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 former general counsel Amy Cordalis finds being a Yurok woman provides her a unique vantage point from which to hold the U.S. government accountable on this issue to ensure her people’s health and way of life. “I translate between Yurok cultural values and this colonized American law,” Cordalis, a mother of two and lifelong fisherwoman who has been part of her tribe’s legal team since 2014, tells The Fuller Project. “You can’t exercise the right to eat your traditional foods if there are no traditional foods. So the fight for a clean, healthy river is inextricably tied to the ability to exercise food sovereignty.” Earlier this year, a fish kill of enormous magnitude left 70 percent of juvenile salmon dead, according to Yurok biologists. Tribal scientists later found the deadly pathogen Ceratonova shasta, which spreads due to low water quality and piscine stress, present in 97 percent of the fish they captured. The Yurok, who usually run a commercial fishery to bring in much needed income, have had their fishing rights severely curtailed to protect the remaining salmon population. Gensaw has long campaigned for a healthier river: organizing rallies, attending state water board meetings and helping negotiate with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which governs the dams the Yurok say have ruined the ecosystem and endangered the salmon population. She sees the ill effects of salmon scarcity, especially on children. Without fish in their diet, there are “a lot more chubbier, overweight kids,” Gensaw says. “As moms, we talk about it a lot. Queenie is my first kid without a steady diet of salmon, and I can dramatically see the difference,” referring to her 5 year old and her older children, ages 9 and 17. The children’s changed diets are affecting their health. Terry Raymer, a diabetes expert at the United Health Services in Arcata, south of Klamath, treats Yurok pre-teens who, he says, have a “very significant elevated body mass index,” putting them at increased risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. One 2021 report from the American Academy of Pediatrics said that Native
American youths have “excessive disease rates compared with the general pediatric population,” with children aged 2 to 5 having a higher combined prevalence of overweight and obesity — at 58.8 percent — than children of any other ethnicity or race. And it’s not just the children: The UC Berkeley study noted high levels of disease related to poor diet in the Klamath Basin tribes, “with 83.58 percent of all households reporting at least one person in their household suffering from a diet/ lifestyle related health issue including high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and cavities.” In 2017, the Yurok Tribe secured additional water flows for salmon under the Endangered Species Act and challenged faulty data that U.S. government agencies used to determine water levels needed to protect salmon in a case that Cordalis contributed to. Now she is fighting both for dam removal, to improve water quality and help the salmon populations recover, and for access to land owned by logging companies that contain traditional foods like the oak trees that produce acorns, a staple of the Native American diet for generations and to which Yurok mothers are turning to increasingly to feed their families as the salmon dwindle. (Under the Dawes Act, Native Americans were purposely allocated land of poor agricultural quality. Ancestral land once spanned almost a half million acres, giving the tribes plenty of land to fish, farm and forage, but the U.S. government confined the tribe to just 10 percent of that area.) A 2019 study in the journal Food Security noted that for the Yurok and other Native peoples, restoring access to Native foods lost due to colonialism is key to “revitalizing culture and restoring community health and well-being.” Yurok activist Annelia Hillman, 46, recruits young Yurok members to help wage her people’s long struggle against loggers, farmers and the U.S. government — not only for land and resources rights, but also for the very health and welfare of their tribe. “We need the next generation to carry on this work,” Hillman says, speaking of the activism she has been involved in for more than half her life, “so they can establish their identity as Indigenous people and challenge institutional systems.” The Yurok women may have a powerful ally in Deb Haaland, the first Native American woman to serve as Secretary of the
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Continued on next page » northcoastjournal.com • Thursday, Nov. 18, 2021 • NORTH COAST JOURNAL
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