TULELAKE, Calif.—Joey Gentry hesitates before she drives through the fields of alfalfa and wheat that line the roads in the Klamath Basin.
“Because I’m good and brown,” said Gentry, a member of the Klamath Tribes and a tribal and racial justice activist. ”It’s not safe for Natives to be out in farmland during a drought year.”Like much of the American West, this dry, hilly, high-elevation landscape straddling the California-Oregon border is experiencing a summer of extreme drought. But when the federal government announced in May that, for the first time ever, it would cut irrigation water to about 180,000 acres of agriculture in the basin, tensions ignited between farmers and the Klamath tribes.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation made the cuts to preserve two endangered species of suckerfish sacred to the Klamath Tribes, as well as protected coho and chinook salmon that travel along the Klamath River to reach spawning habitat. After meeting the needs of the fish, the bureau determined, there would not be enough water left over for most irrigators in the basin - link
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