How an Native Led Department of Interior Matters
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This kind of thing has flown completely under the radar in our broader discussions because basically the political class doesn’t care about public lands and neither does anyone who lives in the east. But putting Deb Haaland as the head of Interior and Charles Sams as the head of the National Park Service has had a huge impact on management because it has centered Native Americans. Almost all the new national monuments Biden has created have come out of Native attempts to lock down white development of western lands. Then you have the issue of bringing in the tribes to co-manage resources, as you are seeing in northern California.
California’s Yurok Tribe, which had 90% of its territory taken from it during the gold rush of the mid-1800s, will be getting a slice of its land back to serve as a new gateway to Redwood national and state parks visited by 1 million people a year.
The Yurok will be the first Native people to manage tribal land with the National Park Service under a historic memorandum of understanding signed on Tuesday by the tribe, Redwood national and state parks and the non-profit Save the Redwoods League.
The agreement “starts the process of changing the narrative about how, by whom and for whom we steward natural lands”, Sam Hodder, president and CEO of Save the Redwoods League, said in a statement.
The return of the 125 acres (50 hectares) of land – named ’O Rew in the Yurok language – more than a century after it was stolen from California’s largest tribe is proof of the “sheer will and perseverance of the Yurok people”, said Rosie Clayburn, the tribe’s cultural resources director. “We kind of don’t give up.”
For the tribe, redwoods are considered living beings and traditionally only fallen trees have been used to build their homes and canoes.
“As the original stewards of this land, we look forward to working together with the Redwood national and state parks to manage it,” Clayburn said. “This is work that we’ve always done, and continued to fight for, but I feel like the rest of world is catching up right now and starting to see that Native people know how to manage this land the best.”
The property is at the heart of the tribe’s ancestral land and was taken in the 1800s to exploit its old-growth redwoods and other natural resources, the tribe said. Save the Redwoods League bought the property in 2013 and began working with the tribe and others to restore it.
These are very positive moves, which is why Trump will destroy them when he takes power in January.