The statement notes that the waters are “also claimed” by the California state government, which “supports the concept” of tribal stewardship. This whole thing seems pretty insubstantial.
"We do not seek the permission of other governments and can no longer wait to act to preserve and protect this culturally and ecologically important place"
This is SOP for California politics. CA jurisdictions have been ceding territory to Indian tribes for a while. This is purely an economically motivated cash grab layered under miles of politically correct double-speak. There is an indian tribe in Montana that has a massive coal mine that wanted to run a rail line to a port through the area that was shut down last year. This is possibly another strategy to do the same thing.
> and be it further resolved, these waters are also claimed by the State of California, who through its California Natural Resources Agency Pathways to 30x30: Accelerating Conservation of California’s Nature Report, support the concept of Indigenous Marine Stewardship
Do you have any evidence pointing towards this being a money grab? That’s a serious accusation.
Dont forget Newsome wanting to give $100M+ to tribes to buy back 'ancestral land' despite multiple groups claiming ancestry. Sounds like a money grab to me
> wanting to give $100M+ to tribes to buy back ‘ancestral land’
…proposing, and the legislature establishing, a $101M grant program for tribes to carry out “multi-benefit nature-based solutions projects located within the state of California.” [0]
It is not solely or primarily for acquiring land, and to the extent land is acquired, it may or may not be ancestral land. (There is a separate and earlier deadline within the program for grants applications for up to $25M of “Time-Sensitive Shovel Ready Ancestral Land Return Projects” for projects that meet that description and are already partially funded and which also meet the other requirements of the program.)
> despite multiple groups claiming ancestry.
To the extent projects under the grant program are ancestral land return projects, and are in “shared ancestral territority”, there is explicit approval priority for those which “will be jointly owned and/or managed by inter-tribal consortium, tribal conservation district, or partnership”.
> I’m not in California so I don’t know about that proposal.
Its not a proposal, it is a program established by law and which the first deadline for the early round of grants has already passed.
> Does it even involve the same tribes?
Potentially, since the grant program is open to all California tribes, whether or not federally recognized.
The joint declaration here could plausibly be a foundation for the tribes to establish one or more projects within the declared protected area and apply for grants to carry them out, so it could be directly related.
Thanks for sharing the information. It appears not only do they not have to be federally recognized to apply but they can also apply if they are a 501c3 corporation. I would like to see some nature restoration, tribal based or otherwise, and hope this resource is used properly.
I don't know what economic value this part of the ocean has. There aren't any fish left. We're currently in the planning stage of a wind farm here, but that's in deeper water outside of this zone.
Do you live on the California coast? There are plenty of fish, mostly because of so many protected areas. Maybe you are talking about commercial trawlers or something but if its coming to subsistence fishing there is more than enough to eat. Apparently, these groups claim they know how to harvest mussels during blooms ... Maybe they are immune to cyanotoxins etc. I just wonder where they have been practicing.
Good question. I have no idea. I doubt there is precedent!
And I can’t wait to see how this gets legally tested — native rights haven’t been properly respected and these kinds if tests are deeply important in restoring rightful sovereignty and tribal agency to our hosts and neighbors.
I’m chuckling as I imagine they’re going to do a better job of protecting and managing the Earth than the government of California and Oregon have done over the last 150 odd years.
> We do not seek the permission of other governments
> these waters are also claimed by the State of California, who through its California Natural Resources Agency Pathways to 30x30: Accelerating Conservation of California’s Nature Report, support the concept of Indigenous Marine Stewardship
So I guess the State of California theoretically supports IMSAs, but does the state support this one? Does the state need to approve an IMSA for it to be official? Or are tribes independent enough that they can just declare it?
I do not see any official press releases from the California state government on this particular topic. To be clear, the Lost Coast Outpost has subtle biases. So I would take this news with a grain of salt until we see official dispatches.
The closest thing to a legitimate news source on the matter that I could find was this:
I wish there were a clearer explanation of what this means. Obvs if they are declaring legal sovereignty it’s a pretty important development. But there is a big difference between a press release and the first time they take actions that contradict the presumed US sovereignty.
But still the article doesn’t make clear to me if that’s what’s actually going on.
> Obvs if they are declaring legal sovereignty it’s a pretty important development. But there is a big difference between a press release and the first time they take actions that contradict the presumed US sovereignty.
Tribal governments are subordinate-but-concurrent sovereigns to the federal government, similar to states, so while it might sort-of contradict California’s sovereignty, nothing in this story would even potentially contradict US sovereignty.
And, actually, it is more complex than that, because tribal governments also exercise concurrent sovereignty within their territory with the states in which their lands are located, rather than exclusive sovereignty, so it wouldn’t strictly contradict California sovereignty, either.
In the California part, most of this area is already parkland. Redwood National & State Park, Del Norte Coast State Park, Tolowa Dunes State Park.
The Resighini Tribe is about 40 people, Tolowa Dee'ni is about 110 people. The biggest one is Cher-Ae Heights, 130 people. The largest tribe in the area, not part of this announcement, is the Yurok, around 3000 people. So this is just a small subset of the local indigenous groups making this declaration.
These smaller tribes talk about conservation and the environment, but their main activity is running this casino:
I do think it is important to preserve the natural beauty of Northern California, but I think the state and national park systems are doing a pretty good job of it, and I wouldn't want to turn the parks over to some local casino operators.
* These are tiny tribes [because the United States committed genocide on them, stole their children to be raped, tortured, and murdered en masse]
* These people are just casino operators [because the United States made their food supply extinct, banned them from any valuable land, and ultimately confined them to concentration camps on the worst plots of land we could find]
* Therefore, it just makes sense that the United States retain total control over this final plot of land
It’s not clear to me how we should handle this history and how it should bear on present day concerns, but the argument that effectively “we were close enough to a successful genocide that we might as well not pretend otherwise” is pretty astounding.
Your first bullet point here is basically entirely fiction, none of those accusations are factual.
The small number of people relevant to this land-grab are, very literally, casino operators. This wasn't a general commentary on Indian casinos, this is literally people who were born into the privileged position of inheriting generational wealth and privileged legal rights.
If you ignore that you've been conditioned through years of propaganda to see an overly simplified and exaggerated system of "Indians good, European immigrants bad", then this gets trickier when you realize you're basically arguing in favor of some trust fund kids to get more powerful because of who their great-grandparents were, a system which I'm confident you'd oppose if it were a different set of kids born feeling entitled to land, wealth and political power.
I wish I could remember the name of the documentary I watched about youth in one of the Klamath tribes. It would certainly change your perception of "people born into privilege". That may be true for a small number of people, but not the majority.
> The small number of people relevant to this land-grab are, very literally, casino operators. This wasn't a general commentary on Indian casinos, this is literally people who were born into the privileged position of inheriting generational wealth and privileged legal rights.
Sure… downstream of a genocide. I’m not saying the rights aren’t complicated or they aren’t casino operators. I’m saying both of those are a direct consequence of genocide.
> Your first bullet point here is basically entirely fiction, none of those accusations are factual.
No, it’s really not. Did the boarding schools not exist? Did the reservation I was born in not exist? Did the one that I grew up next to with suicide rates 2x any nearby district not exist? Are the migrating megafauna still roaming or are they extinct or so close to extinction they must be protected? Are the rivers still flowing or have they been dammed?
I think this misses the point and is honestly derogatory toward these tribes. They are the ones with the ancestral rights and knowledge to manage the land. They had vastly different strategies than we have implemented that more effectively preserved species and conditions for far longer than us. Painting them as merely profiteers without acknowledging that we are the ones who have taken everything they had and forced them into second-class citizenship in our capitalistic society is perpetrating the same colonial violence.
This doesn’t appear to be the case legally speaking.
>and knowledge to manage the land.
Why do you assume this? Because of their heritage? Americans didn’t move in yesterday, they’ve also been here for centuries and these environmental issues are pretty recent in comparison. You seem to be making a gross assumption here and playing along with their political ploy. Not saying they want the resource wealth but that doesn’t mean they don’t have an incentive to play up the environment for their own territorial gain.
>This doesn’t appear to be the case legally speaking.
How can you defend injustice toward them using the very legal system that has subjugated them?
>Why do you assume this? Because of their heritage? Americans didn’t move in yesterday, they’ve also been here for centuries and these environmental issues are pretty recent in comparison. You seem to be making a gross assumption here and playing along with their political ploy. Not saying they want the resource wealth but that doesn’t mean they don’t have an incentive to play up the environment for their own territorial gain.
It's what I was taught in my forestry program at Cal. Native American strategies that included routine prescribed burning worked better to replenish the forest than ours of absolute fire suppression that has led to more intense and out-of-control fires that decimate forests and their wildlife, for example.
I don’t think we do fire suppression because we are too dumb to understand that unburned materials will build up. We do it because people live everywhere and it is challenging legally to tell people to evacuate their homes because we need to do a controlled burn.
If you pee on a section of ground before anyone else, it becomes intertwined from your DNA and anyone sharing above a certain percentage of your DNA has rights to that land, knows more about the land, and can dictate what other people do with that land. I think it's in the Constitution or the Bible or something. </s>
Agree with the ecological preservation objectives, hard disagree with handing over of sovereignty, whatever that actually means,to a group based on their ethnicity / ancestry.
I grew up in the area, those shores aren't tribal lands other than a few tiny bits. And most of it is already preserved shore/ocean, so this just appears to be a land grab attempt.
I agree that this area should be protected, but giving it to a few people based on ancestry is ridiculous.
Native tribes are and have always been sovereign entities, that didn't end with European colonization. The degree to which the US government acknowledges this has varied over time, obviously, but as recently as the SCOTUS case on the Indian Child Welfare Act (Haaland v. Brackeen[0,1]), it has at least recognized that sovereignty exists.
Funny, because the same Americans who refuse to recognize the sovereignty of native people claim their own is an inalienable manifest destiny granted to them directly by God. The white man speaks with a forked tongue.
Isn't this how most nations work? If one's parents are American, they inherit all the rights due to Americans, including the ability to run for political office. This gives the descendants of Americans sovereignty over a chunk of land in North America known as the United States.
Yes there are other routes to sovereignty over US soil other than familial inheritance, including being born on the land or becoming a naturalized citizen.
Still, the predominant route is via a claim to the correct ancestral lineage. Here I mean that one’s ancestors form an unbroken chain of people who also had sovereignty over the land. This route is also the predominant one taken by citizens of most other countries.
I think usually the sovereignty must be handed down through an unbroken chain. This is how monarchy and dynasty worked. Once the chain was broken, then you have a new sovereign entity. I think this is how citizenship works in most countries.
In modernity we have different notions of justice where it becomes meaningful to claim that a chain of sovereignty was unjustly broken from one group of people and handed to another. If this were the case, you might have claims in Europe in some people’s eyes.
Whether this is the actual case or not, parental lineage is a major force that justifies claims of sovereignty in the American legal system and elsewhere.
Tribes were sovereign, signed treaties that enshrined sovereignty—within limits,to be sure—and continue to exercise that sovereignty. Nothing is being handed over, it’s always been there.
Interestingly the idea that tribal membership is based on ancestry originated with Europeans and (white) Americans, more than native tribes. Historically (generalizing wildly), tribal membership is about citizenship in a community much more than it is about who ones’ grandparents were. Blood quotient was a US legal concept that reflected the American fondness for racial categories. A Navajo friend has Scottish and Arab ancestors who’d married into the tribe, just to give an example. Or check out _The Unredeemed Captive_, for a practice that would make no sense if tribal membership were racial.
Communities often want to continue as communities, in a way that’s only possible with self-determination. That can land as either a left- or a right-flavored interest, depending on who’s asking and the overall context. But it’s too big a part of human nature to brush aside.
A close read of the statement suggests that this is more of a feel-good thing and not much to worry about. If those tribes get actual sovereignty over those waters, they’ll soon find them full of Chinese fishing trawlers.
They're indigenous, nothing is being "handed over" it's land that they were forced to live on when they were forced of their original land in the area. They already have sovereignty.
A lot of people were forced to leave a lot of land all over the world. Borders shifted constantly within Europe. People were constantly expelled and relocated. Now of course they shouldn't have been, but that was a long time ago and we've generally agreed not to do that anymore.
Should former Roman land be given to the Italians? Should the Louisiana purchase be undone because it was the result of a military defeat in the Napoleonic Wars? Should the non-first-nations parts of California be returned to the Mexicans because it was ceded in the Mexican-American War under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo? What framework do you propose we use to decide which land is worthy of sovereign rule - and which isn't? Which groups are worthy of sovereignty, and which aren't, and on what basis?
I think all groups should be represented within the government and there's no reason to revisit the question of sovereignty because there's no framework that makes sense. There's no easy place to stop that isn't totally arbitrary.
Well there are actually frameworks that are generally agreed upon.
https://social.desa.un.org/issues/indigenous-peoples/united-...
While it's true that some lines will be arbitrary, that doesn't mean they can't be drawn based on ethical principles, international norms, and democratic practices.
I think we should probably try our best, as a society to be ethical and address damage caused by our society in the past and present. Not doing so because we think it would be too hard to parse is not admirable.
I guess my question is this. The Spaniards who lived in the non-First-Nations part of California are indigenous to the region too. Exactly as indigenous, IMO, as the First Nations who walked across the land bridge from Russia and set up camp. So why shouldn't they be sovereign and granted the same rights? And what's to say that in 100 years this agreement will not be torn up too, because of, say, it feeling 'forced' due to 'economic conditions'?
It's time to stop looking backwards, and start figuring out how to move forwards together as one.
We should all be looking after this marine zone together.
"It's time to stop looking backwards, and start figuring out how to move forwards together as one."
This is a much easier perspective to have if you are raised in a society that predominantly thinks of indigenous people as extinct and a thing of the past.
It is a much harder perspective to have if you live with the understanding that these issues dont originate in the past but in the modern consequences of historical events.
I too would like a world in which we dont really need to worry about how indigenous peoples are treated. Unfortunately we live in a world where the dominant power structure is all too willing to trample over indigenous rights while certain parts of society appear in droves to defend said trampling.
This may also not be the context of whats being discussed in the article but we are touching on the broader topic of indigenous rights and sovereignty.
To be clear I don't think they're "extinct" I think they're a unique and distinct part of our society like people of any other background. Their stories deserve to be taught in school, in the context of our shared history (good and bad) - and they deserve to be represented in government - like everyone else. And they deserve to live the way they want, like everyone else. Nobody's rights should be trampled.
> This may also not be the context of whats being discussed in the article but we are touching on the broader topic of indigenous rights and sovereignty.
Maybe, but I do appreciate you sharing your perspective.
To take things a step further, all the various North American indigenous groups have been waring, slaving and migrating their way across the continent for millennia, just like every single other people group on earth for all of history, so it's almost certain that whatever indigenous "Nation" is claiming a given piece of land "Stole" it from some other indigenous "Nation" at some point in the past, yet we never hear them talking about returning "their" land to those "Rightful owners" do we?
>yet we never hear them talking about returning "their" land to those "Rightful owners" do we?
I mean, they might if they didn't have bigger problems to worry about, and they might have in the past, because native cultures were as complex and multifaceted as any other.
Unfortunately, Europeans completely obliterated those cultures and only fragments of their knowledge and histories only remain, unrecognized by American culture and untaught in American schools, so we'll never know.
> Agree with the ecological preservation objectives, hard disagree with handing over of sovereignty, whatever that actually means,to a group based on their ethnicity / ancestry.
I’m sure many people in the various tribes object to the handing over of most of their sovereignty over to the USA based on the guns held to their head (and where land was retained, it often being not merely a small subset of their land, but often completely different and worse land) but their vigorous excercise of the sovereignty they retain is not a “handing over” of anything to them “based on their ethnicity”, even to the extent that there is a rearrangement of sovereign rights between the three relevant sovereigns (state, federal, and tribal) such that there is something being handed over at all.
This is so bare facedly a profit driven land grab. These people don't give a damn about conservation or culture, they just want to use their burgeoning social power to force a kind of "Exclusive economic zone" onto their neighbors so they can implement a commercial fishery for their own exclusive benefit, free of any kind of regulatory oversight or environmental protections.
As someone who lives near a bunch of various first nations, I've seen this pattern playing out more and more lately. They come up with some bullshit rationale about "Protecting the environment and their culture," use that to brow-beat the politicians into capitulating to their demands out of fear of any kind of pushback being labeled as "Racist" and then as soon as the first nations groups gain control of an area or resource, they keep doing whatever they claimed they were against even worse than the people who we're previously doing it (ie. cutting down more trees that the loggers, catching more fish than the fishermen) and then once they've cut down all the trees and / or caught all the fish, they just plonk down some condos on their "Sacred land" and turn into rent-seeking landlords.
