The rural mental health crisis in drought-stricken Klamath Basin is coming for the entire West
As the Klamath Basin's fish go extinct and farms go bankrupt, the region's native tribes and agricultural communities are struggling with profound despair and racist conflict. One Klamath Tribal Health leader is facilitating indigenous-based mental health workshops for distressed farmers and ranchers - It's a tentative start, and a reminder of how much work lies ahead.
Left, a Klamath resident protesting Klamath Basin irrigation cutoffs, Shutterstock
Right, Karuk indigenous protesters advocating to protect Klamath River salmon, Getty, Maurice Mcdonald, PA Images
By Rei Takver
“Everyone is struggling for the last drop of water, and there is no water, so it’s like there isn’t any for anyone, really. That is hard for people to come to terms with.”
The last time conditions were as dry in the American West as they are in June 2022, it was at least 800 A.D., and possibly earlier. Charlemagne was king of the Franks. The Maori people were migrating on their earliest canoes to New Zealand.
To vastly understate—the West Coast is parched, and (due to global warming) the parching trends towards permanence. Aquifers are draining down, and waterways are disappearing.
At the end of March, the US federal government informed the agricultural communities of the Central Valley Project in California, where a significant portion of America’s food is produced in the fertile soils, that this upcoming season they will cut off 100% of the water usually allocated for irrigation. Fields will inevitably lie fallow, and agricultural workers will face massive financial loss.
Nowhere are the human consequences of this drought felt more acutely, or fought over more passionately, than in the Klamath Basin, a watershed which starts at Klamath Lake in Southern Oregon, streams downwards into Northern California via the Klamath River, and flows out to the Pacific Coast.
“The whole place is just a disaster in terms of mental health,” says Hannah Gosnell, who researches the geography of the basin at Oregon State University.
The last two years in the Klamath have been the driest years in one hundred and twenty. The basin’s local fish, sacred to the native Yurok, Karuk, and Klamath tribes, are edging even closer to extinction. In 2021, conditions became so dry, and the fish came so precariously close to catastrophic die-off, that the US government completely cut off irrigation to the region’s agriculture for the first time in history.
“The whole place is just a disaster in terms of mental health.”
As long-time Klamath rancher Becky Hyde puts it, “Everyone is struggling for the last drop of water, and there is no water, so it’s like there isn’t any for anyone, really. That is hard for people to come to terms with.”
What are the mental health consequences of living in such a drought, for both native peoples and the white agricultural community—and how do those consequences influence the interactions of those involved?
The landscape
To understand the emotional landscape of the Klamath, you first have to get a sense of the ecological one.
Historically, the Klamath Basin was ripe with aquatic life. Before white settlement, the Klamath River in Northern California once boasted the third largest salmon run on the West Coast. Klamath Lake, in Oregon, teemed with two unique species of native Suckerfish—the C’waam and Koptu.
That was then. Today, for a variety of environmental reasons, including drought, the Klamath Lake goes through seasonal periods in which algal blooms poison the depleted water and then the bacteria that grows to eat the blooms sucks all the oxygen out. The water that remains becomes so toxic that drinking it could seriously sicken and potentially kill pets.
Under these conditions, almost all the juvenile suckerfish suffocate and die. It’s been twenty-five years since the suckerfish successfully spawned a new generation, which means the youngest adult suckerfish was born the same year as Spiderman movie actors Zendaya and Tom Holland. It’s happening to the salmon, too. Downstream, the Klamath River is too warm and too low, and the numbers of salmon there are now so diminished that the sustainable allocation of fish for each individual Yurok tribe member is less than one salmon per year.
The Yurok tribe once subsisted on salmon, and the Klamath tribes lived on suckerfish. Both are considered sacred to their peoples. “Spiritually our entire existence depends on those fish,” explains Joey Gentry, a Klamath tribal activist, to KQED.
It is literally true. Forced to eat a western diet, obesity levels soar among the region’s indigenous communities. That kills.
Nowadays, western agriculture dominates the landscape. Farmers grow potatoes for McDonalds and Lays, and hay for cows. If you eat a French fry or a bag of potato chips in the United States, your food may be from Klamath—and the moisture in those potatoes may be the water that Klamath’s suckerfish and salmon need to survive.
Two promises, neither kept
For many of the great-grandparents of today’s Klamath farmers, the opportunity to farm the Klamath Basin was the making of the American Dream. Starting in 1907, the US government began promising land and unlimited irrigation water to white homesteaders, many of them returning soldiers, so that they could build a livelihood. Eighty-seven farmers won their plot after having their names drawn out of a pickle jar after World War II. The government called the region the Klamath Project.
Water, the Project seemed to imply, was inexhaustible. The farmers would have verdant crops, and the Klamath tribes, who were promised rights to fishing in the Treaty of 1864, would have a thriving natural ecosystem to live off.
It clearly did not go that way. The Klamath Basin tribes lost both their land and tribal status in 1954, in an act of dispossession so brutal that the US government officially titled it the Klamath Termination Act. “It’s like having a wife that was stolen from you, and you see her with somebody else, walking, and she looks, and she smiles, and she still gives you love whenever you’re out there, and in your heart she’s still yours,” one native man explains in a Place Matters Oregon video, “But she was stolen.” Tribal members have not been able to eat the endangered suckerfish in Klamath Lake since the eighties.
“They deserve an apology,” says Hyde, whose ancestors fought in the French and Indian war before coming West to settle Oregon. She adds: “The farmers also deserve an apology.”
The federal government failed the farmers, too. Some farms have been held in families for four generations at this point, and people who grew up expecting to pass their land on to their children now feel as if their way of life has been taken from them—and, due to climate change, it has. These young ranchers and farmers stand today in dusty, unplanted fields and contemplate bankruptcy. In one 33-year-old rancher’s words to the Guardian in 2021, “There will not be a fifth generation.”
“We’re both victims of broken promises,” Klamath Project farmer Ben Duval told Al Jazeera.
A history of racialized violence
Even if both groups have been betrayed by the government, that doesn’t stop the situation from spilling over into white supremacist tension and violence. In the media, “Oregon’s Water War” looks just like that—war.
Legally, through the Treaty of 1864, the tribes have the earliest claim to water rights—so the survival of the fish is legally prioritized over the financial health of the farming community. Water is for the fish, first.
This federal position encourages racist behavior among the region’s whites.
In 2001, when drought caused a major disruption to irrigation access, white farmers and ranchers staged what they called the Bucket Brigade. While crowds cheered them on, members of the agricultural community carried buckets of water past the closed irrigation gates and dumped it into the dry agricultural canal. At one point, farmers and ranchers even forced an irrigation headgate’s doors open, temporarily and illegally diverting water through them.
“We can’t solve our water issues until we solve our trauma issues, and we can’t solve our trauma issues until we get a really deep understanding of what the heck’s going on with tribes.”
They displayed a giant bucket statue in front of Klamath Falls City Hall. Native Americans were spat on. Instances of violence towards tribal members dotted the region.
This last summer, it started again. A group of white protesters purchased some land around an irrigation headgate, set up a bucket statue, and threatened to open the gates. Again. Some threatened open violence. Again.
“The beating heart of the whole problem,” Klamath-based environmental journalist Emma Marris told Al Jazeera last fall, was “the sort of settler mindset that white people won and they should be able to run the place as they see fit.”
Klamath tribal activist Joey Gentry, speaking to Al Jazeera, recently counteracted the racist threats of violence with: “We retain our right to hunt and fish, trap and gather, and failure for us to do that is an act of racism, an act of white supremacy. Our creation story tells us that if the fish die, the people die. But before that happens, we will fight, because it’s in our blood.”
There is some hope it will not get to that point. As Marris wrote last summer in The Atlantic, “Pretty much everyone I spoke with—tribal leaders, scientists, and farmers alike—broadly agree on what needs to be done… They see the guys in the tent by the canal headgates as a sideshow of the real work of fixing the basin.” Hyde, speaking to NPR at the time, echoed that sentiment when she said, “Real ranchers and farmers have had zero time to be sitting around at a headgate protesting something.”
2021’s handful of racist protesters, for all last summer’s media coverage of the possibility of violence, did not succeed. They had to pack up their tents and leave. But that doesn’t mean that the tribes and the farmers are at peace.
Joey Gentry to KQED: “We lost everything for them to have this lifestyle. Our tribal people certainly empathize with their plight. We understand what it feels like for the government to make promises and then fail to keep them. We can understand and empathize with that, but I’ve not seen our agricultural community be able to do the same.”
A water crisis, a mental health crisis
What is behind all this conflict, pain, and failure to empathize?
Rancher Becky Hyde: “The number one issue that we need to address is trauma. We can’t solve our water issues until we solve our trauma issues, and we can’t solve our trauma issues until we get a really deep understanding of what the heck’s going on with tribes.”
The tribes
To the native peoples of the basin, losing Klamath’s native salmon and suckerfish is about more than protecting endangered species. It’s about losing the reason they live on the planet. “If we lose these salmon, we will have no more need to be here on Earth,” Yurok tribal member Frankie Myers told the Guardian last year. “It takes a toll on our mental health when we see what’s happening, and we don’t know if there’s anything that can be done about it.”
The implication is not only spiritual—the loss of the fish impacts the daily diet and cultural practices of the tribal communities as well. “When the river’s doing poorly, we do poorly,” says Brook Thompson, an indigenous student of Water Resources Engineering at Stanford University, to Al Jazeera, “Our families can’t be together. A lot of our family time is spent on the river, and when there’s no economic income, where there’s no practices culturally where we can go on the river anymore, then those families get split up, and have to spend time other places.”
As in many Native American communities, the mental health impacts of colonization are profound. As Monica Yellowowl, Klamath Tribal Health’s Behavioral Health Manager, describes the situation in a Place Matters Oregon video, “Our adverse childhood experience rates are significantly higher than the state average. We see tribal members come through the door of our behavioral health clinic—for almost everybody who walks through that door, they have lost a significant amount of family members. They have turned to alcohol and drugs as a way to cope.”
Through Klamath Tribal Health, tribal members do have at least some access to mental health supports. “We do offer both western and culturally relevant services to them,” Yellowowl details in the video, “We don’t always want to be seen as the traumatized Indians. We want to be seen as resilient Indians, powerful people connected to our homeland, practicing our traditions and our cultures.”
The agricultural community
Meanwhile, among the farmers and ranchers, emotional pain is pervasive. As Hyde tells it to NPR, “It’s like you’re sitting there, in the ER, dying.”
Recent media coverage has highlighted the widespread despair of the agricultural community in the Klamath. Every farmer and rancher the media quotes grew up in the basin, and many are living on farms that have been in their family for generations.
“It sounds like a sad country song, but that’s the current situation we’re in,” 28-year-old Bryce Balin, manager of his family farm, tells the Guardian in one article.
33-year old Rodney Cheyne, in a Guardian video: “My family has been here for, you know, 117 years, sixteen years, I feel like it was what I was born to do and I feel like I do a good job at it, and I feel like I’ve got everybody in the entire world against me, and that’s not a good feeling.”
“I have cried a ridiculous amount this year,” Fourth-generation Klamath Project farmer Tricia Hill shares with a New York Times reporter as she stands on her unirrigated, scrub-covered land.
“The going couldn’t be a whole lot worse than it is right now,” Rancher Ty Kliewer says to the camera in a PBS feature, “You almost think giving up hope might be the right idea. If my children’s experience farming and ranching here is going to be anything like mine has been, I would have a really, really hard time telling them this is a good idea.”
“You want to just keep going and hope it gets better,” 23-year-old Chance Thompson explains to the Guardian, “I’ve thought about if I could ever go do anything else…But I could never sit down at a desk. I couldn’t pump anyone’s gas. I couldn’t work at McDonald’s. I got to be outside doing this."
Some of these farmers are the kind that supported the Bucket Brigade. Most aren’t. Their words speak for themselves.
A rancher’s search for mental health support
“All she could find through Farm Aid was a suicide prevention crisis line. Mental health services for farmers in distress, she discovered, are essentially nil.”
Becky Hyde has struggled with her climate mental health since this drought began, over twenty years ago. In that time, she’s tried to get help for drought-related distress more than once. This is her account of what it was like:
“I’ve gotten some counseling, but it is…it’s like your standard counselor, right? Your standard off the shelf counselor, and I guess that’s like all the things that we need to learn, like learn to be mindful, let it go. But, we don’t ever let this go. It is here all the time and it is at a community scale. And to try to explain this to your general…” She trails off, and then manages to say, “The services that we need are absolutely not there.”
She breaks out into a nervous laugh that pops over the phone, “So…make some of them!”
More recently, with the community’s needs in mind, Hyde contacted the 1-800 number for Farm Aid, which she tells me is “Willie Nelson’s thing.” I have to Google Willie Nelson, I’m that much of a city person—apparently he’s an 88-year-old country singing legend. This is what happened when she called Willie’s Farm Aid hotline:
““What if we did a Native-based approach to trauma but for the community as a whole, in which we connect the ag community and the tribal?””
“It was—literally the guy sounded like he was from Arkansas, and I was basically calling him to say—Do you know what resources are out there for widespread agricultural trauma connected to drought? Cause we’re really suffering and we don’t know how to manage this.” The guy with the Arkansas accent directs her to an email address.
What does the email contact provide? “Mostly what it was,” she tells me, “Was immediate suicide prevention.”
All she could find through Farm Aid was a suicide prevention crisis line. Mental health services for farmers in distress, she discovered, are essentially nil.
What next?
Winter, when the landscape greens with rains, is a less-anxious time, when the basin’s inhabitants are less overwhelmed by the stresses of wildfire, fallow fields, algal blooms, and irrigation cutoffs.
In the last few months of this past winter, Hyde started trying to get mental health supports to the farmers, starting with helping them to understand what native peoples are going through. She found out that Monica Yellowowl of Klamath Tribal Health had been running trainings on native trauma, and has done workshops with 5,000 people already—Yellowowl’s job, Hyde says, “is to deal with this long-running, historic, epigenetic trauma.”
She wondered if Yellowowl might be able to help.
Together, the two of them got talking about how Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid is not enough support for the agricultural community, and Yellowowl suggested something that, to my ears, sounds unprecedented: “Well,” Hyde retells Yellowowl’s words, “What if we did a Native-based approach to trauma but for the community as a whole, in which we connect the ag community and the tribal?”
So they decided to try. Hyde told a local farming leader about the idea, asking him, “Would you be willing to get some people from agriculture down in the reclamation project and I’ll try to get ranchers from above the lake?”
He agreed and, in a region now famous for the threat of racist violence over water, Yellowowl held a workshop for farmers and ranchers to talk about the native experience. “We could only have a small group, but we probably ended up having 18 or 19 irrigators,” Hyde tells me. “We did kind of a round circle, and [Yellowowl] came and gave this two-and-a-half-hour conversation about basically all the trauma the tribes have been having since contact.”
How did it go? “It’s a bunch of irrigators, listening to this horrific trauma that the Klamath tribes have.” At this point, Hyde’s voice begins to crack and waver, “It makes me want to cry just talking about it. I feel like I could just start bawling. They listened. They shared. They are in pain too. And so to be at the end of your rope, and then be able to listen, and then just take it in, it’s pretty incredible.”
“I just…know that it’s what we need.” Hyde says, “I know it to the core of me.” But then she something in her shifts, her voice slows, and she tells me:
“We can’t dump all our trauma on someone like Monica.”
Another dry year
Looking forward to this year’s extremely dry summer, Hyde warned me that, “Farmers are gonna start being really stressed because they’re learning about what’s happening with our water year.”
It hasn’t rained nearly enough this winter, and Hyde suspects that the tension of the dry season might make further irrigator talks with native groups hard. What might they need? “Before we even walk into a room with one another to talk about something so serious like water, which has huge conflict around it,” Hyde recommended, “We need everybody to have a mental health session that talks about: Are you thinking about how you’re breathing right now. Are you getting really adrenalized right now? Are you scared?”
As Hyde reminds us both towards the end of our conversation in spring, “We’re about to get sucked under again, right?”
Klamath’s story today might soon be the story of the entire West. As water runs out, racism, intercultural conflict, financial duress, and ecological destruction will collide at heightened levels. Now is the time for the mental health field to adapt to meet what’s needed.
References
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(Becky Hyde, personal communication, February 17, 2022.)
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