By Robin Meadows
Five years ago, Plains Miwok cultural practitioner Don Hankins got a surprising invitation from Russ Ryan, a project manager at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. The agency owns four islands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, including one called Webb Tract, and Ryan asked Hankins for help stewarding them from an Indigenous perspective.
Hankins was skeptical at first. Metropolitan gets much of its water via the Delta, and he had seen the impact of such water exports firsthand as a child. His family had a place on Old River near Clifton Court Forebay, an expanse of open water near a pumping station that pulls water south from the Delta. “I could see sturgeon and other fish entrained in the forebay,” Hankins recalls.
But Hankins feels a deep-rooted responsibility toward the Delta. He was also moved when Ryan visited him at California State University Chico, where he’s a professor of geography and planning. On a walk in Big Chico Creek Ecological Reserve, the pair forged a partnership that included bringing tribes into planning a new wetland on Webb Tract from the very beginning.
“It’s a game changer,” says Hankins, noting that this is the first time tribes have been integral to a restoration project in the Delta.
METROPOLITAN’S DELTA ISLANDS ADAPTATION PROJECT
Metropolitan bought its islands in the central Delta in 2016. Back then, these islands were in the footprint of the state’s plan to tunnel water under the region in hopes of boosting the reliability of exports. But the tunnel plan―now called the Delta Conveyance Project―has since been downsized and rerouted, and no longer involves the agency’s islands.
The question then became “now what can we do with these islands?” says Malinda Stalvey, a Metropolitan project manager who leads the Webb Tract wetland restoration.
So Metropolitan launched the Delta Islands Adaptation Project, which is led by Ryan and uses the four islands to help address Delta woes such as extreme soil loss and carbon emissions. The central Delta once had exceptionally deep peat soil—some 150 feet that built up over 10,000 years—but is now subsided as much as 30 feet below sea level.
Draining the region’s wetlands for agriculture exposed the soil to air, letting microbes break down the peat. This soil loss stresses the islands’ levees and releases tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The remedy is putting water and wetland plants back on the landscape to create peat, reversing subsidence and sequestering carbon.
Webb Tract, which was farmed for corn until a few years ago, loses up to 1.5 inches of soil and emits 50,000 tons of carbon per year. Now nearly half of the 5,500-acre island is slated to be restored to wetlands that rebuild soil. Much of the rest will be planted with rice, which grows in water and so halts subsidence. The hope is that sales of rice, a high-value crop, and wetland carbon credits will cover the considerable costs of maintaining the island’s levees.
Funding for the rice and wetland restoration projects is provided by the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Conservancy.
INCLUDING TRIBES FROM THE OUTSET
Ryan reached out to tribes early while planning the Delta Islands Adaptation Project, a process that began in 2019 and took five years. These initial conversations laid the foundation for trust. “There’s a suspicion there and rightly so,” Ryan says. “There’s a history there.” California tribes have been killed, persecuted, and swindled out of their land since Europeans began arriving in the late 1700s.
“Trust is the biggest building block,” Ryan continues. “If you don’t have that, you don’t have anything.”
Ryan’s dedication to including Indigenous people stems from his experience as an Eagle Scout in Rhode Island, when the Narragansett Tribe taught him ceremonial dances and how to make beads and headdresses. “It had a profound influence on me and connects with what I’m doing now in the Delta with tribes,” he says.
For her part, Stalvey had spent the previous 10 years on Metropolitan’s California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) approvals. CEQA requires tribal consultation under AB 52―but this takes place so far into the design process that projects might as well be set in stone.
“We always heard from tribes that by the time consultation happens, it was too late,” Stalvey says. “I wanted to include them early on in the design instead of after the fact.”
A key part of tribal inclusion was compensation. “We felt the cultural practitioners should be paid for their expertise and time,” Stalvey says, adding that her team built tribal compensation into the project budget.”
ECOCULTURAL RESTORATION
To give tribes a voice in the Webb Tract wetland restoration, Hankins teamed up with Northern Sierra Mewuk culture bearer Austin Stevenot. The two are longtime family friends and co-chair the restoration’s Ecocultural Working Group, which includes basketweavers, healers and other Indigenous culture bearers and practitioners. In an ecocultural worldview, people’s identities are both cultural and ecological. Instead of having an extractive relationship with the natural world, humanity is part of and responsible for it.
“We’re paying attention to not just what we need but what other critters need,” says Stevenot, who directs tribal engagement for River Partners, a nonprofit dedicated to restoring California’s waterways. “You can’t just focus on fixing one part—you need to address all issues as one, as a whole.”
The Ecocultural Working Group wanted the Webb Tract restoration to include plants that Indigenous people need to survive, including for food, baskets and medicine, as well as plants for nonhumans, including flowers for pollinators. The group also wanted to preserve sand dunes that project engineers had earmarked for maintaining the island’s levees over the next 30 years.
“I said no,” Stevenot says. “Those dunes are the high point so that’s where we’d find any remnants of culture.”
These sand formations are also among the last of the Antioch Dunes, which are home to the endangered Antioch Dunes evening primrose. The plant, which grows primarily in pure sand, is not currently found on Webb Tract. Stevenot hopes to restore the primrose to the island’s dunes, a possibility Stalvey has begun to explore with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
California tribes have lost access to almost all of their ancestral lands, and early conversations during the Delta Islands Adaptation Project planning phase led to the idea of offering Indigenous people a place for ceremony as well as for tending and gathering culturally important plants. “We haven’t been able to harvest here for a long time,” Hankins says.
This vision of tribal access could be realized as part of the Webb Tract wetland restoration.
BENEFITS GO BOTH WAYS
The Ecocultural Working Group gave as much as they got. Project engineers originally planned to make about 20 small wetland units, which would have been pricey to build and manage. Instead, the tribal group recommended taking advantage of the island’s topography by using existing high ground for the wetland’s major berms.
That brought the number of wetland units down to seven, lowering the cost of construction. Metropolitan didn’t calculate a precise figure but, Stalvey says, without the savings “we would not have had enough money to build the project.”
“The land tells us a lot,” Hankins says. “We’re using our cultural knowledge of living in place since time immemorial.”
Stalvey also hopes to include tribes in managing the wetland. Tribes traditionally burned tules, tall, spiky reeds that dominate Delta marshes. Tules form peat, reversing subsidence and cutting carbon emissions. But when these plants get too dense, they stop growing. Stewarding tules with fire can boost their productivity, accelerating peat formation and carbon sequestration.
“We’re integrating traditional knowledge to fast-track restoration,” Hankins says.
Working closely with tribes also introduced Stalvey to a different mindset. “It changed how I look at the land—they don’t see it as a commodity,” she says. Maximizing crop production boosts profits in the short term but can ultimately come at the expense of the natural world. Tribes take the sustainable approach of using only what they need to survive until the next season.
This long view is fundamental to Indigenous stewardship. “We think intergenerationally—200 years out,” Hankins says.
