For millennia, indigenous Indian people of the Sinkyone region practiced a sustainable way of life based on instructions they received from the Creator and their ancestors. The essence of sustainable living was based on the understanding that human beings were only part of the natural order of life on this Mother Earth. Humans were no more important than all the other animal and plant relations because each helped sustain the other's life. For North Coast Indian people, sustainability meant sustaining their community, including all life--its well-being and longevity.
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Within the last 150 years since arrival of the region's first Euro-American settlers, an alarming number of native species have become forever extinct from the North Coast. The early settlers perpetrated their genocide against the Sinkyone people concurrent with their destruction of Mother Earth--with lasting impacts to the land's sustainability.
During their long history of caring for the land, the Indian people and the land itself evolved sophisticated systems of sustainable resource management focused on maintaining a very sensitive ecological balance--a balance that has been under increasing assault since arrival of the first settlers. The health and abundance of Indian-managed land resulted from intensive land stewardship techniques like prescriptive burning, routine vegetation thinning, and harvesting for foods, medicines, and other items of everyday use. The whole basis for Sinkyone Indian sustainability was to never take more from the land than what was absolutely needed.
The remaining integrity found today within small pockets of the North Coast's dwindling, naturally functioning landscape (ancient redwoods, clear streams, healthy salmonid runs, biological diversity) provide small windows into an aeons-long, widespread land stewardship regime practiced by this land's indigenous Indian peoples.
The concept of sustainability is informed by indigenous Indian spiritual-cultural beliefs. The Mattole, the Eel, and the coastal streams of Sinkyone are considered to be living, sentient beings that provide for the sustenance and well-being of the human, animal, and plant peoples. It was understood among the Indian people that if these streams were respectfully stewarded, and if thanks were regularly given for their many life forms, then they would continue, as designed, to sustain life.
Documented stories tell how Indian people used to pick berries alongside the grizzly bear, for both love berries and there was a time when they lived together with understanding. This understanding is one reason why the bear is central to the culture of many North Coast tribes. But the non-Indians hunted this beautiful relation to extinction because they were terrified of "wild" things like the grizzly, which they could not control.
The fundamental beliefs and values that enabled indigenous peoples to carry out such successful, long-term sustainable management are still practiced in Indian country. The InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council and many tribes of this region are engaged in collaborative land conservation and restoration projects that are helping to heal the land and the people of the North Coast. In our work, we are applying sustainable cultural values from the indigenous Sinkyone world to the problem-solving involved with rehabilitating wounded land. As we strengthen our cultural identity, the ties to our ancestors (and therefore to our land) are strengthened. In this way we sustain our culture and the very life of Mother Earth.
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The InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council is a nonprofit land conservation consortium of ten federally recognized North Coast tribes working to protect our forestlands and cultural sites from further desecration, and to promote healing for the land and the people.
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InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council
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TOC for Forest & River News, Summer 2005