Newsom supports tribal land return amid dam removal project

It’s been more than a century since members of the Shasta Indian Nation saw the last piece of their ancestral home — the landscape along the Klamath River where villages once stood — submerged because of a massive hydroelectric project.

The settlement now covers more than 2,800 acres of land, known as Kikaseki, will be returned to the tribe. Part of reclamation The largest river restoration effort in US historyThe removal of four dams and reservoirs that had cut the tribe off from the spiritual center of their world.

“For so long we have felt a great loss, a loss of our family, a loss of our ancestors, a loss of our villages and ceremonial sites,” said Shasta Indian Nation Chairwoman Janice Crow. “Now we can return home, return to culture, return to ceremony, and begin to weave a new story for the next generation of Shasta who will once again be able to call our ancestors’ land home.”

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Recently, Governor Gavin Newsom announced the state’s support to mark the fifth anniversary of his apology to Indigenous Californians for the theft, violence, forced assimilation, and emotional trauma they suffered — and his promise to make reparations partly through land reclamation.

Located along a sacred waterway, the area is surrounded by oak and redwood forests and rocky cliffs where the Shasta harvested elderberries and currants, hunted deer, and netted salmon using wild pumpkin root. It has also been the site of tribal ceremonies.

Until recently, much of the site was submerged beneath the Copco and Iron Gate reservoirs.

with Closing of dams and draining water from reservoirsMiles of river valley are once again visible, and the return of free-flowing water has fueled hopes of reviving the salmon runs that have sustained the valley’s tribes since time immemorial. The Klamath River Renewal Corp. will transfer 2,800 acres once the work is complete, which could come by the end of the year.

The reappearance of stolen land brings back a horrific chapter in the Shasta people’s history, said Sami Jo DiFuntorum, the tribe’s chief cultural preservation officer. She has guided tours in the area for years.

The gold rush of the mid-to-late 1800s brought miners to the region, killing indigenous people and sexually assaulting indigenous women. Violence and land theft were already terrible enough, Defantorum said, but this led to another atrocity – the displacement of people who believed the land was part of them.

“Some people say it’s ingrained in our DNA,” Difuntorum said of this deep attachment to the natural world. “That’s how I feel when I go up there.”

Then in 1911, what remained of Shasta was seized through eminent domain — the process by which governments and special districts purchase private property against the owner’s will — in order to build the Copco No. 1 Dam, part of the Lower Klamath Project that is now being demolished.

“People didn’t want to sell; people didn’t want to leave,” Difuntorum, 65, said.

She thinks about the plight of Shasta women, such as her great-grandmother’s family, who was known to all as Kitty Grasshopper. After the dam was built, Grasshopper’s daughters married local white landowners, DiFuntorum said.

Difuntorum recounts stories told by elders about the pressures women faced to adopt the ways of the dominant white culture and suppress their tribal identity.

She struggles to put into words how strange it feels for tribal members to have survived for so long, knowing that the place they felt most at home is in someone else’s hands, and at the bottom of man-made lakes.

“When you think about the health and well-being of the Indian people, it’s mental, emotional, physical, spiritual, everything,” she said. “Whenever we go on tour there, I don’t think I’ve ever been able to go there without crying — I wouldn’t say I melted down — but crying … it feels like it’s a generational wound.”

The lands being returned to the Shasta Indian Nation include not only the portion of the Copco Reservoir that was known as Ward’s Canyon Ranch, but also the old Copco No. 2 powerhouse, which still stands. Defantorum said there are plans to turn the powerhouse into an interpretive learning center where visitors can learn about the story of the tribe and the river.

The tribe will also work to restore native vegetation on the land, especially plants the tribe has traditionally grown for food, basketry, medicine and ceremonies. Some of the crops, as well as preserved deer and salmon meat, will be shared with tribal members through the Food Sovereignty Program.

The Difuntorum are also looking forward to the construction of a six-mile-long Heritage Trail and the revival of the First Salmon Ceremony, an annual springtime event marking the start of the salmon fishing season, a ritual the tribe has not been able to perform since before the dams were built.

Difuntorum asks, “How do you restore people’s sense of place?”

She believes the state’s effort to return land to the Shasta Indian Nation, a group of Shasta people not recognized as a sovereign entity by the federal government, offers one answer to this question. She sees the partnership as a model for how governments work with tribes to atone for wrongs that shattered civilizations and caused generations of heartache.

The Newsom administration’s support comes after similar moves to help other tribes reclaim land or enter into co-management agreements. The state’s Tribal Nature-Based Solutions Grant Program has awarded $107.7 million to fund 34 projects and return nearly 50,000 acres of land to California tribes — including the Hoopa Valley Tribe’s acquisition of 10,395 acres of forested property and the Tule River Tribe’s acquisition of 14,672 acres for environmental and species conservation.

The Yurok Tribe recently entered into a new arrangement with Save the Redwoods, California State Parks, and the National Park Service Becoming co-manager of ‘O Reve’The culturally significant 125-acre property was transferred back to them.

“You hear a lot of talk about reparations and justice — I don’t even know what justice would be for me as a Native woman,” Difuntorum said of her tribe’s land reclamation.

“Getting the land back so our people can return to the place we came from – that’s very important,” he said. “But should it be more than that? I don’t know the answer to that, but I think it’s a good start.”