Indigenous Rights and Effective Climate Resilience
Indigenous Rights and Effective Climate Resilience
In partnership with the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe in California, USA
Since 1970, the Sierra Nevada in northern California has experienced a 256% increase in large wildfires (Schoennagel et al., 2017).
In 2022, wildfires burned roughly 362,000 acres (1465 sq. kilometers) across the state. Northern Sierra Nevada experienced the largest fire, accounting for 63,000 acres (255 sq. kilometers) (Ives, 2022).
In Nevada County, approximately 50% of the population currently live in very high wildfire-risk areas (CCHVIz, 2023).
This case study investigates the relationships between contemporary climate-related environmental vulnerabilities and the destruction of Indigenous lives, sovereignty, and culture in Nevada County, northern California, USA.
Findings are in part based on oral history interviews conducted by the lead researchers with members of the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe (NCRNT) and non-native community members. Findings are also informed by data that emerged from a day-long workshop with Tribal members and elders, community members, researchers, and local civil society to define and elaborate on the links between climate impacts, conflict, capacities for social cohesion, and climate resilience.
In-country collaboration took place in December 2022. We hold deep appreciation for the NCRNT, their non-profit arm California Heritage: Indigenous Research Project (CHIRP), and members of the local community of Nevada County, CA.
“Nature and Nisenan culture are deeply intertwined. Damage one and the other feels it. They are counterweights paired to balance each other. The Nisenan were able to strike that balance and thrived for thousands of years. All aspects of Nisenan life were dependent on the environment, who provided not only the means to survive, but to flourish…Nearly every tradition and cultural practice is tied to a landscape and its resources that no longer exist.”
Shelly Covert, Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribal Spokesperson
The most pressing environmental vulnerabilities in California must be understood as directly tied to the history of dispossession and violence against Indigenous peoples and land from the start of European colonization, intensifying during the gold rush and continuing into the mid 20th century. This has been recognized by academics and the state of California as a genocide.
By 1870, the Native population in California had been reduced to 20,000 people, less than half of the population that existed in 1848.
Policies in the late 1950s and early 1960s also severed Tribal sovereignty by ‘canceling’ the recognition status of 44 tribes. Today, the NCRNT is one of numerous remaining tribes to have been terminated during this period that have not been restored, leaving them without a recognized land base or political sovereignty vis-à-vis the United States.
“This is living history. This isn’t in the past. It started in the past, and it’s still going on today.”
Saxon Thomas, NCRNT Council Member
Without the political, economic, and cultural sovereignty afforded through federal recognition, tribes like the NCRNT often remain unable to formally participate in or lead key decision making processes around the management of and protection against climate vulnerabilities.
Federal recognition affords tribes with eligibility for US government funding, as well as rights to self-governance, access to a land base, housing, healthcare, education, economic development opportunities, and political representation within local, state, and federal processes.
The forced displacement of Indigenous populations from their homelands, destruction of pre-gold rush environments, and the systematic exclusion of Indigenous groups from the planning and management of environmental issues remains a key challenge in addressing the environment-fragility-peace nexus.
Despite this, the NCRNT has forged alternative forms of sovereignty that facilitate both social cohesion and climate resilience through various legal, social, and economic activities. As a result, the NCRNT has been able to facilitate the revival of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and practice to address key climate vulnerabilities in the region.
This systems map explores conflict, climate impacts, resilience, and peace in Nevada County, California by illustrating linkages among key driving factors (KDFs) of conflict and peace and their manifestations experienced by community members.
Climate impacts and vulnerabilities
For tribes such as the NCRNT, the most significant conflicts emerged around the gold rush in 1848 both as a result of state-sponsored violence and Western settler damage to environments. The destruction of the natural environment and of Indigenous cultures during this period has played a central role in worsening the climate vulnerabilities of today.
Key driving factors of conflict
Despite facing significant limitations as a federally terminated Tribe, the NCRNT has developed a set of resilience strategies that have enabled their cultural survival and increased resilience to climate change amidst ongoing climate vulnerabilities.
These strategies include the historic preservation of Nisenan history and TEK; engagement in legal efforts to access and sustainably manage ancestral land; and collaboration with local organizations to reduce wildfire risks, sustainably manage landscapes, and conduct advocacy.
“So that same rock that was there hundreds of years ago – it heard that language, and I think it likes to hear it again. And all of our burns over the thousands of years, going down into the earth and coming up in trees and bushes. You know, it’s all part of this. We’re connected.”
Sarah Thomas, NCRNT Elder
Factors for climate resilience
For the NCRNT, TEK refers primarily to traditional Nisenan knowledge and cultural practices of wildfire prevention, forest management, and natural resource management within the Sierra Nevada. The preservation of cultural burning knowledge and the application of this knowledge by younger generations has enabled the NCRNT to engage in projects to increase climate resilience in Nevada County by using its burning practices to reduce wildfire risk. For instance, The Sierra Fund explicitly states that their current conservation collaboration with the NCRNT “relies on the cultural memory of the Nisenan for land-based activities at the Nisenan Cultural Reclamation Corridor that will protect and restore natural resources, including healthy forest and riparian ecosystems.”
The Tribe is also a part of MineWatch, a coalition of 25 organizations led by the Community Environmental Advocates Foundation, who oppose the re-opening of the Idaho-Maryland Mine in Grass Valley. Through advocacy work with this coalition, the NCRNT has pushed for systems change and increased cultural awareness around the dangers of new mining activities. The Tribe has also used this space as a platform for educating the public around the historic legacy of the mining sector in Nevada City; consequently, community support against the mine has increased and the NCRNT has been increasingly viewed as a central actor in the decision-making process.
Led by NCRNT council member Saxon Thomas, the Tribe has also partnered with Firewise Community to run a program teaching local homeowners in Nevada County how to burn fuel and restore native plants on private land in order to create a defensible space to protect their properties from wildfires. Through this collaboration, NCRNT burning practices are able to directly support the resilience of the broader Nevada City community by implementing a resilience technique that reduces the risks and consequences of catastrophic wildfires. This collaboration is raising public awareness of disaster risk reduction through the promotion of prescribed burns, thus contributing to normative change around forest management.
The NCRNT define ‘peace’ and ‘social cohesion’ in the context of the history of their erasure, prioritizing the protection and dissemination of their culture for new generations, the ability to ensure the future physical survival of Tribal members and the natural environment, and the ability to maintain collaborative and positive relationships with the non-native community as central to these definitions.
While continuing to seek restoration of their federal recognition status, the NCRNT has successfully forged peace and social cohesion via alternative forms of sovereignty in its absence.
Factors for peace and social cohesion
‘Uba Seo and the recurring Visibility Through Art exhibits have had remarkable impacts – not only have they increased the Tribe’s visibility locally, they have provided the community with a central space for which to engage with the Tribe and how it wants its story to be told, thereby opening up space for authentic and constructive shared healing. This ability to engage the non-native community in shared learning and healing is central to the NCRNT’s social cohesion because it facilitates the creation of strong community bonds and a shared purpose.
Inspired by similar Indigenous-led reparations programs, the Ancestral Homelands Reciprocity Program encourages residents within the Bear and ‘Uba watersheds to contribute towards “the stability and restoration of the original people of this land.” Donations are used to support the financial, social, and cultural needs of the Tribe, including environmental protection efforts and language restoration. This reparations program has become a vital source of financial resources to maintain the Tribe’s activities and support Tribal members in the absence of recognition benefits. Whilst relying on existing relationships that the Tribe has forged with local community members, the AHRP also functions as a source of relationship building by inviting community members to stand in reciprocity with the Tribe and “transform our community and our culture into one based on integrity and respect for the rights of all beings.” By engaging in a reparations program, community members therefore become active participants in historical reconciliation and restorative justice efforts. This approach prioritizes the repair of social connections and peace and enhances communications between the Tribe and the local community.
Conclusions
This case study underlines the need for holistic, historically-informed approaches to addressing climate change and conflict vulnerabilities that recognize, center, and support the knowledge and experience of Indigenous communities.
Indigenous groups like the NCRNT reveal how we can successfully approach the environment-fragility-peace nexus and create opportunities for both increased social cohesion and environmental resilience in the process.
In the face of historical and ongoing erasure, social cohesion, backed by a strong connection to place, close family ties, and local language revival, serves as a core driver of peace for the NCRNT and the local community.
Send questions or comments to Diana Campos at [email protected].
To learn more about CDA’s Environment-Fragility-Peace Nexus project, contact us at [email protected].
