Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability

2. A Continuing Legacy: Institutional Racism, Hunger, and Nutritional Justice on the Klamath

2 A Continuing Legacy Institutional Racism, Hunger, and Nutritional Justice on the Klamath Kari Marie Norgaard, Ron Reed, and Carolina Van Horn Karuk people have relied directly on the land and rivers of the Klamath Mountains for food since “time immemorial.” So vast was the abundance of salmon, sturgeon, steelhead, lamprey, and forest food resources that the Karuk were among the wealthiest people in the region that would become known as California. These foods flourished in conjunction with sophisticated Karuk land management practices, including the regulation of the fisheries and the management of the forest through fire (Salter 2003; McEvoy 1986). Ceremonial practices including the First Salmon Ceremony regulated the timing of fishing to allow for escapement and thus continued prosperous runs. Forests were burned to stimulate production of food species, especially acorns and bulbs. Burning also influenced the local hydraulic cycles, increasing seasonal runoff into creeks. The diversity of available food resources provided a safety net should one species fail to produce a significant harvest in a given year. Thus while salmon were centrally important, other food resources were consumed fresh and preserved to provide throughout the seasons. With the invasion of their lands by European Americans in the 1850s, the life circumstances of Karuk people changed considerably. Today Karuks are among the hungriest and poorest people in the state. Median income for Karuk families is $13,000, and 90 percent of tribal members live below the poverty line. Genocide and forced assimilation over the past century have damaged traditional knowledge and relationships with the land and led to changes in the people’s tastes and desires. Yet despite dramatic events that took place during the Gold Rush, the testimony of elders about foods they ate until recently indicates that considerable changes have also occurred within the last generation, suggesting that contemporary circumstances, as well as historical ones, produce Karuk hunger. Even tribal members in their early thirties recount significant changes in the number of fish in their diet since childhood. Four dams on 24 Chapter 2 the Klamath River figure centrally in this fact. Since 1962, these dams have blocked access to 90 percent of the Spring Chinook salmon spawning habitat. When the Spring Chinook population plummeted in the 1970s, Karuk people attained the dubious honor of experiencing one of the most recent and dramatic diet shifts of any Native tribe in the United States. Spring Chinook have been the single most important food source to decline, but there are at least twenty-five species of plants, animals, and fungi that form part of the traditional diet to which Karuk people are currently denied or have only limited access. Without salmon and tan oak acorns, Karuk people are currently denied access to foods that represented upward of 50 percent of their traditional diet (see figure 2.1). With the destruction of the once abundant riverine food sources, a signi ficant percentage of tribal members rely on commodity or store-bought foods in lieu of salmon and other traditional foods. Food insecurity within the Karuk Tribe is evidenced by the fact that a survey conducted by the tribe in 2005 found that 42 percent of respondents living in the Klamath River area received some kind of food assistance.1 One in five Figure 2.1 Grinding acorns Photo courtesy of the Karuk Tribe of California A Continuing Legacy 25 respondents use food from food assistance programs on a daily basis. The percentage of families living in poverty in Karuk ancestral territory is nearly three times that of the United States as a whole. This dramatic reversal in food access is the direct result of the systematic, statesponsored disruptions of long-standing traditional Karuk relationships with the land. Indeed poverty, hunger, and a wide range of cultural struggles experienced throughout Indian Country2 today are the result of similar histories. In this chapter we describe the processes through which Karuk people became hungry. This story is important on its own terms. And understanding why and how this group of people who had survived for tens of thousands of years off the land became hungry is also important for any understanding of food or environmental justice. We begin with a review of current literature on racism and environmental justice. We then use the ongoing struggle of the Karuk Tribe of California to maintain access to their traditional foods to illustrate how the production of hunger has been...