Suchergebnisse

Ron Reed and Kari Norgaard discuss the importance of fire for Karuk tribal culture, health, food, and sovereignty. They describe the history of settler colonial fire suppression practices and its ongoing impacts on Indigenous communities. Reed argues for the need to center place-based, Indigenous ecology model.

Tending, harvesting, preparing and consuming traditional foods including salmon, acorns, mushrooms and deer are family activities in Karuk culture. Families are important sites for cultural reproduction, especially in the context of structural genocide. In this article we examine how colonial violence continues to impact indigenous families today in the form of environmental degradation. Runs of salmon, lamprey, steelhead and other species in the Klamath River have declined precipitously in the past two decades, and availability of forest foods is also limited by a combination of non-Native regulations and environmentally degrading management practices. How does environmental decline impact indigenous families? Decline of salmon and other important foods has resulted in families spending less time together. Environmental decline thus limits the transmission of cultural knowledge, identity development of youth and the strength of social ties within families, and also appears to be associated with younger age of death, leading to further reductions in cultural reproduction within families.

On the Klamath River in northern California, Karuk tribal fishermen traditionally provide salmon for food and ceremonies, yet the region has sustained serious environmental degradation in recent years. What happens to Karuk masculinity when there are no fish? Using interviews and public testimony, the authors examine how declining salmon runs affect the gender identities and practices of Karuk fishermen. Gendered practices associated with fishing serve ecological functions, perpetuate culture in the face of structural genocide, and unite families and communities. The authors find that the absence of fish resulting from ecological damage affects both food availability and the quality of social connections, which in turn affects individual gender practices and symbolizes genocide to the community. Karuk men's individual struggles to construct themselves as men are thus interwoven with struggles against racism and ongoing colonialism. The authors coin the term colonial ecological violence to describe these circumstances. They also describe how some men restructure masculine identities by transferring "traditional" cultural responsibilities to fish, community, and "collective continuance" to new settings as activists and fishery scientists. The authors call for a decolonized sociology that uses more theorizing of the particular and very real ways ecological relationships structure gender in traditional Native communities to understand the operation of gendered and racialized colonial violence in the form of environmental degradation, today.