Keeping salmon in her children’s diet is “an entire job”, says Georgiana Gensaw, a Yurok Tribe member and mother of four in Klamath Glen, California, a community whose only easily accessible food store is a fried chicken shop attached to a gas station a few miles away.
The Yurok reservation where Gensaw lives sits on a remote strip of land that snakes shoulder to shoulder with the final 44 miles of the Klamath River along the misty northern California coast. In 2001, drought descended on the Klamath Basin, the watershed that feeds the river. Due to a history of water mismanagement in the basin, combined with a historic drought, the river is sick – and the Yurok are too.
The salmon they have long depended on as dietary staple and cultural cornerstone have become scarce. Combined with the lack of food sovereignty, that scarcity has prompted the need to fight for their main sources of nutrition and for their very way of life, they say. Yurok women, traditionally their tribe’s caregivers and food providers, bear the brunt of the food and health crisis while leading the fight for cultural preservation.
Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/oct/04/salmon-klamath-river-yurok-women-nutrition-health