Before Co-Stewardship and Management of Public Lands: The Historicity of Indigenous Land Stewardship and Management in Native California

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

This article begins with a very brief overview of the diverse, multilayered, traditionalist relationships that underpin Native California land stewardship. From there it summarizes the impacts of Spanish, Mexican, and early American colonization on Native Californians and their eons-old relationships with the land, including the outlawing by early Spanish colonizers of cultural burning. These summary discussions provide context for a deeper understanding of the significance of ground-breaking, mid-20th-century Native California organizational initiatives to restore ancestral land management, beginning with the 1940 establishment of the Pomo Indian Women’s Club and the 1951 founding of the Northwest California Hoopa Pottery Guild, an effort to preserve ancestral basketry designs in fired clay that would eventually lead to the restoration of regional basketry traditions and the application of cultural burning techniques necessary to generate the growth of the healthy, flexible shoots used to weave a shapely basket. This article ends with the history of the first-ever cultural gathering policy by a California-based, land-holding agency (California State Parks).