| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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habitats Sinkyone InterTribal Park SINKYONE WILDERNESS STATE PARK—Two hundred years ago this section of the rugged northern California coast may have been the most densely populated area on the continent. The Indian people who lived here hunted seals, elk, salmon, and deer and harvested seaweed, acorns, berries, herbs, and other plants. Possibly for as long as ten thousand years they fit seamlessly into this landscape. Standing on the edge of Usal Stream in Sinkyone Wilderness State Park I try to imagine the time when the people here were as much a part of this place as the woodpecker I hear, as the giant redwood that reaches to the sky nearby. What would it be like to have co-evolved with a place, to belong there the way this stream does? I shift uneasily on this romantic thought and my foot slips off a stone into the stream. My dampened reverie is interrupted by Priscilla Hunter, chairperson of the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council and an elder in the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians. She is the emcee at this gathering and she is beginning her opening remarks. "There once was a giant bird who flew over this land," she says. "We are here today because we would like to make this a place the condor could return to someday. So, however you pray, please call on what powers you can to help us bring this land back and to heal it. This is a time for healing; a time for healing history between white and native peoples, as well as a time for healing Mother Earth." For years now these gatherings of local Indian people have taken place here at Sinkyone. They come together and dance and sweat and drum and visit and eat. This year, the participants have a lot to celebrate; on March 20, the State Coastal Conservancy voted to sell them a 3,900-acre parcel of land to the east of our campsite. It is traditional Sinkyone land, and if these Indians can raise $1.4 million in the next two years it will mean, in the words of Hawk Rosales, executive director of the Council, "both a major environmental victory and a major social justice victory." It is not surprising that early Native Americans migrating south from the Bering Strait thousands of years ago chose this region to settle in, or that they stayed here for so long. Even now, after a century and a half of logging, its beauty is overwhelming. This region of northern California is called the Lost Coast because Highway One is forced inland here by these rugged cliffs. Where the mountains meet the Pacific, prehistoric-looking pelicans soar over the surf and big clusters of bobbing seals. Black bears, ospreys, and mountain lions still live here and so do endangered marbled murrelets and spotted owls, which take sanctuary in the few remaining groves of old-growth redwood. This is also a place where hope was lost. One hundred and fifty years ago hunters and loggers, supported by soldiers and vigilantes, massacred the descendants of those first North American explorers. Those who escaped fled deep into the hills or joined neighboring tribes in reservations to the east. By the turn of the century, the only people living here were loggers, who cut what redwoods and Douglas firs they could get to on these steep slopes. Most of the big trees they left behind were cut using new technologies in the 1950s, when the company town of Wheeler was built at the base of Wolf Creek. Georgia-Pacific Corporation went after the old- and second-growth forest with gusto, leaving behind only two percent of Sinkyone's original forest. The erosion that followed the clearcutting washed soil to the sea and filled streams that had once crackled with spawning salmon. "Wheeler is a good example of what happens to an economy based only on extraction," says Rosales. "Native people lived where Wheeler is for at least 10,000 years, and they took care of that beautiful and productive landscape. Wheeler thrived for about ten years, but when the timber was exhausted, the town was abandoned. Just like that. All that's left now are some building foundations and sad phone poles...and a gutted forest all around." Rosales is guiding me along the border of the Sinkyone Wilderness State Park and the parcel of land the Council hopes to turn into America's first InterTribal Park. The path we're on rises a thousand feet above the Pacific, but the hills rise up even more steeply to our right. The land on the Pacific side, to our left, is State Park. The land to our right, the upland parcel, is what the InterTribal Council plans to buy. The two chunks are part of a single catchment, and what happens upslope will determine the character of the park property below and the state's efforts to restore it. Restoration efforts have been underway for a few years now on both the State Park and on the upland parcel. Rosales points to a light green streak on the hillside across a valley far beneath us. Last year it was a logging road, but it was recently regraded and planted with redwoods and native grasses. It is an encouraging sight, the ugly scar of a logging road healing with bright green vegetation. This year, the Park plans to retire eight more miles of old logging road. The last major logging on this land occurred in 1984. Georgia-Pacific Corporation had begun clearcutting the few remaining hard-to-reach groves of old-growth redwoods that had been beyond the reach even of the Wheeler-era technology. A group of local environmentalists appeared one morning hanging from the branches and chained to the trunks of trees in Sally Bell Grove. (Sally Bell was a Sinkyone survivor of a brutal massacre at Needle Rock in the 1850s. She witnessed the murder of her entire family, including her baby sister, whose heart was cut out by a vigilante, who tossed it into the bushes where Sally Bell hid.)
In 1986, California Department of Parks and Recreation, Save the Redwoods League, California State Coastal Conservancy, and the Trust for Public Land purchased the 7,100 acres from Georgia-Pacific. Soon after, about 3,200 acres of that property were added to the southern end of the existing Sinkyone Wilderness State Park. The upland parcel was bought from the other contributors by the Trust for Public Land with the intention of reselling it to a public interest group that would manage it for public access. This is the parcel that the InterTribal Council stands to buy. The non-Indian environmentalists spearheading the movement to save the Sinkyone redwoods connected early on with the local Indians, who added their weight to the effort. In 1986 the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council was formed. The organization, representing ten California Indian tribes from the Sinkyone area, has a mandate to "protect, preserve, and restore the Sinkyone homelands for the sake of future generations." But restoring the landscape and flora and enticing wild animals to return to the area will not suffice, says Rosales. For true recovery, the people who belong to this land must be brought back, too. (Though there are probably no full-blooded Sinkyone Indians alive today, all ten of the federally recognized tribes in the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council have traditional ties to this land.) No one will live on the land permanantly, and no permanant structures will be built, but a summer camp will be set up to introduce Indian youth to the ways of their ancestors and the joy of being at home in the wilderness. "It is very important that the local native people have a safe place to gather traditional plants, hunt, and conduct sacred ceremonies," says Rosales. The council also plans to create a sort of university of native restoration and land management techniques, where old techniques will be revived and wed to modern restoration science. The InterTribal Council hopes to develop sustainable ways to generate revenue for the park's ongoing maintenance and restoration. Byproducts of restoration activities, such as wood products, could be sold. Fire suppression on the property has created a need for brush clearing and tree thinning. "We're talking about making a Native American cabinet shop that would use tan oaks, madrone, and even some scrap redwood from the land," says Rosales. "Toy manufacturing is also a possibility. We also plan to create a nursery for native Californian plants. It would be very exciting to a lot of people to get native plants grown by native people on native land," he says. Another funding source could be ecotourism. A stunning coastal park owned and managed by Native Americans would draw a lot of visitors, Rosales says. They could host seminars and restoration workshops. "I wouldn't be surprised if people would pay to come and help us with restoration," he says. "These kinds of revenue generation would help the park, but they'd also be of economic benefit to the county, and without depending on resource extraction." To date, the InterTribal Council has raised about $120,000. By June 1997 they must somehow come up with $1,280,000 more. The InterTribal Council, composed of representatives of the ten tribes, is scrambling for grant and foundation money as well as seeking individual donations. "Spreading the word is the best strategy we have. When people understand what we're doing, what our vision is, they generally get behind us," says Rosales. When the park is formed, he says, it will not only benefit the Indians and whites who use it, and the land itself, but everyone concerned with making peace with California's coast and forests. If they can learn lessons in sustainable living from the Sinkyone elders, there may be hope that one day even the descendants of the non-Indians living in this area may deserve to call themselves natives of this splendid place.
Gordy Slack is Associate Editor of California Wild. |
Fall 1995
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