Settler Cannabis: From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California

Based on fieldwork in Northern California, such as with the Yurok Tribe Environmental Program, Settler Cannabis combines historical and ecological work with Kaitlin Reed's personal narratives to provide an interdisciplinary view of the damage Western settler colonialism has done to Native American communities in what is now Northern California. Reed, an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe, reminds readers that the highly dangerous “rush” narrative that originated from the Californian gold rush is not something of the past, nor was gold the root of the problem. The ecological, environmental, health, and physical harm that white settlers caused remains present today. Perhaps the most common misconceptions that people have about California's “rushes” is that, as Reed shows, what has been taken away is not only gold or timber: “The real gold is not gold, after all, but the land itself” (161). Reed's work on the history of settler colonialism in Northern California dispels many common misconceptions and deceiving narratives, making this book an insightful read for students and researchers alike in history, Native American studies, sociology, and environmental studies.The end of the gold rush did not end settler colonialism in Northern California. Following the gold rush, the timber industry invaded Indigenous lands. Reed uses the perspective of traditional ecological knowledge—Indigenous communities’ “intimate relationship with and deep understanding of California's ecology”—to distinguish the settlers’ view of land from that of the Indigenous communities (3). To settlers, what makes land “beneficial” is based on the economic production that the land could provide to human residents. This same logic was used to justify at the legislative and social levels the violent dispossession of Indigenous communities to create space for industrial development. As a result, “land itself is a settler-colonial construct” (10). As Reed argues throughout the book, to the Yurok people and other Indigenous groups humans are just members of the ecosystem, living in peace and harmony with their more-than-human relatives. Reed focuses on the Indigenous salmon culture and water usage to show how, after the timber rush, the cannabis cultivation industry today has severely damaged river systems and fish populations. To the Indigenous communities in Northern California, salmon are much more than animals; they are relatives and family members. When cannabis cultivators diverted waterways and caused environmental contamination, the resulting ecological changes were so great that, in 2021, over 95 percent of salmon sampled by the Karuk Tribe tested positive for fatal parasites (75).Reed follows a loosely chronological order in exploring the gold, timber, and cannabis rushes in Northern California's history by building overarching themes shared by all three periods. The cannabis rush, or “green rush,” is the focus, spanning the last three chapters and serving as a discussion guide during all previous chapters. Besides harm to the land, society, and ecology, Reed also shows how the legal system contributed to the destruction of the Indigenous ecosystem. A common argument about cannabis cultivation today emphasizes that cultivation is legal in certain instances, creating an erroneous impression that “legal cultivation is harmless cultivation. After all, legality is the lowest moral standard. Both legal and illegal cannabis cultivations take place on Indigenous land and use the water resources that maintain the salmon culture. Another popular misconception that this book uproots is the “natural preservation” narrative and the back-to-the-land movement that is arguably a derivative of that narrative. Both the capitalist and the preservationist approaches to land use are built on Western colonial ideals that land and the ecosystem are commodities for humans to control. In the scope of traditional ecological knowledge, however, the harmony between the human and the more-than-human world is prioritized. By dispelling settler-colonial misconceptions, Reed reveals that the cannabis cultivation industry occupying Native territories today is not a product of the twenty-first century but was built from the historical context of the “rush” narratives and ecological damage that the gold and timber industries had already caused.Besides the ecological history that Reed charts, we also witness the current legal practices that Native communities engage in through the perspective of Operation Yurok, a multiyear collaboration between the Yurok Tribe, law enforcement, and environmental agencies to combat illegal cannabis cultivation.Reed's writing is concise and engaging. Her method of mixing theoretical discussions with the work of scholars like Cutcha Risling Baldy, William Bauer, and Beth Rose Middleton Manning, together with Reed's personal fieldwork and interviews, make this book a valuable contribution to numerous disciplines and a useful reference for future community and social work that is suitable for classroom or instructional use.