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You are here: Home / Immigration / Extraordinary Read: ‘Chinese dreams on Native American land’

Extraordinary Read: ‘Chinese dreams on Native American land’

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This could be a Hillerman novel, except that none of the ends have been tied up (yet). From the BBC, “A tale of cannabis boom and bust”:

When Xia (not her real name) first heard about the job as a “flower cutter”, she pictured roses.

Details were scant, but a roommate told her it was 10 days’ work for $200 a day, room and board included. Unemployed in the pandemic and unable to send money back to her adult children in southern China, Xia had been living at one of the crowded boarding houses common in the large Asian immigrant enclave of LA’s San Gabriel Valley. The job sounded like a fine temporary solution.

In early October, Xia and five other women made the 11-hour drive to the outskirts of Farmington, a small city nestled in the stunning but sparsely-populated high desert of northern New Mexico. When they arrived, their new boss checked them into a bright pink, roadside motel called the Travel Inn.

In a series of rooms on the first floor, Xia and her co-workers sat in chairs around heaps of plant material that were delivered by rental van in the night, trimming the “flowers” off the top. These were definitely not roses – the fan-leafed plants reminded Xia of àicǎo, or silvery wormwood, which the Chinese burn to ward off mosquitoes. The piles smelled so strongly that the odour hung around the motel like a cloud.

But for the moment, Xia was content. A convivial middle-aged mother of two, she had worked many jobs since arriving in the US in 2015 – home carer, nanny, masseuse. This was a lot less lonely…

***********

The view from the top of Bea Redfeather’s property on the Navajo Nation is breathtaking and severe. To the southwest is the cathedral-like Tsé Bitʼaʼí, or Shiprock pinnacle, a giant rock which rises nearly 1,580ft (480m) from the desert floor. Redfeather, a petite, 59-year-old tax accountant and silversmith, has lived here almost 30 years.

“This was peaceful,” she says, looking out over the horizon. “Calming.”

All that changed in early June, when Redfeather saw an enormous lorry jostling down the narrow frontage road that separates her property from her neighbour’s. A group of men got out and started unloading equipment into the empty field.

It astonished Redfeather that on a reservation where new development is tightly controlled by tribal bureaucracy, a large-scale farming operation was going up across the street without her even hearing about it. The Navajo Nation was also struggling with a severe coronavirus outbreak, one of the worst in the country, and movement on and off the reservation was supposed to be tightly controlled…

Not long afterwards, Redfeather says that San Juan River Farm Board president Dineh Benally drove up, and came over to speak to her. She says he asked her how they could resolve the situation.

“I says, ‘I’m going to stop you and what you’re doing.’ And you could see it in him. He was angry,” she recalls.

Benally, a former civil engineer for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the eldest son of a formidable tribal politician, was well known for his ambition to introduce the profitable cultivation of hemp and marijuana on the reservation…

Reader Interactions

28Comments

  2. 2.

    Poe Larity

    CBD with D8 is the new molly for the kids. See, D9 is the THC and that’s regulated. So just change the molecule a bit and it’s all wholesome.

    And now it will be at every county featival with no regs, so grandma can get high too.

  3. 3.

    HypersphericalCow

    @Poe Larity: reminds me of all the various isomers of codeine, all basically the same, but with a slightly different group attached, in order to evade patents.

  6. 6.

    namekarB

    It’ll all sort out nice and tidy once Big Tobacco hoovers up all these little grow operations.

  7. 7.

    MagdaInBlack

    I’m getting an ad for ” Sotheby’s.” Wee bit above my pay grade but nicer pictures than Zergnet ?

  8. 8.

    Another Scott

    @namekarB: Big Tobacco is old news.  I imagine it will be deep-pocketed techbros that try to horn in on it and squeeze out people who might actually have ties to the area.  Probably buying out small operators with Dogecoin or something else ridiculous…

    :-/

    Virginia legalized possession effective sometime this summer, but legal distribution, growing, etc., is still a couple of years or more away.  There’s a lot of money and potential health issues in youngsters at stake – here’s hoping we get it right.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  9. 9.

    Mo Salad

    I made it about halfway through the article and quit. Not because I was bored, but because I could see that this was one I wanted to pay full attention to.

    Thanks for the link.

  10. 10.

    ant

    Pretty rough for Republicans these days. It used to be that cannabis prohibition worked great for keeping all the non white and non male people in their place. Now, nobody cares about the devil’s lettuce any more.

    Nowadays, cops can be held accountable for murder even.

    We got blacks and women that think they can be president, and not knowing their place, causing others to get all uppity, what with all their UI benefits being able to party in Florida and so on.

     

    For the privileged (white men), this just isn’t the same country, as it was back with the founding fathers and patriots and all. Back then, they would have never given out vaccines to everybody for free. It just isn’t fair for a white man these days.

  11. 11.

    Geminid

    @Another Scott: In the last, “veto” session of the Virginia General Assembly, the Cannabis law was amended to legalize personal possession and the growing of up to four cannabis plants. While the law does not come into effect until July 1, several of my friends have jumped the gun and started their plants. I guess they could be called “Sooners.”

  12. 12.

    Another Scott

    I’ve become (perhaps excessively) distrustful of the BBC based on their politics coverage, so I went looking for other coverage.

    NavajoTimes (from last September):

    […]

    Most mornings this summer, the Navajo kids said they spent an hour or so cleaning up the trash from the raucous parties that were an almost nightly occurrence on the farms, then awaited orders from their shift bosses.

    The work was grueling — employees hauled 60-pound bags of soil throughout the labyrinthine networks of greenhouses, handled dangerous chemicals and operated heavy machinery. The hourly cash pay was $5. At least two kids on the work crews were 10 years old, employees said.

    “They always give the Navajos the dangerous jobs,” said Gipson, the 19-year-old employee, recalling an instance in which he and his uncle fumbled an unlabeled container of acid they were told to carry, splashing some of it on their hands and on the ground, where it frothed “like the blood from Alien vs. Predator.”

    On good days, their supervisors assigned them to the “dark room,” where they trimmed buds with the sharp blades of a whirring, mechanized metal fan, getting piles of dope ready to load onto the moving trucks that arrived weekly.

    “There’s Blue Cookie, Northern Lights, Skywalker OG, Blueberry Kush, Sour Diesel, Jet Fuel,” said Amber Brown, 20, ticking off the marijuana strains she and other workers said were written on plastic labels tucked into the pots.

    Ever since the large greenhouse operations began appearing on the reservation in 2019, Benally has described the farms as legal hemp enterprises. As farm board president, he also claims he has the authority to license hemp farms.

    Hemp cultivation is against the law without approval from the federal government, and Benally does not have that approval, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

    He also lacks the authority to grant hemp licenses or to independently lease farmland on the reservation, according to a lawsuit filed against him in June by Navajo Nation Attorney General Doreen McPaul. The suit charged Benally and his businesses, Native American Agriculture Company and Navajo Gold Company, with illegally growing industrial hemp and unlawfully issuing land use permits for his industrial hemp project, putting “the People of the Navajo Nation at risk.”

    […]

    Abuses like these are guaranteed as long as laws aren’t uniform and as long as so much money is at stake. Here’s hoping rational and sensible national laws are put in place soon, and that they apply everywhere (including on Indian lands).

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  13. 13.

    Mike in NC

    New York and Virginia voted to legalize weed last year. North Carolina will do so in 2022.

  14. 14.

    VeniceRiley

    Hemp cultivation should be legal. There are 2 kinds: The kind that give you hemp seeds (hulled hemp seeds are mildly nutty tasing and great on salad and in smoothies and hemp oil is also tasty and rich in your Omega fatty acids) and the kind for fiber that can be made into anything from clothing to faux oak (mixed with soy glue) and is a better CO2 sink by a country mile.

  15. 15.

    divF

    @MagdaInBlack: Sotheby’s = real estate porn.

    One of the local branches of Sotheby’s (2 Tunnel Road, Berkeley), was for decades J.T. Ward Realty. The founder was Jay Ward, of Rocky and Bullwinkle fame, who started his real estate business after he graduated from Berkeley. Even at the height of his success in Hollywood, he kept the real estate business in case things didn’t work out.

  17. 17.

    Another Scott

    @VeniceRiley: A lot of the new pot cultivation is indoors.

    NatureSustainability:

    The legalization of cannabis has caused a substantial increase in commercial production, yet the magnitude of the industry’s environmental impact has not been fully quantified. A considerable amount of legal cannabis is cultivated indoors primarily for quality control and security. In this study we analysed the energy and materials required to grow cannabis indoors and quantified the corresponding greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions using life cycle assessment methodology for a cradle-to-gate system boundary. The analysis was performed across the United States, accounting for geographic variations in meteorological and electrical grid emissions data. The resulting life cycle GHG emissions range, based on location, from 2,283 to 5,184 kg CO2-equivalent per kg of dried flower. The life cycle GHG emissions are largely attributed to electricity production and natural gas consumption from indoor environmental controls, high-intensity grow lights and the supply of carbon dioxide for accelerated plant growth. The discussion focuses on the technological solutions and policy adaptation that can improve the environmental impact of commercial indoor cannabis production.

    For comparison, burning a gallon of gas (2.84 kg) makes roughly 9 kg of CO2.

    (The article itself is behind a paywall.)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  18. 18.

    Redshift

    @Geminid:

    the Cannabis law was amended to legalize personal possession and the growing of up to four cannabis plants 

    Yes, but not selling, which was Scott’s point, I think.

  19. 19.

    Redshift

    @Geminid: An acquaintance of mine is doing the same thing. I pointed to out (because I don’t want him to get busted) and he claimed that because the seeds won’t grow into anything usable before July 1, it’s legal. I’m dubious about that, but I have to admit the cops probably won’t go after him.

  21. 21.

    Another Scott

    @Redshift: No, the correction was warranted.  :-)  I thought only possession was legal.  I’m glad that small-scale growing is also going to be legal.  (Otherwise, there would still be a path for police to hassle people and the main point of these reforms is to stop that.)

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  22. 22.

    Trichome Cowboy

    Its actually easy to grow frosty dank on a small scale with the new samsung lm301b LED diodes (quantum board LEDs – Spider Farmer is A+) a carbon filter kills the smell.  Seedsman online for discreet shipping (RQS seeds A+). 4 plants should be 1lb 2X a year harvest for an intermediate grower, 6bs a yr for an experienced one that uses trellis SCROG techniques, etc.  R-DWC hydroponic is the easier than people think, just measure the nutes & ph, change the water once a week…soil is an art, hydro is a science.

    Delta 8 THC isnt CBD – its hemp derived THC. Delta 9 is regular cannabis derived THC. Thats why Delta8 is legal – “all products from hemp are legal”

    Stoners get a bad reputation, but some people smoke daily and still function normally ; )   never show up late to work, always pay thier bills, own a house, nice car, etc.  Drinking alchohol fucks my body up, even  a few beers make me feel like shit. Gorilla Glue #4 on the other hand….

  23. 23.

    Jay

    @VeniceRiley:

    Commercial hemp requires a field, a tractor for tilling and planting, a combine for harvesting.

    Greenhouses, a large “labour force” and “Security Guards” are a red flag for pot cultivation.

    The combine puts the seeds in one truck and the fibres in another, at the same time.

    Good luck smoking enough hemp to get high.

  24. 24.

    karen marie

    @Mike in NC: I was shocked – and delighted – when AZ legalized pot by referendum last fall. I was even more shocked – and super delighted – when sales started earlier than predicted. I never thought I’d see the day.

  25. 25.

    James E Powell

    Murder Mountain, a Netflix documentary series, explores the changes taking place in Humboldt County as growers move from illegal to legal. Or not.

  26. 26.

    WhatsMyNym

    WA legalized it a few years ago. Mostly only hear about zoning issues or small counties still trying to keep it out (the growing & selling).

  27. 27.

    evodevo

    @Another Scott: ​
      Whoa! Well, it’s Texas, I guess…if it’s anything like when our drug dealer neighbor here in rural KY turned up with a lion, there really weren’t any state or local laws covering this. He kept it on a log chain attached to a tree, for 4 years, till one day it attacked him and he shot it. All us neighbors breathed a sigh of relief. We had all been carrying AK’s while on our daily dog walks or doing farm work that whole time, because it occasionally got loose and roamed the countryside.

  28. 28.

    burnspbesq

    White folks will always try to exploit tribal lands and tribal sovereignty. I once met a stinking rich white guy who got stinking rich via payday lending and rent-to-own. He claimed that because the nominal lender was a tribal bank, the loans were exempt from California usury laws. The CFPB didn’t see it that way.

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