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On The Cover
HumCo’s COVID Test-Positivity Rate Ticks Back Up
As the Journal went to press Nov. 16, Humboldt County Public Health confirmed 32 new cases of COVID-19, while also reporting one new hospitalization.
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The cases made 417 locally through the first 16 days of the month, a decrease from the 474 confirmed through the first 16 days of October. However, the numbers aren’t all trending in a positive direction. Last month, Humboldt County recorded a test-positivity rate of 12.1 percent — down substantially from its peak of 15.9 percent in August but through the first weeks of November, the number had climbed back up to 14.2 percent. While that’s down from Humboldt County’s peak of 15.9 percent in August, it still far outpaces the rates of the state (2 percent) and nation (5.4 percent.)
As of Nov. 16, a state database showed 11 people hospitalized locally with COVID-19, with two under intensive care. While those numbers are far below Sept. 3, when the hospital census peaked at 42 COVID-19 patients, they are still elevated enough to impact Humboldt County’s fragile healthcare system.
The Food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, recently authorized the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use for children 5 to 11 years old and local pharmacies and pediatricians have begun scheduling appointments. Public Health, meanwhile, announced it will hold several pediatric and family vaccination clinics for children ages 5 to 11. Appointments will be required and can be made on the state’s vaccine portal, www.myturn.ca.gov. Boosters will not be available at these clinics.
“Pediatric clinics will offer vaccine to children ages 5 to 11 only. Family clinics give priority to children ages 5 to 11, but parents and guardians of children who are getting vaccinated can receive any dose of the COVID-19 vaccine,” a news release states. “Due to a sharp increase in demand, walk-ins are not allowed at family and pediatric clinics for children ages 5 to 11 at this time.”
As of the start of November, 7 percent of the county’s cases recorded to date — 685 in total — had been confirmed in children ages 5 to 11.
Public Health also reported recently that health officials are urging all eligible residents to get COVID-19 booster shots after federal regulators accepted recommendations recently to expand booster options to Moderna and Johnson and Johnson vaccines.
Moderna boosters can be administered to those 65 years and older, those residing in long-term care facilities, people 50 and
Gutswurrak
Humboldt State University announced it will be honoring the Wiyot Tribe, on whose ancestral territory its campus sits, by naming its activities center Gutswurrak — pronounced “guts-wuh-dock” — Student Activities Center. Gutswurrak, the Wiyot word for “gathering place,” recognizes the importance of the space while honoring its physical location, according to an HSU press release. POSTED 11.13.21
older with underlying medical conditions putting at them of increased risk and those at increased risk of exposure and transmission due to high-risk work setting, who received their initial vaccination six months or more ago. All residents aged 18 and older who received the Johnson and Johnson vaccine can receive a booster dose if it has been at least two months since their initial dose.
Get the latest COVID-19 information, including schedules of upcoming vaccination clinics, at www.northcoastjournal. com.
—Thadeus Greenson
POSTED 11.16.21
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Outbreak Closes High School: South Fork High School announced Nov. 15 it would remain closed for the week and through Thanksgiving break due to a COVID-19 outbreak that had affected an undisclosed number of students, faculty and staff. According to a Facebook post by the school, Southern Humboldt Unified School District made the decision in consultation with Public Health.
POSTED 11.16.21
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Eureka Mulls Ward Maps: As the Journal went to press Nov. 16, the Eureka City Council was holding a public hearing on redrawing the city’s ward maps on the heels of the U.S. Census to ensure the city’s population is evenly distributed among them. At the same meeting, the council was slated begin the process of implementing its new ranked choice voting system.
POSTED 11.16.21
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Californians See Growing Inequality: Seven in 10 Californians say the gap between rich and poor is getting larger, according to a Public Policy Institute of California survey that polled more than 2,200 residents. Respondents were split on the state’s economic outlook over the next 12 months, with 47 percent saying they foresee good times and 52 percent saying the year will be bad.
POSTED 11.15.21
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Digitally Speaking
The number of 2021 fentanyl overdose deaths in Humboldt County through Nov. 15, a three-fold increase over the 11 recorded in 2020, according to the Humboldt County Drug Task
They Said It Comment of the Week
— California Department of Fish and Wildlife waterfowl coordinator Melanie Weaver explain how migrating birds are being hit hard by the state’s historic drought. POSTED 11.10.21
— “FromHumBoldt” commenting on the Journal website on the story headlined “Policing the Police,” about the Eureka City Council’s move to hire an independent police auditor and shift the mission of its police oversight board to focus more on accountability and transparency. POSTED 11.14.21
Annelia Hillman stands with jugs of algae-ridden water from the Klamath River at a protest calling for the removal of four hydro-electric dams. Due in large part to the efforts of Native activists, the dams are now slated to be removed in 2023. Courtesy of the Yurok Tribe
‘No Fish Means No Food’
How Yurok women are fighting for their tribe’s health
By Lucy Sheriff
newsroom@northcoastjournal.com
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, 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 due to a washout — making queues to get through the roadwork 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.”
The Yurok reservation where Gensaw lives sits on a a remote strip of land that snakes shoulder to shoulder with the final 44 miles of the Klamath River alongside 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 an historic drought, the river is sick — and the Yurok are too.
The salmon they’ve long depended on as both dietary staple and cultural cornerstone have become scarce. Combined with the lack of food sovereignty, it 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.
“The situation has gotten so bad that I don’t even know what kind of loss to compare it to. Because there’s no replacing salmon,” Gensaw says, her voice breaking. “My babies were meant to eat Klamath River salmon.”
In a community whose median income is $11,000, with unemployment rates as high as 80 percent, with some 35 percent 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 at 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 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 “We need of the Native American diet for generations and the next to which Yurok mothers are turning to increasinggeneration to carry on ly to feed their families as the salmon dwindle. (Under the Dawes Act, Native Americans were purposely allocated this work.” 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 Continued on next page »
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