Hand Carved Sterling Sockeye Salmon Bracelet

Hand Carved Sterling Sockeye Salmon Bracelet #48 by Owen Walker

The Salmon is the staff of life for people in the Northwest and that includes us at Walker Goldsmiths!  This Design #48, Hand Carved Sterling Sockeye Salmon Bracelet by Owen Walker is a celebration of the Salmon that sustain life and culture on the Northwest Coast.  We who live here often take the salmon for granted just as people in other places may take their daily bread for granted.  Salmon may not be quite as important to our diet as in former centuries, but we still depend on them for our food, our recreation and for many of us our livelihood.  The annual smoking of salmon is still a big event in our family.

Salmon in all their varieties were and are the staff of life for the West Coast of North America.   Salmon was dried and traded over the Rocky Mountains in exchange for dried Buffalo meat, Elk and Buffalo hides, Elk teeth and Catlinite for pipes.  There were also other things traded from the coast such as dried clams, dentalium shells and euchalon oil, but dried salmon was the number one product.

Owen’s Recipe for Smoked Salmon Dip; Here is a favorite way to use smoked salmon in our family.  Take one large sweet yellow onion, chop it into the blender with a pint of sour cream, add a couple dashes of Frank’s Red Hot, and liquefy it.  Warm up about a pound of cream cheese so you can stir it and add the liquefied onion mix, then add a small side of smoked sockeye salmon mashed up in your hands into tiny bits.  I don’t use the skin.  Also a couple of generous pinches of chopped parsley enhances the flavor.  Put it in the fridge for a couple of hours if you can wait that long, and use it as a dip for crackers, sourdough bread, corn chips, pilot bread, or fingers.  I suppose you could eat it with a spoon, but I don’t think it would taste as good.

This Sterling Sockeye Salmon Bracelet, Design #48, is a female or hen as the Steelhead fishermen call them and they are full of eggs ready to create the next run of the “staff of life”.  It is a fun bracelet with Mama Sockeye swimming around your wrist looking for a place to lay her eggs.  It is a  profile design with the source of life on the Northwest Coast circling, full of eggs, sustaining you in all you do!

Hand Carved ~ Sterling Silver Sockeye Salmon Bracelet ~ by Owen Walker
design #48, 1/2″ wide