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Legacy of the Land

Jeremy Charles (Smith River, California) - In 2023, the Tolowa Dee-ni' people alongside partnering tribes asserted sovereignty over the 700 square miles of their ancestral fisheries. Now in 2024, we see how marine science and resource management can be guided by community and culture.

In Northern California, Marine science is guided by Tolowa Dee-ni' Nation’s community and culture.

Keepers of the Coastline

The Arthur Vining Davis Foundation

GBH Climate and Environment Fund

In 2023, the Tolowa Dee-ni' people alongside partnering tribes asserted sovereignty over the 700 square miles of their ancestral fisheries. Now in 2024, we see how marine science and resource management can be guided by community and culture.

In Northern California, Marine science is guided by Tolowa Dee-ni' Nation’s community and culture.

Nature

Keepers of the CoastlinePublished: September 13, 2024Sheryl Steinruck: When we were kids, when it was a low tide, you can go out and get razor clams, quahogs or mussels and everything, and that seemed to change over time.Norene Darnell: We would dig clams all along here all my life for over 60 years. Seeing such a decrease, in the clams especially, and now they're gone, the clams are gone.Sheryl Steinruck: And those kind of food changes, we had to adapt because of the weather and the way things changed. We one time had to go five years. We came down here five years in a row with no fish. Even though we weren't able to catch fish, we still did the tradition, but it was really hard. I think it even preyed on our spirits because that wasn't there. I've often wondered, how do we carry our traditions if we don't have the resource available? How do you teach someone about how to do something if it's not here?Jaytuk Steinruck: The ocean, or the si~s-xa as we say it in our language, is a place to get food, a place to get materials for our ceremony.Suntayea Steinruck: The beach is part of who we are and our identity as native coastal people. I've seen a lot of impact from climate change, from the tides changing, coastal erosion ... that changes the vegetation. Our oceans are warmer, so we're seeing the decline in our fish populations, different changes in the birds and the way they migrate. All that has impacts. No matter how big or small, that throws off balance.Speaker 5: Grab it for me and [inaudible]Sheryl Steinruck: I'm going to get them busted here.Speaker 5: Yeah.Jaytuk Steinruck: We still continue the cultural practices of fish camp at a place called Yaa-ghii~-'aa~dvn or Hole-in-the-ground.Speaker 6: Tina, wants one.Sheryl Steinruck: Okay, you got to clean it, buddy.Jaytuk Steinruck: So, that's where we go and dry ... in our language we call it lhvmsr or surf smelt, and they come to shore to spawn every summer.Speaker 6: Pretty good, huh?Jaytuk Steinruck: The runs of our surf smelt, they're running either later in the year, so even our whole seasons have changed a bit.Sheryl Steinruck: Lhvmsr. Everybody say lhvmsr.Children: LhvmsrSheryl Steinruck: Shu'Children: Shu'Sheryl Steinruck: 'vtlhChildren: 'vtlhSheryl Steinruck: -nishChildren: -nishSheryl Steinruck: Shu' 'vtlh-nish. Fish tastes good. Shu' 'vtlh-nishWhen our ancestors ate this as a stable part of their diet, they would harvest pounds and pounds per family member, store it in their houses all winter long, and that's what they would eat.Rosa Laucci: We've seen a real sharp decline in the returns of these little fish to this beach, and they are one of our cultural keystone species. They're of huge importance to the tribe.Sheryl Steinruck: With the Tolowa Dee-ni' Nation, what we've done now is to come and study the beds, take the temperatures of the water, take the temperatures of the sand. Figure that out. What happened to our fish? Where did they go?Jaytuk Steinruck: And with the decline of the smaller fish or the forage fish, the school fish, it's affecting those big fish. It's affecting those marine mammals. It's affecting those sea birds. You know, we need to look at it as a whole. This is all connected. You take one piece out of that chain, that circle of life, then it affects all the way down. That's what's important. When I say indigenous knowledge is that overall holistic view. When you have that connection and you have that love, it makes it more personal, and if you don't look at it like that, then something will be left out.Rosa Laucci:We started off with a couple of few small projects looking at surf smelt and making sure that their spawning habitat is present and suitable for them to actually use. We map GPS around the gravel beds, then we test the temperature of the gravel beds. The eggs incubate at a certain level, and from there, it expanded into a lot of different monitoring efforts.Speaker 9: Probably close to 13, 16 [inaudible].Rosa Laucci: Yeah. So, we do lot or seaweed surveys, do la’-na surveys, which are sea star surveys, and that assesses the entire health of the rocky intertidal habitat. Healthy 70. We do biotoxin sampling, which tests dee-lhat and met’e, which is mussles and razor clams.Rudy Lopez: This is a mussel shell, and in our language, we call it [foreign language 00:05:26]. This is part of the main food source our people ate because it was abundant most times a year. What we do is we cut them open, we get our bottle, we freeze them, send it off to the lab. We want to check it for biotoxins. See out here, certain times of year, they have certain toxins that we can't eat. What we do is we test them every month, so if our tribal citizens or our elders want to eat these, anytime they can check our website for the tribe and always know if they're safe to eat. It's an important cultural food source for our people.Rosa Laucci: We do 3D modeling of rock intertidal habitats so that we can actually have that point in time to return to at a future date and check different species. We take about 12,000 photos of the area and then we stitch them together to make this 3D model. We create these models to have a very high resolution snapshot in time of this ecosystem, and then when we do them seasonally, we can actually layer the models on top of each other and see how organisms are moving in response to climate change and sea level rise.Suntayea Steinruck: We, the Tolowa, have had to step up and really start and advocating for being good stewards.Emily Reed: You know how we're talking about not having so much plastic at home, because look at where it ends up. On our beaches.Suntayea Steinruck: When we're good stewards, we're always seeking that positive balance between our actions as human beings and Mother Nature. I feel like right now we're out of balance. Now we're looking at how we as indigenous knowledge-keepers can promote that balance in terms that Western science can understand and try to strive for those connections so that they can relate. When you have that connection with all things, it's so powerful. You have an appreciation and respect for those things, and so you have a right and a privilege to take care of those things.Jaytuk Steinruck: I think it was 2009 when the state of California put in what was called the Marine Life Protection Act.Megan Rocha: The state was interested in developing a network of marine protected areas throughout California, and through that process there was no recognition of tribal rights.Rosa Laucci: But what we found out when the MPAs got established, there was no one around, no wardens to enforce the MPA, and so we took it upon ourselves. We would be out here and we would be doing our work and also the work of the state by making sure people were complying with the rules out here. The idea of the Marine Stewards Network started here at Tolowa. We have now this network in California of coastal tribes that are doing their own monitoring and just putting the management of those resources back in the hands of the tribe.Megan Rocha: We're really proud of the indigenous Marine Stewardship area. It's the first in the nation, Tolowa Dee-ni' Nation, as well as Trinidad Rancheria and the other tribes that have an interest in this area talked about how do we claim this area publicly and work together to steward it and then ultimately co-manage with the state as a piece. That was the development of the IMSA.Jaytuk Steinruck: This was a way to come together and protect our coastline. It's going from the Oregon border to Little River, just past the town of Trinidad, California. That was a way for us to designate this is our homelands. Also, acknowledge each tribe's individual sovereignty and exercise their rights in their own territory. We're here. We've been here forever. We've been stewarding these waters in these lands, so it helps strengthen Indian country and strengthen us as native people to come together. We just wanted to protect our resources and provide a spot, safe spot for all of our generations to come enjoy it.Norene Darnell: We should be the stewards of our own land. If we can preserve it and keep it clean and show other tribes on the water what they can do, it would be such an honor to be able to have those people look at us as, "Oh, they know what they're doing. They're trying to make things better, and that's what we should be doing too."Suntayea Steinruck: The action has to be now, the action has to be by us. I just think about that for my grandbabies. I want their grandbabies to sit here and admire the surf and hear these birds and feel the sunshine on their face. One thing that our future generations will be able to do is utilize the technology more and use it in the way that they're able to incorporate the indigenous mindset to it. I want us to make different choices and really take it serious when we listen to Mother Earth. She's telling us things that are going on, but we need to be willing to listen.

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