in his 2000 *Ecological Applications* paper, *Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship*. His 2012 book *Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and Resilience* (University of Arizona Press, First Peoples series) extends the framework into food sovereignty, traversing the food systems of the Tohono O'odham, the Rarámuri, the Diné, and other Southwest and northern Mexico Indigenous communities. The Rarámuri concept that grounds his thought is *iwígara* — 'shared breath' — the principle that everything around is alive and shares the same breath, which is what makes everything related to everything else.

Cultural

Enrique Salmón is Rarámuri (Tarahumara), the Indigenous people of the Sierra Tarahumara in northern Mexico — the deep canyon country south of Chihuahua. He holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from [[sedona|Arizona]] State University and is head of the American Indian Studies Program at [[berkeley|California]] State University–East Bay. His scholarly output spans Indigenous ethnobotany, traditional ecological knowledge, food sovereignty, and the philosophical articulation of Indigenous land relationships in the academic vocabulary of Western ecology.

His signature contribution is the term [[kincentric-ecology|kincentric ecology]]. Coined in the late 1990s with fellow Native scholar Dennis Martinez (Tohono O’odham / Chicano / Tewa) and articulated formally in his 2000 paper [[kincentric-ecology|Kincentric Ecology]]: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship (Ecological Applications 10:1327–1332), the term names an orientation that Indigenous traditions have always carried and that English-language academic vocabulary did not have a word for: the orientation in which non-human nature is kin — bound by mutual obligation, addressable in relational terms, owed care — rather than environment or resource.

The Rarámuri word that grounds Salmón’s thinking is iwígara — “shared breath.” Everything around is alive and shares the same breath; this shared breath is what makes everything related to everything else. The word is a kincentric word in a kincentric language. Salmón’s English-language work is, in part, the labor of carrying this orientation across the language barrier without losing its substance.

His 2012 book [[eating-the-landscape|Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and Resilience]] (University of Arizona Press, First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies) extends the framework into [[food-sovereignty|food sovereignty]]. The book travels through the food landscapes of Indigenous Southwest and northern Mexico — Rarámuri canyons, Tohono O’odham desert fields, Diné cornfields, Pueblo terraces — and shows the same pattern from many angles: Indigenous food systems are functioning, climate-adapted, soil-building agricultures that encode kincentric relationships in operational form.

Why Salmón matters to 0mn1.one

The wiki uses kin as a load-bearing word — the recognition that the more-than-human world is family rather than resource runs through the platform’s mission of serving every form of life. That usage depends on the orientation Salmón named. Filing the source properly traces it back to its Indigenous origin and makes the wiki philosophically honest, crediting the underlying orientation to Indigenous traditions and to Salmón as their scholarly articulator.

The long-form notes on Salmón live at _knowledge/sources/salmon-eating-the-landscape.md.

What links here, and how

Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.

Cultural

voiced by

Eating the Landscape Salmón's 2012 book; book-length elaboration of his earlier kincentric-ecology paper

shares approach with

Tyson Yunkaporta Indigenous-scholar tier peer: Yunkaporta (Apalech/Australia) and Salmón (Rarámuri/Southwest)

2 inbound links · 6 outbound

Cultural

Why Salmón matters to 0mn1.one

See also

What links here, and how