The Yurok Tribe will be getting back a slice of its ancestral land dotted with majestic redwoods and a key creek for salmon spawning.

The Yurok will be the first Native people to manage tribal land with the National Park Service under a historic memorandum of understanding signed Tuesday by the tribe, Redwood National and State Parks and the nonprofit Save the Redwoods League.

The agreement “starts the process of changing the narrative about how, by whom and for whom we steward natural lands,” Sam Hodder, president and CEO of Save the Redwoods League, said in a statement.

The tribe will take ownership in 2026 of 125 acres (50 hectares) near the tiny Northern California community of Orick in Humboldt County after restoration of a local tributary, Prairie Creek, is complete under the deal. The site will introduce visitors to Yurok customs, culture and history, the tribe said.

Much of the property was paved over by a lumber operation that worked there for 50 years and also buried Prairie Creek, where salmon would swim upstream from the Pacific to spawn.

  • girlfreddyOP
    302·
    6 months ago

    They’re getting help to restore everything back to pre-colonization.

    Last week, a 2.2-acre (.9-hectare) parking lot was returned to the Ohlone people where they established the first human settlement beside San Francisco Bay 5,700 years ago. In 2022, more than 500 acres (200 hectares) of redwood forest on the Lost Coast were returned the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council, a group of 10 tribes.

    The ’O Rew property represents just a tiny fraction of the more than 500,000 acres of the ancestral land of the Yurok, whose reservation straddles the lower 44 miles (70 kilometers) of the Klamath River. The Yurok tribe is also helping lead efforts in the largest dam removal project in U.S. history along the California-Oregon border to restore the Klamath and boost the salmon population.

    Plans for ‘O Rew include a traditional Yurok village of redwood plank houses and a sweat house. There also will be a new visitor and cultural center displaying scores of sacred artefacts from deerskins to baskets that have been returned to the tribe from university and museum collections, Clayburn said.

    • Pistcow@lemm.ee
      316·
      6 months ago

      What help? A white elephant to put in generations of resources to restore an exhausted piece of land? Just Google toxic land returned to natives and read several different stories.

      • girlfreddyOP
        18·
        6 months ago

        It’s not perfect. It can never be perfect. But at least the gov’t is recognizing they have to start somewhere.

        • rmuk@feddit.ukEnglish
          4·
          6 months ago

          “Perfection is the enemy of progress.”

          A really good quote that I live by. It was also popular with the Nazis, unfortunately, so if it’s not a self-illustrative example then I don’t know what is.

        • Pistcow@lemm.ee
          13·
          6 months ago

          By giving them a multi generational financial burden and poisoned land.