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Restoring Homelands
From Land&People, April 2004
By Richard Mahler
For settlers from Europe, it was unexplored
territory waiting to be taken. For those who
already knew the land, those same places were
home. Hundreds of years later, people like Alvin
Warren are trying to right some of the wrongs
inflicted by the newcomers' tragic
misperception.
"Native people had seen nearly every inch
of the Americas by the time Europeans
arrived," points out Warren, a land rights
activist and enrolled member of New Mexico's
Santa Clara Pueblo. "There was virtually no
pristine wilderness when Europeans arrived. We'd
already been there. But only now are
[non-Natives] starting to appreciate the
intimate relationship between our ancestors and
their homeland."
Having developed myriad land-based cultures over
thousands of years, this country's original
inhabitants gave up much more than places to
hunt, fish, farm, and dwell. They were forced to
abandon spiritual sustenance, sacred burial
grounds, and place-specific knowledge, along
with the kind of soulful connection to a
familiar environment that cannot be summarized
in words.
"There are fundamental issues of justice
and empowerment involved in reacquisition of
ancestral land," says Warren, whose own
tribe has spent centuries in a setting that
stretches across several ecosystems, from the
thickly forested peaks of the Jémez Mountains to
the flood plains of the Upper Río Grande Valley.
Gradually, the Santa Clara are recovering lost
acreage from private and public interests.
Experience in such painstaking negotiations
makes Warren well-qualified to chair the Tribal
Lands Advisory Council, which helps guide the
Trust for Public Land's nationwide Tribal Lands
Program. As the only large-scale Native American
land restoration venture among U.S. conservation
organizations, the six-year-old initiative
addresses some of the most pressing land-related
needs of Native Americans. Created after TPL had
completed about 20 such projects, the Tribal
Lands Program melds Native American knowledge
and participation with TPL's expertise in real
estate, finance, conservation, and the law.
Through 2003, it has helped provide more than
two dozen tribes secure protection of over
42,000 acres of land valued in excess of $32
million.
"A number of these transactions would not
have been possible without the Tribal Lands
Program," says Warren. The effort, he
believes, "recognizes the crucial value of
land within Native American societies, and the
careful stewardship of natural resources that
results from that life-sustaining relationship.
The program also demonstrates how unifying and
expanding ancestral land-bases can help tribes
deal with ongoing economic issues."
No other ethnic group in this country has
suffered such wide-ranging, systematic removal
from its territory as have Native Americans.
Virtually from the moment of their arrival,
immigrants began displacing indigenous people. A
culminating insult was the 1887 Dawes Act, which
alone was responsible for the loss of more than
90 million acres, or almost two-thirds of this
country's tribal land base. Today, traditional
Native lands are a jurisdictional mess that will
never be completely sorted out. Yet tribes are
more committed than ever to recapture at least
some of that property. Protection through
ownership not only strengthens communities and
expands opportunities, while conserving natural
resources, it also reduces such illegal
activities as looting of artifacts and
desecration of graves.
"We care deeply about our mission,"
Jaime Pinkham told me, shortly before his
departure last December as Director of the
Tribal Lands Program, co-located with TPL's
Oregon state office in Portland. "We are
absolutely unique in what we do: successfully
carrying out real estate negotiations, locating
money, and making legal agreements that return
land to tribes." He adds that some projects
don't necessarily result in direct ownership,
but may instead provide a tribe with certain
rights to use, management, or oversee
property.
For Pinkham, a former Nez Perce council member
now working on special projects for his
Idaho-based tribe, the Tribal Lands Program
holds great personal significance. Through its
auspices, he has helped restore more than 18,000
acres of ancestral Nez Perce homeland in
northeastern Oregon. Formerly a cattle ranch,
the property is now managed as a wildlife
refuge. Recovery came 120 years after the
revered Chief Joseph was forced to lead his
people out of the area during one of the U.S.
military's last Indian wars.
"The Nez Perce were forced off this
land," said Pinkham during a 1997 ceremony
commemorating the property's return. "But
the spirit of the Nez Perce is still cast across
this landscape."
Any transaction involving tribal land is likely
to be complex. Participants tiptoe through a
daunting minefield of federal treaties, Supreme
Court decisions, judicial authorities, ownership
claims, tax codes, and multi-agency regulations.
Potential funding is often hidden in obscure
programs, while transfers may demand in depth
knowledge of public land ownership. It's no
surprise that tribal governments, with limited
financial and legal resources of their own,
frequently find it hard to respond even to
overtures from willing sellers.
Advisory Council member Eddie Tullis, a member
of the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, in northern
Alabama, notes that "each tribe makes
land-related decisions in its own way. Some are
a lot more complicated and time-consuming than
others." With more than 500
federally-recognized tribes, few conservation
groups have the patience to face such
challenges. Yet the time for collaboration has
arrived. Rising prices have made it more
advantageous for tribes to purchase lands with
conservation easements or restrictive covenants,
which can greatly reduce per-acre costs.
"I think that 100 percent of tribes in this
country are eager to reacquire at least some of
their lands," declares Everett Chávez,
governor of New Mexico's Santo Domingo Pueblo,
which partnered with the Tribal Lands Program
last fall to obtain 1076 acres of
"tremendous cultural value" long
sought by the tribe. "But arranging these
transfers is by no means easy."
The recent Santa Domingo acquisition, which
followed a 2001 TPL-brokered deal that returned
about 7500 acres to the pueblo, involved the
federal Bureau of Land Management, New Mexico's
state land office, and the owners of a private
ranch. The series of agreements also placed in
public ownership part of the scenic Sandía Crest
above Albuquerque that had been threatened with
development.
"It's great that there are interest groups
out there, like TPL, that can help us do
this," says Chávez. "Creative
partnering can be challenging, and we appreciate
the expertise that others provide."
While each of New Mexico's 19 pueblos kept at
least some of their ancestral land during
Spanish and Mexican rule, tens of thousands of
additional acres were lost following the U.S.
takeover in 1846. The situation was not unlike
that facing many other North American tribes
during the 20th century.
"Our legal position was weak,"
explains Chávez, "since our people never
felt compelled to put up fences or to build
permanent structures on much of their land. We
didn't occupy it, though we all shared in our
use of it." In part as a result of this
low-impact stewardship, the governor estimates
only about 90,000 acres of Santa Domingo's
original 277,000 acres of homeland along the Río
Grande corridor remains under the tribe's
jurisdiction. The tribe continues to negotiate
for acquisition of more land, usually through
exchange or purchase. "We don't want it
returned simply for monetary reasons," he
stresses, "but mainly because of the land's
cultural significance."
In a similar move, the adjacent San Felipe
Pueblo participated in a 2001 exchange with the
BLM and a private landowner that yielded the
return of more than 9000 acres to San Felipe and
public protection of the Taos Valley Overlook, a
spectacular viewscape of the Río Grande Gorge
that dazzles motorists driving between Santa Fe
and Taos.
Not all TPL-brokered acquisitions are
concerned with restoration of ancestral lands or
preservation of scenic areas, however.
Properties of historic and cultural importance
are being saved as well.
Elsewhere in New Mexico, for instance, the
Tribal Lands Program is helping members of the
Ácoma and Zuni pueblos obtain private ranches
that encompass ceremonial trade routes, cultural
sites, and sacred petroglyphs that have been
visited consistently by Native people for
centuries.
"Today, the Zuni must cross private
property in order to collect mud, cattails, and
other materials that are used for sacred
purposes," says Deb Love, Director of TPL's
New Mexico office. "We're trying to change
that situation." She adds that such
agreements often yield win-win situations for
all parties: honoring Native American
traditions, compensating sellers, and conserving
precious natural resources. In addition, some
arrangements may allow for limited land-based
economic activity, such as mining and big-game
hunting, that brings income to participating
tribes.
Nearly two-thousand miles northwest of New
Mexico, analogous struggles are beginning to
guarantee access to places where members of the
region's tribes traditionally have hunted,
fished, and obtained culturally sensitive
materials. For instance, along Washington's
rainy Pacific Coast, the Quinault Nation has
been sustained for generations by its
relationship with the woods and waterways of the
Olympic Peninsula. A series of events, including
fraudulent surveys conducted during the 19th
century, restricted the tribe's use of
old-growth forests, including the ability to
harvest large trees that are carved into
ceremonial canoes.
"TPL hopes to secure a $50 million
conservation easement over 4000 acres,"
says Pearl Capoeman-Baller, president of the
Quinault Nation Business Committee, who fears
such pristine property might otherwise be logged
and degraded. "Our tribe will be able to
use that land, while the habitats of sensitive
species are protected." The latter include
the marbled murrelet, northern spotted owl, and
bull trout.
Further inland, at the confluence of the
Klickitat and Columbia rivers, the Tribal Lands
Program has spearheaded a campaign to protect
Lyle Point, a peninsula that contains
traditional fishing and burial grounds of the
Klickitat band of Yakima. TPL purchased the land
after a local political body approved
construction of 33 houses on highly sensitive
acreage.
In southeast Idaho, a pasture along the Bear
River once used to perform an annual "warm
dance" (for bringing good health to crops)
is now overseen by the Northwestern Shoshone. On
this hallowed ground, on a winter morning in
1863, U.S. soldiers gunned down more than 300
unarmed members of the tribe-including women and
children-leaving their bodies unburied. The band
lost all of its lands and federal authorities
refused even to recognize the tribe officially
until 1980. With the acquisition of the Bear
River site, overseen by TPL Project Manager
Alina Bokde, the Northwestern Shoshone held a
sacred ceremony honoring forebears brutally
murdered more than 140 years ago.
"When your spirit goes, it should be sent
off properly or you wander," tribal elder
Patty Timbimboo-Madsen told an interviewer
during the March 2003 event, in which the
battleground was blessed. "Those people who
passed on could never tell their story. They're
calling out for someone to help them, to send
them on their way." Now, she said, the
spirits of her ancestors finally are at rest.
Across the country, such reminders of the
then-prevailing hostility toward Native
Americans are gaining the recognition they
deserve. In the Southeast, for example, TPL is
helping to save landmarks along the Trail of
Tears. This term refers to the several routes by
which more than 16,000 Cherokee were forced from
their homes in 1838 and sent more than 800 miles
to a reservation in Oklahoma. An estimated 4,000
members of the tribe died during relocation. The
Tribal Lands Program, working with present-day
Cherokees and other groups, is helping to
protect historically significant properties
along one of the first segments of the Trail of
Tears, a thumb of the tribe's ancestral homeland
extending into the Tennessee River called
Moccasin Bend, opposite Chattanooga. Eventually,
these parcels may become part of a proposed
national park. Such locations need to be saved,
Cherokee activist Harley Grant told
Land&People in 2002, "before they're
all developed and built over, and we have no
place to go to remember."
A separate but related effort in north Georgia
has the Tribal Lands Program trying to save an
important tract near the historic plantation of
Cherokee Chief James Vann, who with his family
was evicted and marched to Oklahoma. Also
threatened with development is the former estate
of 19th-century Cherokee leader Major Ridge, a
certified Trail of Tears site now receiving the
program's attention.
Dale Allen, Director of TPL's Southeastern
Regional Office in Atlanta, believes the
importance of such work cannot be overstated.
"I was born, raised, and educated
here," Allen recalls. "Yet there are
things I have learned [through association with
such projects] that are both shocking and
shameful. I was surprised at how much I didn't
know about how the indigenous people of this
region once lived, and how they were treated by
newcomers."
Bowen Blair, Senior Vice President of TPL with
oversight responsibility for the Tribal Lands
Program, believes such high-profile projects
are, indeed, "a valuable way to educate
people. They tell important human stories that
extend beyond borders." Hardly a week
passes, he says, without TPL being asked to
respond to a proposal that threatens the
land-based resources of Native American group.
Blair feels a key message inherent in the Tribal
Lands Program is that "the situation
regarding every property and every tribe is
different. We can't make generalizations about
needs. In fact, some tribal land may be most
appropriately used for non-conservation
purposes."
A prime example of the initiative's diversity is
found on the Navajo reservation, this country's
largest tract of Native-controlled territory, a
starkly beautiful landscape that spills across
the deserts of Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona.
The headquarters of the tribe's western region
is in Tuba City, a northeastern Arizona
commercial center near the Grand Canyon. While
rich in desert scenery and cultural history,
Tuba City is plagued by high unemployment and a
lack of recreational services. Nearly half of
the community's estimated 8225 residents are
under the age of 19, nearly all of them
Navajo.
In 2002, Tuba City resident Louise Yellowman, an
activist Navajo serving on the local board of
supervisors, helped secure part of the funding
needed to build and maintain her community's
first municipal park. At press time, TPL was
assisting Yellowman and others in Tuba City to
secure the estimated $3.12 million needed to
develop the in-town property.
"I'm very optimistic about this becoming a
reality," Yellowman told me. "We need
it so badly."
When completed, the park is expected to include
a skateboarding area, ball field, picnic
pavilion, and tracks designed for walking and
jogging. Such amenities are particularly
important in Tuba City because, as in many
Native American communities, a host of factors
have conspired to undermine the health and alter
the lifestyles of residents. The result is a
high level of diabetes, obesity, and other
problems associated with poor diet, disruption
of tribal traditions, and lack of exercise.
The potential human impact of the Tribal Lands
Program in a place like Tuba City is enormous,
though the amount of involved acreage represents
a fraction of what is conveyed through most
other projects. Laura Baxter, a member of the
Pit River tribe and the program's Portland-based
Field Representative, says such examples
underscore the tremendous range of opportunities
that exist where the interests of Native
Americans and their lands intersect.
"Our goal is not simply the pragmatic one
of returning lands to tribal hands," she
concludes, "but in bringing passion and
understanding to the relationship between people
and place, no matter who they are or where they
happen to be."
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