The government cut off water to farmers in the Klamath basin. It reignited a decades-old war over water and fish
Joey Gentry hesitates before she drives through the fields of alfalfa and wheat that line the roads in the Klamath Basin. ”It’s not safe for Natives to be out in farmland during a drought year,” [Gentry said.] 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.
Related articles:
- Los Angeles Times: Young Native Americans fight back as water disappears
- OPB: Klamath Basin drought - Yurok Tribe