(Re)claiming space and place through collaborative planning in rural Oregon

In 1992, the Snake River chinook salmon runs were listed under the US Endangered Species Act, heightening conflicts among environmentalists, loggers, and ranchers in the Pacific Northwest. Amidst the fray, however, an unusual collaborative salmon recovery effort emerged in northeastern Oregon between historically antagonistic groups, including the Nez Perce Tribe, a county government, private landowners, and public land users. In an area with a history of contestation over boundaries and state efforts to control people and space, collaboration between the present and former residents of the Wallowas offers insights into how conflicts can evolve into cooperation. This article argues that an important factor in the formation of this unusual Native American and Anglo American alliance was the development of a shared ideology, which articulated commonalties, re-imagined the past, and suggested actions to achieve an agreed-upon future. Discrete in time and place, ideologies are subject to on-going change as they draw on shifting definitions of identity, attachments to space, and creation of place. Based on seventeen months of anthropological and archival research, these dynamics are illustrated through analysis of the (re)claiming of space and (re)defining of place through the “Wallowa County/Nez Perce Salmon Recovery Plan” process.