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

In 1992, the Snake River chinook salmon runs were listed under the US Endan gered 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 betwee n historically antagonistic groups, including the Nez Perce Tribe, a county government, private landowners, and public land users. In an area with a h istory of contestation over boundaries and state efforts to control people and space, collaboration between the present and former residents of the Wa llowas offers insights into how conflicts can evolve into cooperation. This article argues that an important factor in the formation of this unusual N ative American and Anglo American alliance was the development of a shared ideology, which articulated commonalties, re-imagined the past, and suggest ed actions to achieve an agreed-upon future. Discrete in time and place, id eologies are subject to on-going change as they draw on shifting definition s of identity, attachments to space, and creation of place. Based on sevent een months of anthropological and archival research, these dynamics are ill ustrated through analysis of the (re)claiming of space and (re)defining of place through the "Wallowa County/Nez Perce Salmon Recovery Plan" process. (C) 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.