Summer 2021 Newsletter

Letter from Chairman Valentin Lopez

Dear Friends,

 I’m so thankful to be able to once again go outside and feel the warmth of the sun, to hear the birds singing, and to watch the different species of bees work to pollinate the large sage plant in front of my house. I recently learned there are over 1,600 species of bees indigenous to California; I was amazed to learn this. Now I watch different species of bees come out at different times of the day. I’m also very grateful to be able to once again travel to the Indigenous territories in which we work and to talk face to face with our land trust staff as well as our friends and partners.

Because of your friendship and generosity, our land trust continues to work hard to restore sacredness to Mother Earth and to restore the Indigenous landscapes that our ancestors worked so hard to develop and manage over thousands of years.

 In May, we welcomed four new Native Stewardship Corps members to our program. You can read more about the new stewards here. We are blessed that our Mutsun youth continue to look at our stewardship program with great interest as they are anxious to learn the ways of our ancestors.

 Our Native Stewardship Corps program continues to focus on fire.  Recently the stewards cleared a 4 foot wide fire line to bare soil over 1 mile long in the Soquel Demonstration State Forest. This research and stewardship project is being conducted in collaboration with CAL FIRE to reduce wildfire danger, protect natural and cultural resources, and study how prescribed burning can help manage mountain landscapes today. Our stewards worked alongside the CAL FIRE crew, and this was the first time they had created a fire line at this scale. Our stewards were happy to be working at a new location alongside CAL FIRE, and together we look forward to other opportunities to continue collaborating.

Other steps we are taking to focus on fire include continuing to work on fuel reduction within Año Nuevo State Park, and specifically within the  Quiroste Valley Cultural Preserve. At this same time we are preparing a burn plan for conducting a cultural burn at Quiroste Valley in the near future. We are also enrolling our Stewards in fire training programs that can help them further their fire management skills and award them certifications so they can become independent leaders in conducting cultural burns in the future. This work is being supported by a grant from the California State Coastal Conservancy  (with cap and trade funding from California Climate Investments). Finally, we are working with our partners, including the Central Coast Prescribed Burn Association, to identify and plan future cultural and prescribed fires.   

 Our work with UCLA’s Center for Diverse Leadership in Science (CDLS) program has begun as part of our Coastal Stewardship Program. We are working with professors and students to collect eDNA samples on a quarterly basis to analyze changes in species present in several locations along the coast. We plan for this study to continue for a very long period of time. This data will help us study the impact of climate change on species in these waters. We also conducted archaeological surveys below Mill Creek dam and will soon conduct a survey above the dam wall. The goal here is to identify the impacts of the removal of the dam wall on both biological and cultural resources. Finally, we’ve scheduled a talking circle with the UCLA students to talk about our future work together. This talking circle will allow us to share with them our Tribal history and the goals of our Land Trust, in particular, the goals of our Coastal Stewardship Program. UCLA students and faculty will also share their interest in ocean and coastal studies and research. This talking circle is an important way to allow participants to understand each other and to develop strong relationships for our work together. 

 Finally, the challenges to protect our most sacred site, Juristac, from a sand and gravel quarry continue to grow. When Juristac was acquired in 2015 by the investor group Debt Acquisition Corporation of America it was a 6,400 ranch. The property owners recently sold the 1,800+ acres that are within Santa Cruz County to a real estate developer. Now they have a 120 acre parcel and a 2,200 acre parcel up for sale. The selling of the land, parcel by parcel, is such a violation of all that we believe in. We had hoped that this property could have remained whole and that someday our Tribe would once again be allowed to hold ceremonies here and to steward the land as our ancestors did. We don’t understand why the land use laws of the county and state provide no protection for Native American sacred sites. We have no doubt that if this land had been the sacred site of any other religion, the county of Santa Clara would not consider approving the mining permit. We have been told that the only thing that will prevent the mining permit from being approved is overwhelming public objection to the permit. It is for this reason that we ask all citizens to please sign our petition at: http://www.protectjuristac.org/petition/ and to stand with the Amah Mutsun.

kan-sireesum

With our heart