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 nearest grocery store, Safeway in Crescent City, lies 24 miles away along a stretch of road frequently plagued by landslides and toppled redwoods – last summer it was closed for 20 hours a day after a washout – making queues to get through the roadworks up to five hours long.
As a lifelong reservation resident, Gensaw recalls when fresh food was abundant. “I grew up with fish patties, rice and fish, noodles and fish, salmon sandwiches, dried fish,” she remembers fondly. “We never understood how lucky we were, that it was going to go away.”
In a community whose median income is $11,000, with unemployment rates as high as 80%, with approximately 35% living below the poverty line and most of the population in a food desert, the result is a serious impact on their nutrition sources and health. A 2019 University of California-Berkeley study of Native communities in the Klamath Basin found “91.89 percent of households suffering from some level of food insecurity and over half experiencing very low food security”.
Food sovereignty – the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods – is linked to Yurok Tribe members’ rights and cultural identity as well as their nutrition and health. The tribe’s general counsel, Amy Cordalis, finds being a Yurok woman provides her a particular vantage point from which to hold the US government accountable on this issue to ensure her people’s health and way of life.
To read more of Lucy Sherriff of the Fuller Project article, please click here.
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