OUTCOME: Ecosystem Conservation and Restoration

Problem

Tribal leadership in stewarding ancestral lands is hindered by the lack of recognition of Tribal sovereignty and rights to co-manage these lands as well as the lack of Tribal members in agency leadership and management positions. Ecosystem management as practiced by non-Tribal land managers often focuses on commercially valuable species, endangered species, or other management goals that do not address landscapes, specific sites, and culturally important plants and animals that are valued by Tribal communities.

Solution

Tribal Ecocultural Restoration - Engage with Tribes as sovereign nations, support Tribal leadership in public agencies, and support Tribal ecocultural restoration, stewardship, and co-management of public lands.

Background and Context

Many North Coast Tribes have the knowledge and experience to sustainably steward landscape and ecosystem processes, including using beneficial fire for hazardous fuel management and other purposes, but may lack the opportunity to do so. This knowledge is needed to improve land management to include stewardship principles, as well as wildfire response and recovery. Disconnection between agency leadership and Tribal leadership, and the lack of Tribal members in key management positions within agencies, hinder the ability to benefit from Tribal leadership in these areas. The federal government has recently committed to building the Nation-to-Nation relationship with Tribal governments (Joint Secretarial Order 3403 – Fulfilling the Trust Responsibility to Indian Tribes in the Stewardship of Federal Lands and Waters) and this principle should be applied at all levels of federal, state, and local government agencies and entities. Tribes should be recognized as sovereign nations with all the rights that entails. In particular, Tribal co-management of publicly-owned ancestral lands and traditional use areas should be supported.

Ecocultural restoration prioritizes restoring both ecosystems and the Indigenous communities that depend on and care for them. Rather than centering human needs or focusing on single species or single ecological functions, it focuses on the interconnections between species and the fundamental equality and right to life of all species (Long et al 2020). Tribal communities have connections and reciprocal relationships with multiple species from multiple different habitat types, all of which must be intact and functional in order to provide materials for traditional uses. When Tribal people do identify specific species that are important for cultural and subsistence uses, these are often not those focused on by non-Tribal land managers who often concentrate on commercially valuable or rare and endangered species. Active Tribal stewardship integrated with forest conservation, restoration, and revitalization promotes a diverse and reliable supply of ecocultural resources (Long & Lake 2018).

The North Coast is the ancestral territory of North Coast Tribes. The majority of North Coast Tribes acknowledge an inherent responsibility for managing their ancestral territories regardless of whether they currently have the capacity. Therefore, North Coast Tribes’ jurisdiction goes beyond the gathering, fishing, and hunting rights, which each individual Tribal member retains. Each North Coast Tribe exerts their jurisdictional authority according to their own traditional policies, laws, mandates, and capacity. NCRP seeks to be inclusive of all California Tribes or Tribal communities who are descended from the original Tribes whose territory is within California, regardless of whether the Tribe or Tribal community is unrecognized, federal, or state recognized.

Recommendations

Recent research by Souther et al (2023) has identified challenges to integrating TEK into land management, including lack of financial support, institutional norms and barriers, informational sensitivity, disparate data types, and bridging the local-national scale. Barriers experienced locally, such as barriers to Tribal access to public ancestral lands for hunting, gathering, and other subsistence activities, including fees, access restrictions, and competition from non-native land users, should be removed in policy and in practice. Tribal identification of ecosystems of importance and identification of projects to restore and enhance them, supported by funding to implement priority projects, will restore both the health of and Tribal access to culturally important species. Tribes should be supported in full co-management of public lands and granted full access to public lands for hunting, fishing, and gathering as well as for cultural resource management and stewardship purposes, which can include cultural fire as well as digging, thinning, trimming, weeding, distributing seeds or other propagules, and other related activities.

USFS, CAL FIRE, and other federal and state agencies should support Indigenous Peoples by securing steady funding streams for beneficial fire, decentralizing burning regulations, returning decision-making authority to Tribes, and repatriating Indigenous lands (Marks-Block and Tripp, 2021). These agencies should also work proactively to reduce risk aversion to beneficial fire in upper agency management. Best practices for integrating TEK into land management identified by Souther et al (2023) include 1) rigorous safeguards to protect intellectual property around TEK; 2) respectful knowledge sharing and co-creation of products, with formalized partnership agreements that outline roles and expectations at the onset of projects; 3) prioritization of long-term consistent engagement of partners, with a focus on community and relationship-building; and 4) proper acknowledgement and compensation for TEK.

Actions

Support Indigenous sovereignty, increasing co-leadership, shared decision making, and Indigenous stewardship of ancestral Tribal territories, funding Indigenous fire stewardship, planning and cross-jurisdictional prioritization of fuel management, and other Tribal priorities.

  • Support return of surplus state and federal lands, where agencies lack resource to conduct management activities and implement planned projects, to local Tribes.
  • Support Tribal programs and partnerships with land trusts and land conservation agencies for the reacquisition of lands for Tribal people. See for example the donor program of the Karuk Tribe.

Provide opportunities for training agency staff about how to work with Tribal governments and Indigenous community organizations on management of wildland fires, fuel management, and other Tribal priorities.

Support and facilitate integration of a Tribal Cultural Fire representative and/or liaison into each relevant agency in the region to facilitate use of beneficial fire.

Ensure at least one experienced person per region (ideally a Tribally appointed Tribal representative or Tribal member) is empowered to assist cultural fire practitioners with cultural burns within the individual’s traditional territory, and that California Tribes are represented in each relevant state and federal agency.

Provide funding to Tribes to employ staff to effectively navigate state and federal agency requirements.

Provide funding to support Tribes and cultural fire practitioners, including paying them when assisting agencies with prescribed burns.

Hold meetings and workshops of Tribal representatives and Tribal members for regional planning and ecosystem restoration mapping for prioritized inclusion of Tribal interests into regional plans.

Support Tribal cultural fire practitioner’s efforts to restore fire regimes through their application of Indigenous knowledge and practice and TEK, including adaptive management.

Support and fund necessary fuel management actions that would allow cultural fire regimes to be resumed (See RFFC Demonstration Project – Dry Creek Rancheria Vegetation Management and Demonstration Project Using Native Vegetation and TEK).

  • Provide Tribes with the opportunity to identify subsistence and cultural resources in need of restoration and support expansion of Tribal ecological management to support identified resources and ecosystems that support them (i.e., conifer forest understory, oak woodlands, wetlands, meadows, etc. that support food, medicine, and basketry resources).
  • Provide Tribally requested assistance in the form identified by the Tribe – funding, permitting, technical assistance, etc.
  • Evaluate Tribal interest in establishing native plant nurseries focusing on culturally important plants.
  • Develop forestry prescription templates that include plants utilized by Tribal people in different ecoregions.
  • Support reintroduction and restoration of ecological and cultural keystone species that have been extirpated and conserve and restore their habitat.

Support Tribal eco-cultural revitalization endowment funds for long-term Tribal stewardship.

  • Establish collaborations between public land managers and Tribal members who collect and use native plants for food, basketry, etc.

Establish relationships between publicly supported nurseries, botanic gardens, arboreta, etc. and Tribal communities to grow culturally important plants that are currently dwindling on Tribal lands for replanting there.

Encourage natural history museums to reorient their exhibits to positively portray indigenous ecocultural stewardship of California landscapes, past and present.

Support development of teaching aids for environmental education for Indian children, including native plant gardens, plant collection locations, apps, websites, brochures, etc. that connect ethnobotanical knowledge and native languages with native plants  (See Karuk Pikyav (To Fix It) Field Institute).

References and Resources

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