Rehearsing her speech, Joey Gentry looked nervous. An environmental activist and member of the Klamath Tribes, Gentry planned to address the city council of the small farming town in Southern Oregon where she lived the next day.The region’s best hope to end its decades-long conflict over water, she planned to argue, was to finally address its legacy of land dispossession, ecological destruction and genocide against Native American tribes like hers. “I can say that to you guys,” she said quietly to a group of supporters gathered at a park in downtown Klamath Falls, “I don’t know if I can say it to them.”Speaking publicly about racial justice was not without risk in Klamath Falls. A year earlier, at the park where Gentry now sat, a small Black Lives Matter demonstration was met with hundreds of counter-protesters armed with rifles, shotguns and pistols. Now, Gentry planned to argue that the Klamath Basin’s festering racial injustices were also at the root of the region’s explosive issue: water.
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