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cannabis plants. There was (and continues to be) fear that drought conditions and climate change, with the added impact of unregulated illicit water diversion for cannabis, could result in another catastrophic fish kill. This cultural collision culminated in 2002 but it began with invasion, with those first ships.

As Yurok people, we cannot talk about water diversion for cannabis without talking about Salmon and the health of our River. The River is already overtaxed and overallocated — and must endure the impacts of human-caused climate change. This is true of many Rivers throughout California — all of which have significant ties and connections to Indigenous peoples of that region. When our Rivers give us a choice between Salmon or cannabis, I hope the answer is an easy one. Salmon constitute both an ecological and a cultural keystone species. People, plants and wildlife all depend upon Salmon and the often unacknowledged ecological labor they perform. If Salmon disappeared from the Klamath Basin, the ecosystem would collapse. Their well-being is fundamentally tied to ours. As Yurok people fight for the very survival of Salmon, they are fighting for their own right to survive — to live in a world of ecological and spiritual balance. Salmon’s resilience keeps alive the hope of a better future for Yuroks and all California Indian peoples.

The surge in cannabis production, dubbed the green rush, is an apt analogy to the Gold Rush–era ideology of Manifest Destiny, resource extraction and wealth accumulation. For California Indians, the Gold Rush was an apocalypse aimed at destroying Indigenous cultural and ecological worlds. The state of California was founded on genocidal violence toward California Indians, on Indigenous land dispossession and on resource extraction. I argue violence against the landscape is mirrored or paralleled in violence against Indigenous bodies. Just as our Rivers are attacked by black snakes, so are our peoples, our cultures.

This violence has been fundamental for the creation and maintenance of the state of California. The contemporary Green Rush violence against Indigenous lands, waters, and bodies cannot be understood in isolation. It is part of a larger historical pattern of the violence associated with resource “rushing.” While state-sponsored militias no longer commit for-profit murder of California Indians, our traditional gatherers and basketweavers have faced threats, fear of physical violence and intimidation from trespass grow operations. More-than-human relatives have been intentionally poisoned and exposed to chemicals located at grow sites. Whether it be oil pipelines or cannabis irrigation infrastructure, these black snakes are merely symptoms of two greater foes: capitalism and colonialism. Resource rushing, guided by the rush mentality, is a violent settler-colonial pattern of resource extraction that has been repeatedly played out — first gold, then timber, then fish and now cannabis.

California Indians have watched this pattern play out over and over again. We already know how the story ends. Everywhere we look, it seems, lands and waters are being desecrated in the name of profit. But as Estes notes, the Zuzeca Sapa prophecy foretells resistance and resurgence to capitalist and colonialist forces. We are rising up. l