Description
Settler Cannabis: From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California by Kaitlin P. Reed (University of Washington Press, 2023, Indigenous Confluences series) is a history of cannabis growing on and around Indigenous lands in Northern California.
Reed traces how back-to-the-land settlers of the 1960s gave way to unregulated growing on Indigenous lands by the 1970s, and argues that the green rush is the latest wave of settler-colonial extraction in the region, after gold, timber and fish. Drawing on archival research and interviews with tribal members, tribal employees and state officials, she looks at the environmental toll and makes the case for returning land to Indigenous stewardship.
Reed is an associate professor of Native American Studies at Cal Poly Humboldt and an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe. The book won the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award in 2024.
