Justice for Lamprey (Asúm): Honoring the Original “Sandworms”

by Emily Washines and Mark Auslander

This month, global audiences are thrilling to the spectacular sight of massive sandworms, erupting across the surface of planet Arrakis in the science fiction film Dune: Part Two. In the Frank Herbert novels and the films they inspire, sandworms grow to be hundreds of meters long. They are revered as “Shai-Hulud” by the plane’s indigenous Fremen peoples.. Their larvae are the source of melange spice, the consciousness-enhancing substance that permits interstellar navigation and which is the most valuable commodity in the Dune universe. The awe-inspiring sandworms—-characterized by vast mouth orifices with circular rows of teeth—are attracted by rhythmic movement and can easily devour humans and mining stations alike. In climactic scenes, the messianic hero Paul Atreides embraces his destiny by leaping atop sandworms and riding them across the desert.

The late Frank Herbert wrote that in creating the Sandworm, he was partly inspired by mythological dragons, including the serpentine Colchian Dragon that guarded to the Golden Fleece. Both dragon and sandworm pose enormous trials to the conquering heroes, Jason and Paul, who must overcome their deepest fears in their quest for glory. Yet Herbert, who grew up hunting and fishing in Washington State, also acknowledged that the sandworm was based upon the remarkable annelid species known as Pacific Lamprey, the jawless, boneless fish which navigate the ocean and river waters of the region. (Often termed “eels” by Native elders, tribal reports usually refer to them as “eel-like lampreys.”) These slender tubular beings are anadromous: adult lamprey live in the salt waters of the ocean, at times descending to great depths, and then at the end of their life cycle migrating up fresh water rivers and streams to spawn. Like the sandworms they inspired, lamprey spend the majority of their life spans as larvae, and are characterized by circular mouths and sharp teeth. They at times attach themselves to whales and other maritime creatures, sucking out nutrients for extended periods. Lamprey species comprise one of the oldest families of fish on planet earth, dating back an estimated 450 million years.

It seems likely that Herbert, a fisherman who often encountered Native communities in Washington state, was aware that Pacific Lamprey hold a sacred status for the indigenous Native peoples of the Columbia River basin and northern California. Lamprey are honored as an important ceremonial food in Native communities, although harvest opportunities have dramatically diminished since the construction of massive dams along the Columbia and Klamath, which greatly limit lamprey migration and have precipated sharp population declines.

Contrasting Mythologies

It is instructive to contrast Frank Herbert’s imagined mythology of sandworms with the spiritual understanding of Asúm (Ah-soom), the Yakama language term for Lamprey. In Herbert’s vision, sandworms are of a limited intelligence: they mistake the rhythms of machines and human walking for the vibrations of their conventional prey, and thus can be manipulated by humans. Although dangerous, they are ultimately subordinated to the will of human heroes.

Arguably, Paul’s mounting and riding of giant sandworms is a classic Western colonial fantasy: a foreign aristocrat, he enters the desert world like Lawrence of Arabia, seeking to become one with indigenous peoples whom he will lead to victory over an oppressive empire. For those who are psychoanalystically inclined, Herbert’s treatment of the worms is interwoven with the psychosocial dynamics of the overall text: they are hemaphroditic creatures, evoking the configurations both of a massive phallus and of the mythic vagina dentata, which lures men to their doom. In that sense, Paul’s mastery over the Sandworm seems consistent with his Oedipal struggles to overcome both his dead dominating father and his beautiful enigmatic mother. Controlling sandworms for Paul is thus both an external struggle to control the universe’s most valued commodity and an internal struggle to dominate his own inner psychic demons, separating himself from the contradictory impulses of his rigid upbringing to achieve complete mastery over himself and the universe.

In contrast, for Sahaptin-speaking peoples such as the Yakama, Nez Perce and Umatilla, Asúm or Lamprey do not figure in a scenario of violent domination. Rather, these ancient fish are embedded in complex cycles of mutual care and interdependence. Native peoples honor an ancient agreement; the People safeguard the migratory waters and honor salmon and lamprey in ceremony, knowing that in turn salmon and lamprey will feed them and their descendants. As an elder puts it in the film The Lost Fish, “They give themselves up so we can live in this world. Spiritually, he [Lamprey] is one of us.” These cycles of reciprocal, mutual care are mirrored in the underwater realm: Asúm are known to travel in vast schools around salmon, and in that sense provide a protective penumbra, redirecting predators that might otherwise threaten salmon.

It is also worth noting that Asúm is associated with wry humor and playfulness for Yakama and other Native people. Elders recall that in ancient times. Asúm was a great gambler, and gambled away all his bones, including his jawbone, and then his arms and legs, to Coyote ( Spilyáy). Perhaps this story encodes deep ecological knowledge, that the annual migration of Lamprey upriver brought (and should still bring) vast nutritional resources from the Pacific depths into the headwaters and headlands of the Columbia Basin, and thus sustained complex terrestrial ecosystems and stream networks, all overseen by Coyote. Perhaps the ancient story celebrates a sense that to this day, and into the dreamed of future, Lamprey and Coyote are playing still in an endless life-sustaining game.

Our Responsibilities Moving Forward

For all the differences in the narratives recounted byHerbert and indigenous storytellers, there are important points of intersection. In the Dune novels and films, sandworms function, to some extent, as potent reminders of the futility of human efforts to dominate nature; massive high technology mining complexes can disappear within moments through sandworm attacks. Although Pacific Lamprey pose no physical threats to humans, they too are poignant reminders that we are not the sole masters of the planetary biome, and that we must strive to live in balance with a vast, interconnected network of living things. The indigenous peoples of the Columbia River Basin have united to pursue the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fisheries Commission Pacific Lamprey Tribal Recovery Plan, restoring vital ecosystems and enhancing migratory passage, downstream and upstream, of these remarkable beings.

Enormous work remains to be done. Since countless generations, Yakama and other peoples of the Basin gathered at Celilo and Willamette Falls to harvest vast salmon and lamprey runs with joy and reverence. These vital food sources, which nourished bodies and souls, were devastated by the construction of dams at the Dalles and Bonneville. Ladders and passive structures by the dams allow only for a small proportion of lamprey to continue their upriver spawning journeys, and the upper reaches of the basin thus continue to suffer from great deficiencies of life-enhancing minerals and nutrients that would otherwise be brought by the fish. In the 1960s and 1970s, white fisheries officials on the Umatilla River intentionally poisoned lamprey, mistakenly classifying them as invasive speciies that threatened game fish. River restoration and dam removal initiatives along the Klamath and perhaps someday the Columbia may allow for a return of the awe inspiring lamprey migrations of old, and the revivification of complex high country ecosystems.

*Lamprey climbing ladder at Bonneville Dam, Columbia River*

As we thrill to the cinematic spectacle of the Sandworms of Dune, let us all take a moment to honor Lamprey, among the Earth’s oldest living creatures, and resolve, together, to restore its beautiful habitats and honor its ancient agreement to nourish and safeguard all the inhabitants— human, animal, and plant— of the river and all that the river protects.

Justice for Lamprey (Asúm): Honoring the Original “Sandworms”

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