April 24, 2007
In December 2006 the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council celebrated its twentieth anniversary. The Council may be the best-known example of Indian land conservation in the U .S. It was formed in 1986 to protect threatened Sinkyone coastal redwoods from further logging and to return local Indian stewardship to this land. In 1997 the Council purchased 3,845 acres for the first InterTribal Wilderness area, which has been permanently protected through conservation easements. The Council conducts its work in collaboration with a wide variety of project partners.
The intertribal concept is important because the Council's member tribes all retain historic and cultural ties to the Sinkyone land. Local Indian peoples have always understood that for our conservation work to succeed, the Sinkyone Indian land movement had to be an intertribal effort open to all local Indian tribes.
The Council's ten federally recognized, sovereign tribes have members hailing from more than twenty Northern California indigenous ethnicities. Many Sinkyone Indian people who are descended from original Sinkyone families today identify themselves as Bear River, Cahto, Coast Yuki, Mattole, or Wailaki--or a combination of these and other tribal ethnicities.
The Council's tribes have members who trace their ancestry directly back to Sinkyone Indian people who survived an era of genocide and lived well into the twentieth century. It is largely out of respect for the original Sinkyone people and their descendants that the Council was formed and continues to carry out its cultural land conservation work.
The Council assisted in decommissioning more than 60 miles of abandoned logging roads and stream crossings in the 7,250-acre Sinkyone State Park, which led to its recent designation as an official State Wilderness. This watershed rehabilitation will dramatically reduce sediment deliveries to Sinkyone stream and ocean waters, thereby significantly improving salmonid habitat. Since 1992 the Council has conducted monitoring and implemented various other measures for cultural resource protection within the Sinkyone State Park and in other areas of Sinkyone ancestral land.
In the near future, the InterTribal Wilderness will offer two public camping areas and three public hiking trails connecting to the Lost Coast Trail in the adjacent State Park. We continue stewardship and restoration of Wolf Creek, an important Sinkyone stream that historically supported salmon, and one day will again. The Council is engaged in several collaborative projects with State Parks relating to cultural-natural resource protection and restoration.
Since 1990, the Council has developed nearly 100 seasonal jobs in cultural resource management and monitoring, fisheries restoration, watershed rehabilitation, trail development, resource inventories, land stewardship planning, and other areas, hiring 75 Indian people and 25 non-Indian people.
As we enter our next exciting era of cultural land conservation in the region, we thank the many Friends of Sinkyone for their continued support of this intertribal effort to honor the Sinkyone people and to return the cultural stewardship of Sinkyone lands back to local Indian peoples' hands.
For more information
please contact the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council
at 707/463-6745.
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InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council
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TOC for Forest & River News, Spring 2007