By Robin Meadows
The first time Malissa Tayaba visited one of her ancestral village sites on the banks of the Sacramento River, she was in tears.
“We are river people, we are salmon people. The river fed us, clothed us, and kept us healthy,” said Tayaba, Vice Chair of the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians, at the 2024 State of the Estuary Conference. “Everything we need to be who we are comes from the river.”
But her ancestors were forced off their homelands in and around the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta long ago, and relocated inland away from the waterways intrinsic to their identity.
Now the Delta Stewardship Council, a state agency, is collaborating with tribes to highlight their priorities, such as facilitating tribal access to ancestral lands and waters, weaving traditional knowledge into managing and restoring the Delta, and fostering tribal and environmental justice.
“One thing we have to acknowledge is the long history of depredations of the state to tribes―we’re trying to right historical wrongs,” says Brandon Chapin, the Delta Stewardship Council’s Legislative and Policy Advisor and Tribal Liaison. Chapin describes his liaison role as developing meaningful partnerships with tribes. Instead of just “checking the box with an email notification,” he says, agencies should form relationships with tribes and include them early enough for their input to be meaningful for decision-making.
HISTORICAL WRONGS
When European settlers arrived in the Delta in the late 1700s, they drove out the Indigenous peoples who had lived here for hundreds of generations and remade the land to suit themselves. The Delta, once a vast complex of tidal marsh and low islands, was drained and leveed. Today the region is an agricultural powerhouse and the hub of California’s water delivery system. The flourishing villages of the people who were here first exist only in memories passed down by Indigenous elders and culture keepers.
Stone spearpoints put people in the Delta region as the last Ice Age ended, some 13,000 years or 650 generations ago. The area’s wealth of wildlife and plant life supported one of the densest Indigenous populations in North America. The Delta was once home to about 10,000 native peoples in villages of up to 1,000 people, whose cultures and traditions were deeply rooted in the land and water where they lived.
Then, shortly after seeing the Delta in a 1772 expedition, the Spanish came to the region. They brought smallpox, diphtheria and other new diseases that killed many native people, and tore many others from their homelands―and the ways of life, or lifeways, inextricably bound to those lands―to build and live in missions. In 1823 the Mexican Republic overthrew the Spanish but Indigenous people fared no better under the new regime, which continued to coerce their labor with violence.
Devastating as this was, “what came next was worse still,” wrote Edward Castillo (Cahuilia-Luiseno), an Indigenous historian at Sonoma State who specialized in Native American history and culture, in a Short Overview of California Indian History.
The 1848 “discovery of gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada…ushered in one of the darkest episodes of dispossession, widespread sexual assault, and mass murder against the native people of California.” By 1900 settlers―or, as some say, invaders―had decimated California’s native population from more than 300,000 to just 16,000 people, and taken over most of their homelands. There are no tribes left in the Delta.
TRIBES ARE STILL HERE
But, as tribal members say in a 2024 poster portrait series in downtown San Francisco, “We are still here.” California has the most tribes in the U.S., including 109 that are federally recognized and many more that are not. In 2011, Governor Jerry Brown issued an executive order requiring each state agency to have a tribal liaison who consults with Indigenous peoples on managing sites that are sacred or vital to their cultural traditions and heritage. In 2019, California became the first state to issue a formal apology to tribes for, as Governor Newsom said, “violence, exploitation, dispossession, and attempted destruction of tribes and their people.”
Just as California’s native people are still here despite past atrocities, they still pass their lifeways from one generation to the next. “It is a testament to the strength, resiliency, and perseverance of Delta Indigenous peoples that they and their rich cultures survived to the present day,” wrote archaeologist and historian David Stuart in Refuge and Resistance: Delta Indigenous Nations Helped Shape California Colonial History.
THE HEART OF CALIFORNIA
Indigenous peoples also still feel connected with and responsible for stewarding their former homelands in the Delta. “They remember the villages of those tribes that gathered here, that traveled here, that traded here,” said Rebecca Allen, a former Tribal Historic Preservation Director for the United Auburn Indian Community, in a 2023 Delta Stewardship Council Tribal Listening Session.
“They remember the place of deep spiritual and cultural memory and meaning,” continued Allen, who is not Indigenous but was authorized to speak for the tribe. “That’s never gone away―it’s still here.”
The big takeaway of the listening session for Chapin is that to tribes, the Delta is the “heart of California” and extends to the entire watershed, which stretches north to Mt. Shasta and south to the Tulare Basin. While the Delta is relatively small at a little over 1,000 square miles, it drains nearly half of the state.
Two mighty rivers―the Sacramento and the San Joaquin―meet here, sending water from Mount Shasta and the Sierra Nevada through the Delta and San Francisco Bay and out to the Pacific Ocean. Just as these river systems connect with the Delta, the tribes throughout the watershed are connected to the Delta.
“Tribes see themselves as its original and continuing guardians,” Chapin says. Other takeaways from the Council’s Tribal Listening Session Chair are spotlighted in a blog post called How we can all be Guardians of the Delta.
More tribal initiatives are underway. This year the Council’s Delta Science Program research awards, which fund studies that inform water and environmental decision-making in the Delta, call for participatory projects where researchers partner with communities affected by the research. The Science Program encourages projects by tribes, and offers to connect non-Indigenous researchers with tribes. Projects will be awarded early next year.
The Council is also drafting a Tribal and Environmental Justice Issue Paper in consultation with California tribes and others. The paper will include tribal issues, concerns and recommendations, and is expected out later this year.
MEANINGFUL TRIBAL INCLUSION
To help share Indigenous perspectives on the Delta more widely, Chapin also organized the State of the Estuary conference session where Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians Vice Chair Tayaba spoke earlier this year. The conference is geared toward planners, resource managers, and restoration practitioners who work in the San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary, making them an ideal audience for what she and her fellow panelists had to say.
Tayaba told the packed room about visiting her tribe’s original village sites along waterways. “Those places are suffering,” she said, citing E. coli contamination and algal blooms. “We want to protect the river not only for us, but for all people.”
“Water is important to us―it’s our lifeway,” Tayaba continued, adding that it’s hard to get state and federal agencies to understand what water means to tribes. “Our mantra is culture is ecology and ecology is culture.”
Ivan Senock, a former Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for Buena Vista Rancheria of Me-Wuk Indians of California, put it this way: “All natural resources are also cultural resources to tribes.”
He added that Indigenous knowledge is not necessarily opposed to Western science. Rather, these two different frameworks for living in this world can benefit each other. “We need to give tribal knowledge the same respect and reverence as for the letters of the degrees after my name,” said Senock, a cultural anthropologist who is not Indigenous. “Tribes are the true subject matter experts of the land.”
In particular, Delta projects should be co-developed with tribes so “Indigenous knowledge is part of them from ground zero,” said Don Hankins, a Miwkoʔ (Plains Miwok) traditional culture practitioner and Professor of Geography and Planning at California State University, Chico. “We want to elevate Indigenous knowledge for the greater good, not just for us as tribal people, because we’re all in this together.”
However, tribal input and participation can be impeded by state and federal agency turnover. “Nothing’s worse than building relationships and having a change in management and having to build relationships all over again,” said Hankins, whose ancestral home is in the Delta.
Lack of capacity is another impediment to tribal participation. “It’s a bandwidth issue,” Hankins said. “There aren’t enough of us to go around.” Indigenous peoples account for about two percent of Californians.
Another consideration is that apologies and consultations only go so far. “Tribes have been left out,” Tayaba said. “We need a seat at the table.”
