Restoring Access and Stewardship to Culturally Significant Landscapes in an Era of Climate Change

The alarming rate of global climate change has triggered perceptions of an unprecedented threat poised to endanger or eradicate many life forms in California. But for many Indigenous Peoples in what is commonly known as California, this is nothing new. European colonization, beginning in the late eighteenth century, dramatically reshaped Indigenous life, and its effects are ongoing. California Native communities persist despite large-scale land theft, cultural knowledge suppression, and other assimilative tactics. Colonialism introduced a worldview in which land’s greatest value was as a resource to be extracted for capital gain, contrasting starkly with Indigenous perspectives of kinship relations—that land is a Relative holding inherent value (Liboiron 2021). Anthropogenic climate change can be attributed to colonialism and its large-scale resource exploitation of stolen Indigenous lands.

In this article we highlight how Indigenous resilience in times of great social and environmental change offers lessons for the current climate crisis. Using a case study of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band (AMTB) of California’s Central Coast (Fig. 1), we highlight the transformative effects of environmental stewardship and discuss the use of Western technologies, institutions, and policies to fulfill stewardship objectives.

Colonialism introduced a worldview in which land’s greatest value was as a resource to be extracted for capital gain, contrasting starkly with Indigenous perspectives of kinship relations—that land is a Relative holding inherent value.

Today, Tribal Nations in California are affected by climate change in numerous ways. Ocean acidification and increase in ocean temperatures have led to harmful impacts on kelp forest habitations that are home to many culturally important resources. Increases in the severity and frequency of wildfires from drier summers and fire mismanagement (e.g., fire suppression and fire exclusion in cultural landscapes beginning with the Spanish Mission Period and intensifying through the Anglo-American Period) adversely affect culturally important species, some of which have already been threatened by centuries of non-native species invasions. Ecosystems and species such as oak and riparian woodlands, grassland prairies, and wetlands are becoming increasingly imperiled due to climate change and ongoing land use practices that are entrenched in colonial managerial and extractive approaches to land. Opportunities to reintroduce traditional stewardship practices grounded in kinship relations as a tool to tackle these issues are complicated by drought conditions and lack of attention to Indigenous knowledge systems as legitimate methods for ecological revitalization.

These effects are compounded by prevailing obstacles to Tribal stewardship and land access. Issues include the lack of jurisdiction over ancestral lands, the forced removal and relocation from ancestral areas, and a lack of federal recognition for several California Native Nations. The suppression of traditional stewardship practices and traditional knowledge, and the prioritization of Western science in its stead, are some of the many factors impeding contemporary Tribal access and stewardship opportunities. Despite all of this, Indigenous stewardship has persisted.

THE AMAH MUTSUN TRIBAL BAND

The members of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band believe their Creator gave them the responsibility to steward their land and to take care of non-human relatives in their ancestral area. This stewardship responsibility explains the resilience of the AMTB’s members, who have faced generations of threats to their existence, beginning with the Spanish Missions and into the Mexican and American periods. Despite surviving the violent waves of colonization, the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band is not acknowledged by the US government as a sovereign Nation (Hart 2018). As with several dozen other California Nations, the Amah Mutsun face difficulty accessing ancestral lands for cultural purposes.

In 2007, the Amah Mutsun initiated a partnership with Pinnacles National Park, where the Tribe became involved in the management of culturally significant flora in the park. Soon after, the AMTB entered into several other research and stewardship partnerships with government agencies and land trusts managing lands of cultural significance to the Amah Mutsun. In 2012, the Amah Mutsun created the Amah Mutsun Land Trust (AMLT) to increase capacity for Tribal stewardship by employing Tribal members, receiving grants for stewardship projects, and increasing capacity for land access and ownership. The premier program of the AMLT is the Native Stewardship Corps, in which young adult Tribal members are employed as land stewards and undertake cultural and ecological management.

ADDRESSING BARRIERS TO STEWARDSHIP

We highlight three strategies the AMTB and AMLT have undertaken to support relationships with ancestral lands. We demonstrate how Tribal resiliency can involve the use of Western scientific knowledge, technology, and policy when contextualized within Indigenous worldviews and further efforts toward climate resilience. First, we describe the AMTB’s engagement with environmental archaeological research (referred to as ecoarchaeology), geospatial technology, and legal pathways have been leveraged by the Tribe to navigate challenges to revitalization goals. Accounting for the many dimensions of Tribal access, we consider these strategies to support access to cultural and ecological knowledge through academic research as well as access to culturally important places for stewardship.

A. ECOARCHAEOLOGY:

Following the recent definition by Lightfoot et al. (2021:190), we define ecoarchaeology as an approach that integrates multiple ecological and anthropological data sets to build a holistic perspective to view human interactions with the environment over long time periods. Gaining a deep time perspective on human/ecosystem relationships is important when planning the revitalization of landscapes amid climate change. The AMTB engages in ecoarchaeological research to contribute to this effort in three ways. The first involves collecting and evaluating ecoarchaeological data (e.g., fossilized seeds, nutshells, fish bones, wood, and other ecofacts) from ancestral sites to learn about past subsistence and land use strategies. Ecoarchaeological data may be also understood as sources of “dormant knowledge” (Lopez 2013), or the material past left behind by Native people over millennia of harvesting, cooking, eating, crafting, and stewarding that may be recovered to re-learn about ancestral practices.

This collaboration to uncover dormant knowledge is critical for AMTB. By the time many Amah Mutsun cultural-bearers were interviewed in the 1920s–30s, many pre-contact food practices had become dormant due to brutal colonization efforts in the region (Milliken 1995, Rizzo 2022). Dormant knowledge regarding plant use emerges through integrating archaeobotanical (nutshells, seeds, geophyte tissues), anthracological (wood charcoal), paleoecological (silica phytoliths, fire scar, and pollen records), and other textual evidence on subsistence and foodways (ethnohistorical and ethnographic data). Understanding the historical preferences of plant foods not only provides the Tribe with information useful for contemporary food sovereignty projects but also an archaeobotanical “taxa list” and relative abundances, and comparative ratios (e.g., nut:seed, acorn:hazelnut) can guide plant propagation and restoration plans (Cuthrell 2013). This information can supplement textual and off-site paleoecological evidence to guide restoration projects.

The second contribution of ecoarchaeology is learning from lessons about how Native people responded to climate change throughout the Holocene (ca. the last 12,000 years). Since 2009, the Amah Mutsun have partnered with UC Berkeley to carry out one of the most robust archaeobotanical sampling programs in the region (Lightfoot et al. 2021). While there are known climatic fluctuations that occurred during this archaeological occupation (e.g., the Medieval Warm Period ca. 950–1250 CE and the Little Ice Age ca. 1300–1850), specifically attributing these climate events to observed modifications in plant subsistence regimes is difficult at the moment. Nonetheless, this research has shed light on variation in plant use frequencies throughout the Early (5300 BCE–1000 CE), Middle (1000 BCE–1050 CE), and Late periods (ca. 1050–1770 CE), and differences in plant use are also observed based on site location e.g., coastal versus inland sites. For example, small grassland seed food use at inland villages diversified notably during the Late Period, evident by increased consumption of  panicled bulrush (Scirpus microcarpus), Tarweed (Madia sp.), and Clover (Trifolium sp.) (Fig. 2, from Cuthrell, in review).

This comparative study of plant use at coastal and inland sites west of the Santa Cruz Mountains has produced new insights about land use, subsistence practices, landscape vegetation, and prescribed burning (Cuthrell 2013, Cuthrell, in review, and Lightfoot et al. 2021). While there is a higher abundance of grassland foods from inland sites over time when compared to coastal bluff sites, it is clear that grassland foods were important components of the long-term subsistence strategies of Native people who occupied these areas as early as the Middle Holocene through the Colonial Period.

The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band leverages ecoarchaeological data to determine at which locations (e.g., ancestral sites and other suitable coastal and inland sites) to prioritize restoration efforts.

From a historical ecological perspective, the results have implications for the management of coastal prairies since these areas would have required regular burning in relatively shorter intervals than would occur naturally (van Wangentonk and Cayan 2008). Since cultural burning became outlawed in the Central Coast of California, many culturally important native grasslands have been converted to scrubland or Douglas-fir woodland; others are being replaced by exotic grassland. The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band leverages ecoarchaeological data to determine at which locations (e.g., ancestral sites and other suitable coastal and inland sites) to prioritize restoration efforts. The data also provides guidance for desirable ecological conditions. In the case of the northern Santa Cruz coast, Tribal-led revitalization of grasslands is increasing landscape heterogeneity and resilience to climate-induced wildfire and drought.

The third way that ecoarchaeology has helped stewardship revitalization efforts is through the AMLT’s Integrative Cultural Resource Survey (ICRS). Implementing on-the-ground Indigenous stewardship work requires knowing basic information about the current condition of archaeological (Fig. 3) and ethnobiological resources (Fig. 4), such as the overall condition of culturally significant biological resources e.g., grassland, oak woodlands, natural spring, or a specific patch of plants. This also includes opportunities to access and resurvey previously studied archaeological sites that were studied without the participation and perspectives of Native people.

This landscape-scale evaluation of Indigenous resources integrates archaeological and ethnobiological documentation to provide case-by-case information on the condition, extent, and spatial relationship of the resources within the context of the broader cultural landscape. Understanding the full scope of Indigenous resources provides a basis for the Tribe to gather plant materials necessary for revitalization efforts. The approach also helps determine which areas should be prioritized for reintroducing cultural burning and other traditional stewardship practices to tackle issues such as wildfires, loss of biodiversity, and habitat stability. We believe that ICRS conducted at larger scales can support essential Indigenous leadership and advocacy in public lands conservation.

B. GEOSPATIAL TOOLS SUPPORT LAND ACCESS AND CLIMATE MITIGATION

The AMTB and AMLT are using geospatial tools to restore land access and mitigate the impacts of climate change on cultural and biological resources. Co-author Taylor is leading this work in close collaboration with AMTB and AMLT leadership. First, Taylor and Sigona mapped open spaces and private lands to which the Tribe has some form of access. Over the years, certain park agencies and landowners have offered to work with the Tribe in some way. Creating a cohesive map of all of these access opportunities allows us to then prioritize them according to other factors (discussed below).

Second, we mapped sacred landscapes and stories through conversations with Tribal elders and leaders, which are a critical supplement to spatial archaeological data that was purchased by the Tribe. Together, these datasets offer us an incomplete yet extremely valuable map of cultural resources that can be used to analyze which sacred places are most threatened by development, future flooding, and sea level rise.

Together, these datasets offer us an incomplete yet extremely valuable map of cultural resources that can be used to analyze which sacred places are most threatened by development, future flooding, and sea level rise.

Third, we utilized a combination of private and community science (iNaturalist) datasets to train advanced spatial models that predict where 10 keystone cultural plants are most likely to be found throughout the Tribe’s homelands, and specifically within the potential access areas (Taylor, Sigona, and Kelly 2023). When overlaid, these 10 predicted distributions identify cultural plant hotspots where many different species are likely to be found. This analysis allows the Tribe to prioritize limited time and financial resources toward the most culturally biodiverse areas. These models can also be used to predict how these plants’ distributions might shift under different climatic conditions, allowing the Tribe to invest in stewardship and gathering areas that are most resilient to predicted changes in climate.

Fourth, we are analyzing satellite imagery to understand how cultural fire and wildfire impact different ecosystems over space and time. Cultural fire is a sacred practice and a key management strategy as the Central Coast contends with wildfires burning more frequently and at higher severity. In addition, California’s rapidly disappearing coastal grassland ecosystems rely on the disturbance of these frequent, low-severity fires to thrive. By studying this dynamic process both on the ground and from space, AMLT can track its efficacy, prioritize new areas for cultural burning, and advocate for the funding that will be necessary to continue and expand the practice.

Maps are a critical means by which the Tribe communicates their vision for their sacred landscapes to the public.

Fifth, maps are a critical means by which the Tribe communicates their vision for their sacred landscapes to the public. One example is the campaign to prevent mining on Juristac, a sacred landscape located at the confluence of the Pajaro and San Benito rivers (see map of the Juristac Cultural Landscape below and Flora, Winter 2023, p. 13 for more information). In engaging the public in these campaigns, the Tribe is working to involve broader groups in the protection of clean water, clean air, and wildlife, which grows our awareness and collective ability to tackle climate change.

Through these geospatial efforts, the Tribe now owns robust datasets revealing how their cultural resources, cultural plants, and potential access areas intersect. These datasets are all owned by the Tribe and are confidential due to their sensitive nature, except when approved for sharing by the Tribal Council. Next, AMLT hopes to create maps that help restore dormant knowledge in the Amah Mutsun community related to these cultural plants and sacred places, and to see these tools and methods leveraged by more Indigenous communities throughout California and beyond.

C. FORMALIZING AGREEMENTS FOR ACCESS AND STEWARDSHIP

The use of formal agreements to facilitate access to culturally significant places has been a priority for AMTB and AMLT. These agreements, including cultural conservation easements and memoranda of understanding (MOU), reflect Tribal interests in fulfilling cultural stewardship obligations relying on access to ancestral places. MOUs are non-legally binding formal agreements between two or more parties that are used to facilitate partnerships and delegate responsibilities, and are in effect for a finite period of time. Cultural conservation easements are legal rights to real property in perpetuity and are used to ensure the preservation of Tribal access rights and the cultural and natural resources of a property (see Middleton 2011). Both tools reflect Tribal interests in access and stewardship while avoiding problematic arrangements of property ownership that may not align with Indigenous worldviews.

Such agreements provide greater security for AMTB and AMLT, due to a lack of trust of state and federal agencies. Formal access agreements acknowledge Tribal interests in sustained stewardship opportunities that hold great potential for cultural and ecological benefits. Sustained access and stewardship of culturally significant places are important for developing localized Indigenous environmental knowledge to help determine the effects of Indigenous stewardship in a changing climate. Recent initiatives, such as the California State Parks Tribal MOU Program, indicate growing opportunities for Tribal Nations to utilize formal policy tools for their benefit. Formalized access agreements can be useful in instances where land ownership is not possible or of interest to Tribal communities, and can serve an important role in utilizing geospatial analysis and ecoarchaeological research for ecological stewardship.

IV. TRIBAL PERSPECTIVES

We the authors (Sigona and Taylor), from 2021 to 2022 conducted a series of semistructured interviews with Amah Mutsun Tribal Members involved in Tribal land stewardship as community leaders, Native Stewardship Corps (NSC) members, or cultural practitioners. We worked closely with the AMTB Council to identify participants who then voluntarily elected to be a part of our research project. Our research interests were community member experiences in stewardship; and the needs and interests in bolstering stewardship opportunities. We collected 13 interviews that were transcribed and thematized. We include a small sample of interview excerpts from our project to elucidate how Tribal members understand the significance of land stewardship for community members as well as the environment.

Describing his philosophy on Amah Mutsun stewardship, AMTB Chair Valentin Lopez depicts a divergence from dominant hierarchical approaches to environmental caretaking:

“The most important thing of all restoration is that you restore spirituality. To restore the spirituality to the land and to the people and to the rivers, and to the ocean, to the fish, the birds. We need to restore the spirituality for all.”

The emphasis on the nonmaterial components of stewardship is also described by Steven Pratt, an NSC member and environmental science university student:

“I know that our Tribe has been active members of the landscape, been active members of the community of life, meaning all facets of life…Everyone is connected to the land, you just have to allow yourself to feel that relationship and realize that all living things are connected to us where we’re equally related…When we realize that, we realize that we’re taking care of our relatives.”

Pratt and Lopez both describe the transformative effects of stewardship and the interconnectedness of the social and natural world. Due to a legacy of colonial violence and enactment of colonial approaches to land management, the revitalization of Amah Mutsun relational approaches to stewardship challenges the dominant approaches to environmental caretaking.

The suppression of Indigenous knowledge systems, and their replacement with colonial perspectives that view society as separate from environment, has made relearning cultural values an important component of Tribal stewardship efforts. One young adult Tribal steward describes their personal shift in perspectives of land from their involvement in Tribal stewardship:

“Before I went to the Stewardship Corps, I didn’t know nothing about plants. I was just stepping on them, I thought they were all weeds…I figured I’d go to the grocery store, grab all my food and money was my lifestyle…but, you know, there’s a lot of knowledge with the land and I learned the uses. I learned that our pharmacy is out there, our food is out there. Grocery store is growing right in front of us.”

The exposure to cultural teachings during stewardship generates a shift away from capitalist values. Reflecting on the significance of such teachings, community member and elder Robert Trujillo elaborates on their necessity:

“It is important to learn the Indigenous natural ways…because that is how we survived…At my age and my generation, we were taught survival, we were taught the natural food up here, we had to know which mushrooms to get, which mushrooms are poisonous, what time of year is best to be hunting, how to build a fire…what makes me so proud now is that we’re doing things in the Indigenous way. And in doing that, we will survive any catastrophe because I fear for these people that have never had the opportunity and life that I have had, to start learning which plants to eat. They look at it and go, ‘that’s grass,’ no, it’s an edible plant, it’s an Indigenous plant that Mother Earth has maintained for us.”

Trujillo illustrates how Indigenous knowledge systems are not only important for survival, but also for having knowledge of non-human relatives as a sign of respect.

Relationships with non-human life are essential for mutual well-being. Reflecting on the importance of environmental caretaking, Pratt expresses the need for attention to non-human relatives:

“We have so much diversity of life on this planet that’s at risk of being extinct…that is motivating [me] to want to fulfill that role of providing life for those individual animals and beings and creatures and plants. Because as much as we have a right to life, they have a right to be alive, too…We’ve caused so much pain in life, too, and in order to work towards bettering that we have to heal and part of that is being a caretaker. So, whether that’s caretaking for plant life, whether that’s caretaking for animal life, or for people, all of it’s stewardship. Because we just want to maintain this boat we’re on so we don’t sink.”

Tribal perspectives decenter the human, and foster greater respect and relational perspectives with non-human kin. Intimate relationships are important for our own survival, but also motivate environmental caretaking efforts. Indigenous perspectives have been marginalized and sought to be replaced with hierarchical approaches to land and environment that devalue non-human life. Contemporary revitalization efforts benefit from generations of Indigenous resilience; and AMTB community members are actively seeking to unlearn harmful colonial approaches to land, and foster deeper relationships with relatives for their collective well-being and survival.

V. CONCLUSION:

The AMTB process of revitalizing cultural stewardship practices returns relational approaches to the land, and counters extractive and managerial approaches to land that effectuate climate change. As a community of people who believe they have been in their lands since time immemorial, the Amah Mutsun understand that the dormancy of traditional practices in the past few centuries has occurred only in a relatively short time span. The path to stewardship revitalization for the Amah Mutsun offers lessons of resilience in times of great change. Furthermore, AMTB relationships cultivated over millennia demonstrate how respect and relational approaches to non-human life have the potential to transform our interactions, and move away from anthropocentric, hierarchical, and colonial attitudes.

The use of innovative technology, such as geospatial tools and ecoarchaeology, can be combined with Indigenous knowledge systems to support stewardship and resiliency in a time of climate change.

The use of innovative technology, such as geospatial tools and ecoarchaeology, can be combined with Indigenous knowledge systems to support stewardship and resiliency in a time of climate change. Archaeobotanical information can enhance Native stewardship plans through gaining a higher-resolution perspective of land use, subsistence strategies, and human/environmental interactions over the long term. To help solve our climate change crisis, while Indigenous Nations should not be expected to share cultural knowledge with governments and institutions that have historically exploited them, the support of Tribal stewardship initiatives in Tribal ancestral lands through collaborations and other solidarity efforts is integral to resilient and sustainable societal practices.

Alexii Sigona is a PhD candidate in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley, and an enrolled member of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band. His research looks at tribal land access and collaborative environmental governance in California. alexii@berkeley.edu

Alec Apodaca is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology and conducts paleoethnobotanical and historical ecological research in California.
ajapodaca@berkeley

Annalise Taylor uses geospatial technologies to study and support the ecological and cultural revitalization efforts of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Environment Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley. annalisetaylor@berkeley.edu

REFERENCES

Cuthrell, R.Q.. 2013. ”Archaeobotanical evidence for indigenous burning practices and foodways at CA-SMA-113.” California Archaeology 5, 265–290.

Cuthrell, R.Q., in review. Archaeobotanical Research at Nine Archaeological Sites West of the Santa Cruz Mountains: Implications for subsistence practices and anthropogenic burning., in: Lightfoot, K., Grone, M., Sanchez, G. (Eds.), The Study of Indigenous Landscape and Seascape Stewardship on the Central California Coast:  The Findings of a Collaborative Eco-Archaeological Investigation. Contributions of the University of California Archaeological Research Facility.

Hart, R., 2018. Federal Recognition of Native American Tribes: The Case of California’s Amah Mutsun, in: American Indian History on Trial.

Liboiron, M., 2021. Pollution is colonialism. Duke University Press, Durham North Carolina.

Lightfoot, K., et al., 2021. The Eco-Archaeological Investigation of Indigenous Stewardship Practices on the Santa Cruz Coast. Journal of California and Great Basin anthropology 41, 187–205.

Lopez, V., 2013. The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band: Reflections on Collaborative Archaeology. California Archaeology 5, 221–223.

Middleton, B.R., 2011. Trust in the Land: New Directions in Tribal Conservation. University of Arizona Press.

Milliken, R., 1995. A time of little choice: the disintegration of tribal culture in the San Francisco Bay area, 1769-1810, Ballena Press anthropological papers ; no. 43. Ballena Press, Menlo Park, CA.

Rizzo, M., 2022. We are not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in 19th Century California. University of Nebraska Press.

Taylor, A., Sigona, A. and Kelly, M., 2023. Modeling spatial distributions of Amah Mutsun priority cultural plants to support Indigenous cultural revitalization. Ecosphere, 14(1), p.e4374.

van Wagtendonk, J.W., Cayan, D.R., 2008. Temporal and Spatial Distribution of Lightning Strikes in California in Relation to Large-Scale Weather Patterns. Fire Ecology 4, 34–56.

Read the full issue:

Artemisia, Native Plants and Climate Change: Indigenous Perspectives Part I

Artemisia, Native Plants and Climate Change: Indigenous Perspectives Part II