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In the mid-1980s, the multinational timber company Georgia-Pacific, operating under the regulatory supervision of the California Department of Forestry (CDF), was logging ancient coastal redwoods in the Sinkyone Wilderness area of Mendocino County, in northern California. American Indians from that area, joined by the International Indian Treaty Council, the Sierra Club, and the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC) in Eureka, California, sued the CDF, claiming that its approval of Georgia-Pacific's timber-harvesting plan in the Sinkyone area did not take into account California environmental laws or indigenous cultural usage of the land.
In 1985, the California Court of Appeals handed down a precedent-setting decision in EPIC v. Johnson, ruling on the side of the Indians and environmentalists that CDF had indeed violated California law. The Court also found that the "Department's response in addressing sufficiency of measures to mitigate damages to Native American archaeological sites was inadequate." As a result of the ruling, Georgia-Pacific sold part of the land, the 3800 acre "Sinkyone Upland Parcel," for $1.2 million to the Trust for Public Land, a non-profit organization that now officially owns it. (An adjacent parcel that was within the suit was taken over by the California State Park system.)
The Georgia-Pacific sale was managed by the California Coastal Conservancy, an agency of the California state government. The Coastal Conservancy lent the Trust for Public Land the money needed for the transaction to take place; it imposed a deadline of 31 December 1994 for the loan to be repaid. Now, the payment term has expired, the Coastal Conservancy has not been paid back, and it wants the Trust for Public Land to sell the land if it can find no other way to pay off its debt. The most likely buyers for the land would be north coast timber interests, who would jeopardize the redwoods as well as the regional environment.
Another product of the legal battle of 1985 was the creation of the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council (ITSWC), a consortium of ten federally recognized Indian nations of northern California. In the face of the pressure on the Trust for Public Land to sell the Sinkyone Upland Parcel, the ITSWC has proposed establishing it as the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Park, which would be the first park in the United States to put native territory back into native hands. The park would be open to all, but owned and managed by Native Californians who have practiced integrated resource management for generations. Since most of the land has had past industrial uses, especially logging, much of the Council's work would entail environmental restoration and reclamation. The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors voted 5-0 in support of the proposal.
The Council emphasizes the connections between the land and people, and between conservation and subsistence. Its plan is to reintroduce local Native American land practices "to protect, preserve, and restore the cultural and natural resources of the ancestral Sinkyone homelands. The ultimate goal of the ITSWC is to restore the entire Sinkyone bioregion." It wants the land to be made available for long term appropriate human involvement.
The Council's program coordinator, Hawk Rosales, thinks that "the results of [Sinkyone] will have positive effects not only on Indian country locally but throughout the Americas. It is about Indian people reclaiming stewardship of non-reservation land. It has the goal of co-management of this land, with this model at the Sinkyone. All of this land is still Indian country, we never gave up rights to the land."
The fate of the land is in limbo. In order to prevent the sale of the Sinkyone Upland Parcel to interests that would exploit it, the Council is attempting to raise the money needed to buy it. It needs to find $200,000 for a down-payment on the total amount required for the purchase, by 15 March 1995.
For more information, or to make a tax deductible donation, contact:
InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council
190 Ford Road, #333
Ukiah, CA 95482
(707) 485-8744
Fourth World Bulletin • Fall 1994/Winter 1995
Copyright © 1996 by the Fourth World Center
Created by Aigis Communications, Ltd