#tribal comanagement

[dailybotany]

So there's this crazy way you can manifest this! It's called voting!

Over the past four years, tribal comanagement initiatives have been a high priority across the entire Dept. of the Interior, resulting in many arrangements like this one across different federal lands. Policy like this is directly due to the Secretary of the Interior, who is appointed by the President. In 2020, Biden appointed Deb Haaland (the first Indigenous member of the President's Cabinet) as Secretary of the Interior. This means she oversees policy for all federal land management across agencies (except for the Forest Service). If you want to see progress continue and co-management become more widespread, vote blue in November!!

"The Yurok will be the first Tribal nation to co-manage land with the National Park Service under a historic memorandum of understanding signed on Tuesday [March 19, 2024] by the tribe, Redwood national and state parks, and the non-profit Save the Redwoods League, according to news reports.

The Yurok tribe has seen a wave of successes in recent years, successfully campaigning for the removal of a series of dams on the Klamath River, where salmon once ran up to their territory, and with the signing of a new memorandum of understanding, the Yurok are set to reclaim more of what was theirs.

Save the Redwoods League bought a property containing these remarkable trees in 2013, and began working with the tribe to restore it, planting 50,000 native plants in the process. The location was within lands the Yurok once owned but were taken during the Gold Rush period.

Centuries passed, and by the time it was purchased it had been used as a lumber operation for 50 years, and the nearby Prairie Creek where the Yurok once harvested salmon had been buried.

Currently located on the fringe of Redwoods National and State Parks which receive over 1 million visitors every year and is a UNESCO Natural Heritage Site, the property has been renamed ‘O Rew, a Yurok word for the area.

“Today we acknowledge and celebrate the opportunity to return Indigenous guardianship to ‘O Rew and reimagine how millions of visitors from around the world experience the redwoods,” said Sam Hodder, president and CEO of Save the Redwoods League.

Having restored Prarie Creek and filled it with chinook and coho salmon, red-legged frogs, northwestern salamanders, waterfowl, and other species, the tribe has said they will build a traditional village site to showcase their culture, including redwood-plank huts, a sweat house, and a museum to contain many of the tribal artifacts they’ve recovered from museum collections.

Believing the giant trees sacred, they only use fallen trees to build their lodges.

“As the original stewards of this land, we look forward to working together with the Redwood national and state parks to manage it,” said Rosie Clayburn, the tribe’s cultural resources director.

It will add an additional mile of trails to the park system, and connect them with popular redwood groves as well as new interactive exhibits.

“This is a first-of-its-kind arrangement, where Tribal land is co-stewarded with a national park as its gateway to millions of visitors. This action will deepen the relationship between Tribes and the National Park Service,” said Redwoods National Park Superintendent Steve Mietz, adding that it would “heal the land while healing the relationships among all the people who inhabit this magnificent forest.”"

-via Good News Network, March 25, 2024

[lakeconews]

Assembly approves measure to include tribal voice and experience in natural resource management

The Assembly has approved a bill establishing the Tribal Cogovernance and Comanagement of Ancestral Lands and Waters Act to encourage the state to create agreements with tribes to share responsibility and partnership in resource management conservation within a tribe’s lands and waters.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this Op-Ed published by the Sierra Club:

Bears Ears is many things, including an attempt at correcting history. The first national monument was Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, proclaimed in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt. Its almost 900-foot-tall granite monolith, made famous in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, had long been called Bears Lodge by the Plains Indians and was considered sacred by many tribes. Which means that in “saving” it, the United States government also claimed it. This usurpation of sacred ground would be repeated again and again in the creation of parks and monuments; places of ceremony and cultural import were claimed in the name of recreation, conservation, and science.

The years since have seen some incremental movement toward tribes becoming more actively involved in the management and administration of national monuments and parks. A precedent for the creation of Bears Ears was set in 1951, when the Grand Portage Band of Minnesota Chippewa and Minnesota Chippewa Tribe asked that tribal land be recognized as a national monument, thus creating Grand Portage National Monument in Northern Minnesota.

More recently, the Ogala Sioux have assumed administration of the South Unit of Badlands National Park in South Dakota. Not far from Bears Ears, Canyon de Chelly National Monument is effectively comanaged by the National Park Service and the Navajo Nation. While the Park Service takes care of park and visitor services, the Navajo Nation manages the land and resources, including mineral rights. But studies have characterized the relationship between the Navajo Nation and the Park Service as historically “turbulent.”

Bears Ears was to take this a step further, but in at least one way, its original proclamation fell short. The coalition and its backers wanted true comanagement by the tribes and the government. Obama’s proclamation almost got there but not quite, stating that the secretary of agriculture and the secretary of the interior would manage the monument through the US Forest Service and the BLM, while a Bears Ears Commission, made up of a member from each of the five tribes that brought forth the original proposal, would “provide guidance and recommendations.”

Guidance and partnering are fine; actual authority and comanagement would have been so much better. The hope is that Secretary Haaland and President Biden will understand this and not just restore but improve Bears Ears.  

[ninety9percent]

Jan_12_2017

Infrastructure privatization has negatively impacted Rockland County in southern New York state. “One overarching statement here is that the water rates for residents of Rockland County are among the highest rates in the US. After all, the mission of the corporate water infrastructure firms is to make a profit, not to seek out the best way to deliver services for the common good.” “One of the rare areas on which Trump and Democrats appear to find some common ground is a goal of achieving infrastructure upgrading and modernization in the United States. However, Trump is more interested in enriching private contractors than meeting public need”. - http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/private-companies-should-not-manage-public-water-supplies

“On Dec. 28, with only 22 days left in office, President Obama set aside nearly 1.35 million acres in southeastern Utah's San Juan County as the Bears Ears National Monument. The announcement capped several years of work by a unique tribal coalition that proposed this first-in-the-nation monument to be comanaged by tribes and the federal government. Obama also designated 300,000 acres at Gold Butte in Nevada, homelands of the Paiute people, ironically, near militant rancher Cliven Bundy's cattle operation.” - http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39056-utah-s-new-national-monument-marks-big-win-for-the-protection-of-indigenous-cultural-sites

Racists and xenophobes will push against sanctuary cities and the rest will resist. - http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39065-former-mayor-of-nazi-city-usa-pushes-legislation-to-defund-sanctuary-cities

“Standing Rock Is a Model of the Right of Peaceful Assembly”. - http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/standing_rock_is_a_model_of_the_right_of_peaceful_assembly_20170111

“Distinguishing Two Very Different Lines of Resistance to Donald Trump” - http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/important_distinguish_two_lines_resistance_donald_trump_20170111

“My complaint is that American television news reports all this as if it is The First Time in History Anyone has Acted like This”. “So, for instance, George W. Bush had German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s personal cell phone hacked to monitor his position on the Iraq War that Bush wanted to launch illegally”. “The NSA hacked into the private and government communications of French Presidents Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Francois Hollande”. “If we started going into the dozens of times the US has casually switched out other people’s governments since WW II, despite the lack of any direct threat to the United States, this would be a very long blog entry”. - http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/those_times_the_nsa_hacked_americas_allies_20170107

“The Real Purpose of the U.S. Government’s Report on Alleged Hacking by Russia”. - http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_real_purpose_of_the_us_governments_report_on_alleged_hacking_by_russi