Editor’s note: Magdalena Valderrama is the Program Director at Seigler Springs Community Redevelopment Association, a 501c3 nonprofit organization in Lake County, California specializing in facilitating collaboration among neighborhoods, Tribal nations, county agencies, municipal advisory councils, special districts, and nonprofits for community resilience in wildfire mitigation and watershed restoration. Magdalena is a longtime member with FAC Net and has worked with the Indigenous Peoples Burning Network. In this blog, she shares reflections from a series of workshops organized in Lake County with the involvement of local Tribes and community members. Blog cover photo credit: Alan Hurwitz Productions.

In mid-2022, the Seigler Springs Community Redevelopment Association (SSCRA) was awarded two grants to develop a “Cobb Mountain Watershed Education and Restoration Program” (Cobb WERP). Initial funding came from the California State Blue Ribbon Committee for the Rehabilitation of Clear Lake established by the legislature to address long standing environmental degradation of the lake. The roots of this degradation go back over 150 years, leaving behind a shoreline Superfund site, seasonal harmful algal blooms, a critically endangered native fish species, and runoff from gold rush era mercury mining in the area. Significantly, the mandate from the State not only addresses technical water quality elements but also the socioeconomic impacts of the lake on the surrounding community. Additional funding was provided by the Pacific Gas & Electric Corporate Foundation. Continuation of the program has been approved by the Blue Ribbon Committee but is pending appropriations by the California legislature.

We stumbled into the work of co‐stewarding private lands with Indigenous Tribes over the past year and a half.  As nonprofit executives and wildfire survivors, we’d been learning since the 2015 Valley Fire in northern California to apply various wildfire mitigation practices and were later invited to join the Fire Networks in  their common efforts to weave these into efficient and sensitive strategies.

In the years since 2015,  after learning our initial lessons on creating defensible space and taking on more broadly-based wildfire mitigation, we could clearly see the connection between the fire adaptation work we had been doing in the Cobb Mountain area and the health of the local watershed creeks that feed the lake. In 2022, when we were invited to participate in the State’s Blue Ribbon Committee for the Rehabilitation of Clear Lake, we were pleased for the chance to advocate for inclusion of upstream and community/cultural issues in re-establishing the resilience of our area and the lake. But the timing was such that there were only 48 hours left to meet the State budget deadline facing the Committee. We enthusiastically proposed a workshop series to educate property owners along three main creeks originating on Cobb Mountain (which was the Valley Fire epicenter).  

 

Gathering everyone at the table

Reaction to our initial proposal was immediate. The environmental director of one of the local Tribes, the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians, pointed out that they had already been at the forefront of water data collection and water advocacy for the lake and its creeks for many years. Therefore, any kind of education or training for community members about the waters and lands of the creeks and lake needed the Tribe’s direct involvement.

We were not surprised at the initial skepticism towards our newcomer’s approach. Tribes have been fighting for recognition for a very long time, and many people have shown up declaring their willingness to help or offer support. Previous and ongoing participation by SSCRA in discussions at the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network and in a continuous learning group with Mary Huffman, (Executive Director at the Indigenous People’s Burning Network), had already provided us with background understanding not only the great cultural losses of the local Tribes but in particular their continual stewardship whenever given the chance and for which they themselves have been calling with clearer voices than was possible before. But for all our good intentions, previous successes in the community, and study, we were still an unknown to the Tribes in our area.

Thus began a series of cautious discussions as to how our partnership might work, a first step directly in line with our vision of weaving the most beneficial possible networks of local interconnection. It was important to take the time to size each other up thoughtfully and determine what the best ways forward might be.

The Tribal representatives, including a Tribal elder and the environmental protection director, agreed to work with us after these careful and thorough conversations. The next step was to meet the technical people they thought best to bring on board. And that’s when the project became a Tribal-centric watershed and restoration project involving interested landowners in developing a hands-on shared stewardship of these headwater lands, and a step in the direction of eco-cultural restoration. (See local news coverage about the partnership).  

Understanding local context to inform action

Our conversations about the land within the group and with the current landowners have been challenging. Our Tribal mentors pointed out that before the “unsettlers” arrived here in Northern California, it was possible for two men to ride horses side by side from the coast all the way to Sacramento (as reported by the earliest Russian arrivals), not because the landscape was “a paradise” meant to “exercise dominion over” but because it was the result of intensive and detailed vegetation management. We learned that Indigenous people carefully kept conifer populations in check in our area, favoring instead hardwood species that provided food (oaks, manzanita, madrone) and a more game-friendly landscape. Tended landscapes also have a much lower density of stems per acre, resulting in much higher groundwater reserves as well as year-round creek flows, whereas currently, key creeks do not even make it all the way to Clear Lake anymore.

We’ve also been learning about the specific and complex site-specific landscape management regimes traditionally practiced by Tribes, such as supporting deep-rooting (and fire adapted) native grasses critical for creek bank stability, recognizing the 300+ year life-cycles of keystone oak species, and valuing the effects of smoke for insect pest control at key times of the year. How these traditional practices will translate into new forms of stewardship in a recovering landscape, and what new social and political relationships this could give rise to, remains to be seen as we have just concluded the first 18 months of the program and are finalizing our reports.

Bringing together knowledge systems

Thanks to our Tribal partners and the people they chose to bring in, we saw for ourselves how western technical approaches could be applied together with Indigenous science and methods rather than at odds with each other.  

And we all came to appreciate how Pomo basket weaving is an activity that closely mirrors the further goals of community weaving. The baskets made by the Pomo people are known worldwide for the artistry and intricacy of their design as well as impeccable craftsmanship, all deeply rooted in honoring the complex matrix of relationships that tie Tribal (community) well-being to the natural world. It can take hundreds of hours and even years depending on growing conditions until a local basketweaver has enough of the right materials to meet the need for a particular type of basket.  Some basket designs will never be made again in our lifetime because the conditions for the materials involved no longer exist.

In the same vein, though only recently in comparison to Pomo stewardship, SSCRA has been working at the grassroots level meeting with many different people and groups over time, cultivating learning and sharing along the way. We realized that the same could be said of each member of our team, and then also the landowners who joined the program.  

Workshop successes and looking forward

In all, a dozen local property owners enrolled in a series of six learn-and-do workshops, each of which combined sit-down study/discussion sessions and hands-on restoration work. Participants included institutional and commercial land owners as well as private home owners. Our constant theme has been how each property we work with is connected to the wider community and the whole watershed. Landowner participants have learned how to better care for their land, established durable relationships with Tribal members, and benefitted from hands-on cooperative labor on their land.

In some future article, I hope to explore how restoring the physical landscape connects with a required cultural shift in the local community, which over the years has come to love the groves of “whispering pine” forest that exist today – or rather that did exist until catastrophic fire destroyed vast swaths of it. Shifting our expectations of what the landscape should look and feel like, and learning how to be active stewards of that landscape will be key themes of this and other projects in the years ahead.

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