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Yurok Tribe vice chair
Frankie Joe Myers at Ke'pel Creek. The Trust for Public Land
and the Yurok Tribe are working together to protect 2,000
acres of timberland here.
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The Klamath River runs like an artery through the ancestral
homelands of the Yurok Tribe. From its headwaters in the foothills
of southern Oregon's Cascade Mountains, the river courses past rocky
cliffs and sloping coastal forests, crossing the Oregon-California
state line as it flows through six dams, eventually spilling out
into the Pacific Ocean at a wide, rocky beach in far Northern California.
The Yurok Tribe's landswhich once spanned over a million acresare
now centered on the Klamath; their reservation runs 44 miles along
the river's lower reach, extending a mile from the Klamath's banks
on either side.
In a boat heading down the river, you pass by gravel bars and fishing
holes that would be unidentifiable to an outsider, but that hold
generations of stories and meaning to Yurok tribal members, descendants
of the name-holders. Places like McCovey Riffle or Brooks Riffle.
Stories of parents teaching children how to fish, or grandparentsas
children in the 1940sfishing at night to avoid game wardens.
As Yurok tribal member and attorney Amy Cordalis says, "If you know
the river, you know the people."
Frankie Joe Myers grew up on the Yurok Reservation, sans electricity
or telephone, and learned to fish from his dad, who learned
from his own dad, at their family's fishing hole at Pecwan Creek.
Myers, who lives in Weitchpeca small upriver community on
the reservationhas filled a variety of roles with the tribe
over the last 20 years: He worked in the tribal fisheries department
during a devastating fish kill in 2002, when the tribe says 60,000
dead salmon washed up on the riverbank, and then he led the ensuing
advocacy efforts to remove four dams on the Klamath. He served as
a tribal heritage preservation officer. He testified before Congress
on the climate crisis. And since 2018, he's been vice chair of the
Yurok Tribe. Over Myers's lifetime, the tribe has expanded its land
ownership from around 5,000 acres to 60,000 acres.
And that number is still growing. This spring, the Yurok
Tribe partnered with The Trust for Public Land to acquire more than
2,000 acres of forestlands and prairie surrounding Ke'pel Creek,
a remote tributary of the Klamath River. "Ke'pel Creek is prime
for hunting and gathering and ceremonial use," says Rosie Clayburn,
a member of the Yurok Tribe who works as the tribal heritage preservation
officer. And Ke'pel Creek is a piece of the larger puzzle of Yurok
ancestral lands, Clayburn says. "We're not complete until we gain
back that land and gain back the ability to manage that land."
Importantly, tribal members will be able to hunt, fish, and hold
ceremonies at the Ke'pel Creek property without trespassing on private
timberlands or facing intrusions from tourists or park rangers on
public lands. For example, the tribe has to go through a permit
process and request a partial closure in order to hold ceremonies
in Redwood National Park. "It's always hard having to explain why
your religion is important, or why your ceremony is important, or
why you existing is a higher priority than someone's vacation,"
Myers says.
"We're not complete until we gain back that
land and gain back the ability to manage that land."
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Importantly, tribal members will be able to hunt, fish, and hold
ceremonies at the Ke'pel Creek property without trespassing on private
timberlands or facing intrusions from tourists or park rangers on
public lands. For example, the tribe has to go through a permit
process and request a partial closure in order to hold ceremonies
in Redwood National Park. "It's always hard having to explain why
your religion is important, or why your ceremony is important, or
why you existing is a higher priority than someone's vacation,"
Myers says.
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A ceremony site and gathering
place at the mouth of the Klamath River.
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The Yurok Tribe's push to regain their land base is nested within
a national effort to return lands to Indigenous stewardship. That
effort has been led by activists within the decentralized Land Back
movement and supported by climate scientists who are increasingly
recognizing that Indigenous
land management is critical to maintaining biodiversity and carbon
stores. Myers says that for the Yurok, the reclamation of dispossessed
lands is a way to reaffirm cultural lifeways while also building
financial resilience through the carbon storage market.
"If your culture has been deemed illegal,
that really plays into how we view ourselves as individuals,
as people, as a community."
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This era of expansion marks a shift from just a few decades ago,
when Myers was learning to hunt, fish, and gather while growing
up on the reservation. In those days, the surrounding land was almost
entirely owned by private landowners or timber companies. "To access
these lands, we had to break the law. We had to cut gates. We had
to go at night. We were criminals," Myers says. "If your culture
has been deemed illegal, that really plays into how we view ourselves
as individuals, as people, as a community."
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Ke'pel Creek meets the
Klamath River on the Yurok Indian Reservation in Northern
California.
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The history of tribal lands in what is now California is complicated,
and painful. Until 1871, treaties were the primary means for
the federal government to legally claim Indigenous lands, which
tribes ceded in exchange for reservations and other agreements.
In California, 134 Indigenous bands and tribes signed treaties with
federal agents starting in 1851, but the Senate refused to ratify
the treaties as settlers poured in during the Gold Rush. Instead,
the Senate put an injunction of secrecy on the treaties, which lasted
for the next half century. As a result, Indigenous signatories received
neither the lands nor support the treaties guaranteed. Meanwhile,
Congress ceased the treaty process with all tribal nations in the
U.S. (Hundreds of "unrecognized" tribes, who did not sign treaties
or cede their land and are not recognized as tribal nations by the
federal government, remain today.)
Beginning in 1890, the federal government reserved millions of
acres in California for national forests and parks. Elsewhere in
the state, settlers claimed land and set up commercial operations
of logging, fishing, and mining on Indigenous lands illegally taken
by the U.S. government. "I am not surprised that as far as possible
the whole matter has been kept secret," wrote one director in 1905
at the Northern California Indian Association (NCAI), a non-Native
organization that advocated for the just compensation of lost tribal
lands. In the early 1900s, NCAI searched for the missing treaties
in the records of the Department of Interior with the help of some
congressional members. "Even Congressmen seem to have had some shame,"
the NCAI director concluded of the scandal.
Congress never ratified its treaty with the Yurok Tribe, though
the federal government did establish the 55,000-acre Yurok Indian
Reservation by executive order in 1855. A generation later, in 1887,
Congress passed the General Allotment Act, which broke up tribal
ownership of reservations. The act assigned tribal citizens plots
of land within reservationsand opened the rest up as "surplus"
for settlers.
Nationwide, 60 million acres of reservation lands were taken from
tribal nations and given or sold to non-Natives and corporations
by the federal government. The General Allotment Act was, according
to the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, "the single most destructive
piece of legislation aimed at tribal land." For the Yurok, that
meant that of the 55,000 acres that made up their reservation at
the time of allotment, fewer than 30,000 were allotted to tribal
members.
That number declined drastically over the following century. In
2007, the tribe owned roughly a quarter of the reservation's original
land base. Another quarter of the reservation's lands were privately
owned, and the timber company Green Diamond owned most of the rest.
As Myers told members of Congress in a 2019 hearing on the climate
crisis: "In a matter of 130 years, the Yurok people lost over 1.49
million acres of land."
"In a matter of 130 years, the Yurok people
lost over 1.49 million acres of land."
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From that history came a resolve to regain what was lost, Myers
says now. When the Yurok Tribe wrote their constitution in the 1990s,
reclaiming a tribal land base was included as a bedrock principle.
And in the years since, the tribal government has made strides in
fulfilling their constitutional pledge. In 2006, for example, the
tribe partnered with Western Rivers Conservancy to buy back ancestral
lands from Green Diamond, including the watershed of Blue Creek,
a vital cold-water refuge for salmon. The tribe completed the deal
in 2019, gaining ownership of 50,000 acres that they're beginning
to manage as a salmon sanctuary and community forest.
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In April, the Yurok Tribe
acquired over 2,000 acres surrounding Ke'pel Creek, expanding
a 34,000-acre swath of tribal land.
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"As Yurok people who have been literally locked out of these lands,
some for up to a hundred years, just the ability for our members
to go out and to access these lands and to harvest and gather, interact
with the forest; the shift in land management itself, to allow Indigenous
people back onto their landscapes ... I think that's absolutely
key," says Myers.
The Yurok Tribe has used its newer land acquisitions to tackle
present-day problems facing its citizens and the greater communityfrom
food insecurity to climate change. In late 2020, the tribe bought
a 40-acre parcel of agricultural land, with plans to use it to grow
food, as the effects of the COVID-19 crisis have caused food shortages
and economic havoc. The tribe is also leading an effort with state
and conservation group partners to reintroduce the California condor
to the Pacific Northwest, and is one of the primary forces behind
undamming and restoring the Klamath River.
And with thousands of acres of forest under their care, the Yurok
have joined the fight against climate change. Through California's
cap-and-trade market, the tribe has sold offsets for the carbon
that's sequestered by forests they sustainably manage. That helps
the state meet its emissions reduction goals, while generating funding
that the tribe has used to repatriate both land and cultural items.
The Yurok has really been one of the most strategic tribes in the
Lower 48 to use both carbon finance and a lot of different mechanisms
for recovering ancestral territory
The Yurok has really been one of the most
strategic tribes in the Lower 48 to use both carbon finance
and a lot of different mechanisms for recovering ancestral
territory
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"I would say the Yurok has really been one of the most strategic
tribes in the Lower 48 to use both carbon finance and a lot of different
mechanisms for recovering ancestral territory," says Brian Shillinglaw,
managing director of New Forests, Inc., a forestry company that
has worked alongside the Yurok and other tribal governments across
the U.S. to use the California carbon market to protect and enhance
forests for their climate benefits.
In 2018, 7,000 acres along Ke'pel Creek went up for sale. New Forests
bought the tract, intending to repatriate the 2,424 acres of Yurok
ancestral land within it to the tribe. With technical support from
The Trust for Public Land, the Yurok Tribe applied for funding from
the State of California to fund the acquisition. The tribe is on
track to gain ownership of the land later this year.
"It's a privilege to be able to partner with the Yurok Tribe and
support their strategic efforts to acquire and manage more lands
within their ancestral territory," says John Bernstein, a California
project manager at The Trust for Public Land. "The Yurok are the
original stewards of these lands and resources, and their forestry
expertise and vision for the future of this area benefits the health
of land, water, resources, and the environment for all Californians."
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The patchwork of land
ownership in the lower Klamath River basin poses challenges
for forest management. As the Yurok Tribe consolidates ownership
in its ancestral homeland, it'll be able to more efficiently
steward the land, water, and forests in its care.
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The Ke'pel Creek project is the latest in the organization's long
history of partnership with tribes. With help from The Trust
for Public Land, the Nez
Perce Tribe acquired a 10,000-acre ranch in Oregon's Wallowa Mountains
in 1996. In 2007, the organization helped the Confederated Tribes
and Bands of the Yakama Indian Nation reclaim
fishing grounds at the confluence of the Columbia and Klickitat
Rivers in Washington State. And in Northern California in 2015,
The Trust for Public Land transferred 688 acres to the Kashia Band
of Pomo Indians to create the Kashia
Coastal Reserve.
The organization has worked with more than 70 tribes and Indigenous
groups to conserve some 200,000 acres across the United States.
These days, The Trust for Public Land is partnering with the Native
Hawaiianled Ala
Kahakai Trail Association to preserve three properties on the
Big Island and working alongside the Klamath Tribe to create a green
schoolyard at an elementary school on the tribe's ancestral land
in Chiloquin,
Oregon.
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Much of the land along
Ke'pel Creek is coated in Douglas fir, plus a mix of bear
grass, tan oaks and their acorns, coast redwoods, and salal,
each offering materials and foods that are important to the
Yurok Tribe.
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Rosie Clayburn is heritage
preservation officer for the Yuork Tribe.
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The Ke'pel Creek tract is remote and mountainous, reaching from the
banks of the Klamath River to the top of the ridge. Much of the land
is coated in Douglas fir, plus a mix of bear grass, tan oaks and their
acorns, coast redwoods, and salal, each offering materials and foods
that are important to the Yurok Tribe. An expanse of open prairie
along the creek, bowl-shaped and grassy, is perfect for playing a
Yurok traditional stick game (a mix of "lacrosse and mixed martial
arts," as Myers puts it). That's special, says Myers, since there
are few places upriver that are big enough to hold a playing field.
From relatively small parcels used for agriculture all the way
up to the 50,000-acre acquisition at Blue Creek, the Yurok approach
to stewardship puts the people back in the landscape. Access for
tribal members to hunt, fish, and gather on lands reacquired by
the tribe is paramount, Myers says, balanced with ceremonial needs,
habitat restoration, active fire management, and some logging. "Whether
through our carbon sequestering program or a forestry program or
a watershed restoration program or fisheries program, we now have
dozens of members who are making their livelihoods off of this land
again, like they always did, traditionally."
The tribe's reclamation of land goes hand in hand with efforts
to buy back cultural items from private collectors and repatriate
objects from museums, says Clayburn. Over the years, the tribe has
reacquired hundreds of woven basket caps, condor feathers, funerary
objects, ancestral remains, and traditional clothing like white
deerskins and headdresses made of bright red woodpecker feathers.
So much of the Yurok identitylanguage, ceremony, foodis
inseparable from the land they persist on, Clayburn says. "The whole
foundation of repatriation and that movement is to bring things
home," Clayburn says. "My world is repatriation and the repatriation
of sacred objects. I look at land as the same thing."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anna V. Smith is an award-winning journalist from the Pacific Northwest,
where she writes and edits for High Country News as assistant editor
on the Indigenous affairs desk. Her work has appeared in outlets
such as the New York Times, Audubon, Undark,
and Slate.
@annavtoriasmith
ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Paul Robert Wolf Wilson is a photographer based in his ancestral
territories of Southern Oregon and Northern California. He is a
member of the Klamath and Modoc tribes, and his works focus primarily
on visual sovereignty and land practice, the intersections of peoples
and place.
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