(CN) — A conservation organization will turn over a 500-acre parcel in some of California's most picturesque coastal redwood territory to an Indigenous tribal group.
The Save the Redwoods League bought a 500-acre parcel in the Lost Coast Wilderness, the only truly remote slice of the Northern California coast, in July and announced plans Tuesday to transfer the land to the Intertribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council.
The move was hailed by the Indigenous representatives who will now take over management of the parcel that teems with redwoods, salmon, steelhead and the northern spotted owl.
“Today I stand on the shoulders of giants, my ancestors … to bring them honor, and to not let our old ways be forgotten, for our next generation, my children, my grandchildren and all the kids that I’ll never get to see,” said Buffie Schmidt, of the Sinkyone Council.
The transfer of property ownership will further entail renaming the place to Tc’ih-Léh-Dûñ, pronounced (tsih-ih-LEY-duhn), which means "fish run place."
The parcel is riven through with the winding Anderson Creek, which hosts Coho salmon and steelhead trout and eventually filters into the south fork of the Eel River. The parcel also contains about 200 acres of old-growth forests, including groves of towering redwoods and their associated habitats.
Located north of an approximately 3,800-acre parcel the Sinkyone Wilderness Council already owns, the parcel at issue is located south of 180,000 acres of conserved land associated with the Lost Coast Wilderness, which traverses through the King Range in northern Mendocino County.
“Tribes can achieve larger landscape-level and regional-level protections informed by cultural values and understandings of these places,” said Hawk Rosales, an Indigenous land defender who is of Ndéh (Apache) ancestry and former executive director of the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council. “In this way, Indigenous Peoples will support and participate in the healing of these lands and their communities.”
The council will work with the league to manage the land in a manner that abets more fire resiliency and climate adaption along with conservation practices and indigenous-based land management techniques.
“The Sinkyone Council today represents the Indigenous peoples who are the original stewards of this land,” said Sam Hodder, president of Save the Redwoods League. “The league is honored to support a return of Native people to this place and to partner with the Sinkyone Council in their management and stewardship of Tc’ih-Léh-Dûñ.”
The league had also donated a 164-acre parcel to the wilderness council in 2012.
The donation is part of increasing awareness in the United States that Indigenous cultures are best situated to manage natural resources due to a more integrative approach that eschews the exploitative approach that relies on natural resource extraction and its attendant economies.
The United Nations recently released a policy brief that noted Indigenous peoples are 5% of the world population but manage roughly a quarter of its natural resources. As increasing attention is focused on the importance of old-growth forests not only to ecological problems like endangered species and biodiversity but to human problems like climate change and water quality, the importance of an integrative approach to nature becomes increasingly prioritized.
“Indigenous peoples are stewards of the world’s biodiversity and cultural diversity,” the United Nations argued in 2021.
Priscilla Hunter, like many of the members of the intertribal council, is of mixed ancestry, with tribal membership in the Coyote Band of Pomo Indians and ancestry in the Coast Yuki tribes as well.
She said the area has been of utmost cultural significance for the regional tribes for thousands of years and the descendants of these tribes are best positioned to manage the lands in a way that benefits all humanity.
“In holding and caring for this land, we are helping to lead effective ways of addressing the global climate crisis,” she said.
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