The purpose of the Salmonpeople Tour and subsequent Citizen Stewardship Campaign is to "awaken watershed wisdom in the next generation and those who guide them to bring forth a new mythos of citizen stewardship."

Mythos: the collective values of a people in relation to the natural world embodied in stories and passed down from generation to generation as the way things are.

A mission statement shorter still: "achieve sustainable prosperity."

Salmonpeople, as a rolling campaign, is meant to inform and inspire action. It is meant to be a teaching story, like those told in the longhouse every winter for the past 5000 years. It is the modern Pied Piper for a watershed of interconnected community development projects. Salmonpeople builds community partnerships to accomplish four objectives.

1. Spark Insight: Salmonpeople, the play, stimulates thought, catalyzes conversation and inspires action.

2. Initiate the Next Generation: Salmonpeople stories open communal opportunities to transform the way in which we educate our youth in the behaviors of citizen stewardship and the real-time needs of the watershed community. Salmonpeople education projects include curriculum development, instructional modeling, project design, teacher development and authentic, community-based assessment of academic standards.

3. Convene and Create: Salmonpeople stories invite community conversations and alliances to support intergenerational citizen initiatives that will result in the new, economy of the triple bottom line, the interdependence of ecology, economy and society.

4. Measure what Matters: Salmonpeople partners with organizations committed to designing and implementing new indicators by which to assess progress in citizen stewardship.

The Salmonpeople story stimulates community dialogue.

• Community dialogue gets us thinking about what we value.
• Thinking about what we value helps us learn where the gaps are.
• As we learn, we adapt our behavior to align with what we value.
• Naturally, we want to pass these behaviors onto our children.
• Well-educated children know the responsibilities of citizen stewardship.
• Citizen stewards evolve an economy that is inherently restorative.
• Restored natural systems sustain vibrant human community.
• This story has no end.

As the raindrops of understanding awaken us to the beauty of this cycle, we come to a watershed moment. We become learners. Learning is an engaging activity and an engaged community of citizen stewards begins to take responsibility for the day-to-day practices of interdependence and sustainability. In this way, Salmonpeople becomes both a living story and a way to live. It holds the values, attitudes and behaviors that constitute a watershed legacy for generations to come. We are entirely responsibility for the next chapter in our story, a new mythos of citizen stewardship.