Kaitlin Reed, Dr.

Recipient of The 2025 James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award as one of the Co-Directors of the Rou Dalagurr: Food Sovereignty Lab & Traditional Ecological Knowledges Institute.

Kaitlin Reed (Yurok/Hupa/Oneida) is an Associate Professor of Native American Studies at Cal Poly Humboldt. She serves as her university’s Traditional Ecological Knowledge Faculty Fellow and the Co-Director of the Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab & Traditional Ecological Knowledges Institute. Her research is focused on tribal land and water rights, extractive capitalism, and settler colonial political economies. Her first book, Settler Cannabis: From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California, was published by the University of Washington Press in 2023 and received the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award in 2024. Dr. Reed obtained her B.A. degree in Geography at Vassar College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis. She is an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe in Northwestern California.

Peer-Reviewed Articles:

• Reed, Kaitlin. “‘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(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. Vol. 39, Forthcoming 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(19), 2019.

Book Chapters:

• Reed, Kaitlin. “Cannabis, Settler Colonialism, and Tribal Sovereignty in California,” in The Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Cannabis Research (eds. Dominic Corva & Joshua Meisel). Routledge Press: Forthcoming 2020.
• Reed, Kaitlin. “Obtaining Herbal Sovereignty: A Glance at Marijuana and Tribal Lands in California,” in New Voices in California Indian Studies (Vol. 1): Contemporary Politics & Culture. (eds. Beth Rose Middleton-Manning & Cutcha Risling Baldy). Forthcoming 2020.

Book Reviews:

• Middleton-Manning, Beth Rose; Reed, Kaitlin and Deniss Martinez. “Becoming Storms: Indigenous Water Protectors Fight for the Future,” in Lessons in Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter (eds. Michael Mascarenhas) Sage Publishing: 2020.
• Reed, Kaitlin. Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism by Natchee Blu Barnd (review). Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Journal. Vol. 5.2, 2018.
• Reed, Kaitlin. Reservation High by Judith Surber (review). News from Native California. Summer 2018.
• Reed, Kaitlin. The Land Is Our History: Indigeneity, Law, and the Settler State by Miranda Johnson (review). American Indian Culture & Research Journal, Vol. 41.3, 2018.

Non-Peer Reviewed Scholarship:

• Reed, Kaitlin. “‘Operation Yurok’ and the Environmental Impacts of Marijuana in Yurok Country,” News from Native California. Spring 2018.
• McElwee, Pamela; Fernández-Llamazares, Álvaro; Thorpe, Marian Ahn; Powys Whyte, Kyle ; Middleton, Beth Rose; Reed, Kaitlin; Sy, Waaseyaa’sin Christine; Moldawer, Alysse Marie. “Indigenous Ecologies.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Ecology. Ed. David Gibson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.