The new policy, set by the California Natural Resources Agency, aims to start healing the harm caused by the state’s actions to bar tribes from their homelands and criminalize their cultural and land management practices. These actions not only harmed Native communities, whose cultures and ways of life are intimately tied to the plants, animals and landscape of their homelands, but also caused well-documented harm to ecosystems through the loss of biodiversity, takeover of invasive species, degradation of water quality and increase in wildfire risk.
“The California Natural Resources Agency is taking important steps forward” to acknowledge and address the unratified treaties, Morning Star Gali, executive director and founder of Indigenous Justice and a member of the Ajumawi band of the Pit River Tribe, said in a statement. At the same time, “until there is a true and sustained commitment to land return, co-management, and meaningful investment for all California tribes, repairing these historic injustices will remain a long-standing effort that will take decades to fully address.”
The policy outlines three types of land-use agreements: access agreements that allow tribal members onto the land to reincorporate it into their communities and cultures, collaborative agreements in which land owners work with tribes to care for the land, and land return agreements in which land owners transfer ownership of the land to tribes.