Chumash people in California to co-steward marine sanctuary in historic
partnership
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[October 19, 2024]
By JAIMIE DING
For more than 10,000 years, Native Americans have been living along
California’s central coast, an area of breathtaking beauty with stunning
turquoise waters rich in biodiversity. Now, in the first partnership of
its kind, the area will soon be part of a new national marine sanctuary
that Native people will co-steward with a federal agency.
It will give the Chumash people, once the largest cultural group in
California, a say in the way the marine sanctuary is preserved. The
Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary, designated by the Biden
administration last week, is the first tribally nominated sanctuary in
the United States.
It covers 116 miles (187 kilometers) of California coastline. The more
than 4,500 square miles (11,655 square kilometers) of coastal and
offshore waters that will be included contain diverse marine life
increasingly threatened by climate change and pollution from human
activities.
The designation, which was announced by the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, will take effect after Congress has 45 days
to consider it.
The Chumash people, which span several tribes, including the federally
recognized Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, have long depended on the
ocean for fishing and shellfish, and today some are involved in
environmental monitoring and advocacy work.
Some collaborative projects may include coastal signage, or scientific
studies along the shoreline where there may have been Indigenous
villages in the past that are now submerged.
“The waterways adjacent to the aboriginal territory are areas that our
tribal people have thrived and lived off of for many years,” said
Kenneth Kahn, chairman of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians. “The
legacy of all Chumash people in the namesake of the Marine Sanctuary is
certainly very important.”
The sanctuary comes nearly a decade after it was originally nominated by
the late Chief Fred Collins of the Northern Chumash Tribal Council in
2015.
“When he passed away three years ago … he asked me to complete this for
him, and I promised him I would,” said Violet Sage Walker, chairwoman of
the Northern Chumash Tribal Council.
There have been other national marine sanctuaries that involved
collaboration with tribes, but this will be the first one where it is
written into the final management plan with Indigenous partners included
in the conversation from the beginning, Walker said.
A growing Land Back movement has been returning Indigenous homelands to
the descendants of those who lived there for millennia before European
settlers arrived. That has seen Native American tribes taking a greater
role in restoring rivers and lands to how they were before they were
expropriated.
Earlier this year, the Yurok Tribe in Northern California became the
first Native people to manage tribal land with the National Park Service
under a historic memorandum of understanding signed by the tribe,
Redwood National and State Parks and the nonprofit Save the Redwoods
League.
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Dancers perform during celebration of "Indigenous Peoples' Day
Picnic In The Park 2024" and Chumash Heritage National Marine
Sanctuary at Dinosaur Caves Park, Pismo Beach on Monday, Oct. 14,
2024. (Robert Schwemmer via AP)
Stretching from around the San Louis Obispo County area in central
California down to the border of the Channel Islands National Marine
Sanctuary off the coast of Santa Barbara, the Chumash marine
sanctuary represents a unique mix of ecological zones of the
northern and southern parts of the coast, said Stanford University
professor Stephen Palumbi, who is conducting research in the area.
The waters are home to at-risk species, such as snowy plovers,
southern sea otters, leatherback sea turtles, abalone and blue
whales. It also includes ecologically rich features like the
Rodriguez seamount, formed from an extinct volcano.
When Palumbi and his team were examining a set of silvery fish
called grunions that beach themselves when they spawn in the
southern part of the coast, they brought their findings to their
partners at the Northern Chumash Tribal Council.
“They were saying, ’Oh yeah, we usually get them in the south just
like you’re seeing, but you know, just a couple generations ago we
could get them further north,'” Palumbi said, giving an example of
the value of the tribal members' knowledge.
The latest national marine sanctuary will advance the White House’s
America the Beautiful initiative, which set a goal of conserving and
restoring at least 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030.
Some advocates had originally hoped the boundaries of the sanctuary
would extend north to the edges of the Monterey Bay National Marine
Sanctuary, past Diablo Canyon, which houses California’s last
operating nuclear power plant. However, after concerns from wind
energy companies, NOAA decided to carve out an area planned for
off-shore wind farm development but laid out a process for potential
sanctuary expansion in the future.
“It’s really a balancing act of trying to accomplish the renewable
energy goals of the Biden-Harris and Newsom administrations and
America the Beautiful,” said Paul Michel, NOAA regional policy
coordinator.
The final management plan includes a framework for co-stewardship
that involves an advisory group with a voting seat for the the Santa
Ynez Band of Chumash Indians and two “Indigenous Cultural Knowledge
voting seats," as well as a policy council consisting of the Santa
Ynez Band, NOAA, and California government.
“We not only protected our homeland but we protected our spiritual
connection to our ancestors and our future generations for
everybody,” said Walker. “This is something that will live long
beyond my lifetime.”
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