Dr. Kaitlin Reed (Yurok/Hupa/Oneida) is an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe in Northwestern California, and Associate Professor of Native American Studies at Cal Poly Humboldt. Dr.Reed serves as the university’s Traditional Ecological Knowledge Faculty Fellow and the Co-Director of the Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab & Traditional Ecological Knowledges Institute.
Dr.Reed’s research focuses on tribal land and water rights, settler colonial political economies, and extractive capitalism. Her award-winning first book, Settler Cannabis: From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California, shows how cannabis cultivation in Northern California—especially the “green rush” that grew out of back-to-the-land settlement—fits into a longer pattern of settler colonial resource extraction. Reed traces how successive booms (gold, timber, fish, and now cannabis) have produced ongoing violence, dispossession, and environmental harm on Indigenous lands, while foregrounding Indigenous voices and pointing toward futures rooted in returning land to Indigenous stewardship rather than treating nature as a commodity for profit.
Contact:
(707) 826 3822
Select Works:
Settler Cannabis: From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California. University of Washington Press, 2023.
“’We Are a Part of the Land and the Land is Us’: Settler Colonialism, Genocide, and Healing in California.” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 42, no. 1 (2020).
Middleton-Manning, Beth Rose & Kaitlin Reed. “Returning the Yurok Forest to the Yurok Tribe: California’s First Tribal Carbon Credit Project.” Stanford Environmental Law Review 39, (2020).
Middleton-Manning, Beth Rose; Talaugon, Sabine; Young, Thomas M.; Wong, Luann; Fluharty, Suzanne; Reed, Kaitlin; Cosby, Christine and Richard Myers II. “Bi-Directional Learning: Identifying Contaminants on the Yurok Indian Reservation.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16, no. 19 (2019).