advocating for endangered species
drafting environmental legislation
preserving wildlife habitat
Preserving Ancestral &
Sacred Tribal Lands
Native American tribes support the idea of bringing more lands into protection as wilderness areas and through other designations that can help to keep wildlife and wildlife habitat protected. Green Ballot works with a range of tribes to have sacred and ancestral lands restored to them, and to make sure that these lands protect threatened and endangered species as well as wildlife habitat.
Native American Conservation Land Trusts
In the Indian Country Today Media Network, Duane Champagne advocates for greater protection of Native American sacred and ancestral lands. Champagne indicates that treaties, court cases, state legislation, and federal legislation, have generally been ineffective in protecting these sacred and ancestral lands. “For many Indians, the entire world is full of sacred purpose and being. But even within such contexts, there are certain especially important places where the creator or spirit beings brought people into existence, and the present world into order. These are the places to be revered, remembered and continually honored. All this was taken for granted before colonization. As the incursion pushed northward, westward and southward, many Indian peoples were removed from their sacred origin lands and forced to live in new territories away from their most sacred places.
The tribes did what they could under the circumstances. Tribal communities often gathered their
sacred bundles, moved to their newly assigned locations, and continued to seek protection of the
creator through ceremonies and prayers. Even as they continued to be separated from their ancient
locales, sometimes by hundreds of years and hundreds of miles, they continued to honor those points
of origin and understand their attachments to them.
But today, many U.S. tribal communities still do not control their most sacred places. And in many cases,
the geographical displacement has been so arbitrary and calamitous as to render mere remembrance
meaningless.
The federal officials who are supposed to assist in these matters are often of little help. They may produce treaties
and reservation assignments, but they don’t generally understand or appreciate the spiritual geography of the land
and its relation to the peoples.”
Now, if a tribe’s most sacred spaces happen to remain on their reservation, then the tribes have
access to them. That is the exception, however. Most sacred sites are not located directly on
reservations. As a result, Indian nations have had a difficult time gaining access to and protecting
them. The difficulties of the Lakota and Cheyenne to protect the Black Hills and Bear Butte
are well known examples.
The idea of U.S. law allowing tribes to place land back into trust is frequently problematic.
The best candidates for returning land into trust are lands within the reservation that have been lost through allotments, or land contiguous to the reservation. Sacred places far away from reservations, by contrast, present a more difficult problem. Legal cases to protect sacred mountains have resulted in concessions of minuscule areas in which Indians can pray. Though the American Indian Freedom of Religion Act requires government officials and agencies to respect tribal sacred spaces, they do not offer enforcement capabilities.
A new movement may be afoot, however. Lately, various nonprofit land-conservancy organizations have used federal and state law to buy land and put it into conservancy trust. And Indian tribes have organized and joined such conservancies, e.g. the Native American Land Conservancy. These groups have also used existing law to remove sacred places from the market and taxation, while preserving plants and animals there. Under this approach, the land can be protected from intruders. In many cases, tribes don’t have to explain why they want to preserve the land—as long as they can make strong environmental arguments.
It’s an ideal arrangement. These sacred places are protected but their nature is not revealed. Rather than being under tribal control, the conservancy trust land is controlled by tribal, state and federal agencies and groups seeking to preserve its original condition.
Reclaiming Ancestral Lands in California
More tribes are working with land conservancies to reclaim ancestral grounds. The Kumeyaay tribe is based in southern California near the Mexican border. They were forced off their lands in 1875 and put in reservations. But in 2009, three bands of the Kumeyaay purchased 43 acres around Kuuchamaa Mountain – the most sacred peak in their traditional lands. Now they are transferring this land to the Kumeyaay Digueno Land Conservancy, a nonprofit started by the governments of several Kumeyaay bands. Per members of the tribe, “The Indian way of life is all based on the land. That is who we are.”
Indian conservancies sometimes partner with government agencies and environmental groups to share costs. Native land conservancies often put an emphasis on active engagement with the land including for food, medicine, arts, utilitarian, and spiritual uses. In 2002, the Native American Land Conservancy purchased a 2,560 in the Mojave Desert. The Chemehuevi Indians have now regained access to Old Woman Mountains Preserve which includes rock formations, petroglyphs, plants and wildlife that are central to the tribe’s history and spiritual beliefs. Over one third of California’s native plant species can be found within the border of this preserve, and it is an important migration route for birds from central and South America. This particular preserve prohibits fires, hunting, rock climbing, collecting plants, and disturbing cultural resources.
The Native American Land Conservancy often pairs ecological restoration with sacred site protection. It has partnered with universities and botanists to complete flora and fauna surveys of the Old Woman Mountain Preserves in southern California; has worked with tribes and conservation groups to protect the 1,640 acre Horse Canyon in the Santa Rosa Mountains; and provides site monitoring and tribal liaison services for the Ancient Cahuilla Fish Traps near the Salton Sea – a project that is funded by the Trust for Public Lands.
Per Lisa Haws of the Kumeyaay-Digueno Land Conservancy, “The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR 25 Part 151) explains governing the acquisition of land by the United States in trust status for individual Indians and tribes. It can be a very long, very expensive and sometimes controversial process. By establishing a land conservancy, tribes can protect culturally significant, ethnobotanical or traditional use lands through ownership, cultural easements or conservation easements. A tribal land conservancy is also a way for several federally recognized tribes to own land jointly.”
Progress of Tribes Nationwide
Numerous other tribes are making progress with different varieties of land conservancies. These include:
The Land Trust for the Little Tennessee/ Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians purchased the Kituwah Mound site in the Great Smoky Mountains near Bryson City, North Carolina. The Kituwah Mound is considered to be the “mother town of the Cherokees.” Many oral histories say that is where Cherokees originate. Archaeologists estimate that more than one thousand artifacts remain on the site.
Per Little Tennessee Land Trust Executive Director Sharon Taylor, “many significant cultural sites are close to major water bodies and on prime farm soil.” One of those sites is the Cowee Mound, which had been a political, economic and social center of the tribe until it was seized in the 1820’s. The conservation easement for this property is now held by the State of North Carolina and it allows only traditional agricultural and educational uses.
The Little Traverse Band of Odawa Indians in Michigan has also developed a nature conservancy. It utilizes a cultural conservation easement as a new type of protection mechanism, and this is a way to safeguard historic geographic areas and sacred sites. The tribe considers cultural conservation as being implicit in preserving nature, and inextricably tied with natural history. Frank Ettawageshik of the United Tribes of Michigan says, “We view ourselves as part of the environment, not as masters of the environment. In that respect, anything that helps protect the natural landscape falls within our Native philosophy.”
The InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council is a consortium of ten federally recognized tribes in northern California. It has been successful in efforts with various partners to protect marine areas, redwood forests, and salmon streams in the ancestral Sinkyone tribal territory. It established the 3,845 acre InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness.
The Amah Mutsun tribe in central California is not a federally recognized tribe, but they have developed a land trust to conserve lands that are important to them. They had actively managed their lands for millennia through burning, pruning, sowing, seed-scattering, and more. Ownership is not the tribe’s main goal. In Amah Mutsun tradition, the obligation is to protect lands through stewardship.
The Maidu is a federally unrecognized tribe in California that has set up the Maidu Summit Consortium for performing advocacy work to protect sacred cultural resources. Over time it is expected to take on more of the characteristics of a land trust. The group’s major turning point came in 2013 when a 2,325-acre Sierra Nevada mountain meadow in the Humbug Valley was turned over to the consortium by Pacific Gas and Electric in a bankruptcy agreement.
The Native Land Conservancy is a native run land trust made up of representatives of several tribes in eastern Massachusetts and Cape Cod. They recently received a gift of a small woodlot containing white pine trees which are of major cultural significance to these tribes.
Many other tribes have established land conservancies including the Blackfeet Indians of Montana, according to Beth Rose Middleton, author of Trust in the Land: New Directions in Tribal Conservation. The Indian Country Conservancy, a spinoff of the Trust for Public Land, has protected more than 200,000 acres for about 70 tribes, and is currently working on projects for the Nez Perce tribe in Oregon and Idaho, and for the Yakama tribe in Washington State.
Grander Ambitions
Members of the Sioux tribe in South Dakota are much more ambitious in their efforts to reclaim Sioux ancestral lands. The Pine Ridge Reservation stretches across some of the poorest counties in the United States, with arid land, and with life-expectancy rates rivaling those of Haiti. Yet the nine tribes constituting the Great Sioux Nation, including those on Pine Ridge, have refused to accept over a billion dollars for the land from the federal government.
According to Fran Uenuma and Mike Fritz, refusal of the money pivots on a feud that dates back to the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed by Sioux tribes and General William T. Sherman, that guaranteed the tribes “undisturbed use and occupation” of a swath of land that includes the Black Hills. But in 1877, the government seized the Black Hills and began profiting from its resources.
Unlike the barren stretch that encompasses the reservation, the Black Hills are green, resource-rich, and thick with the smell of Ponderosa pine trees. Stretching all the way to Wyoming, gold, timber, and minerals have been extracted from these Sioux homelands, reaping huge profits for everyone other than the Sioux.
In a 1980 Supreme Court case, the Court agreed with the Sioux, indicating that the land had been taken from them wrongfully, and they had funds set aside for the Sioux. However, the Sioux have never collected these funds, as they stated that the land was never for sale, and that they merely want their ancestral homelands restored to them.
The Sioux are attached to their lands and particularly to the Black Hills because that is the spiritual center of their nation. The Sioux are asking for some combination of federally-owned and unused lands.