The central California coast, with its rugged beaches and kelp forests, draws a lot of visitors for its scenic beauty. For the Chumash people, the coastline means a lot more.
“Almost all the places people like to go to are our sacred sites,” says Violet Sage Walker, chairwoman of the Northern Chumash Tribal Council. “We’ve been going there and praying and doing ceremony there for 20,000 years.”
More than 7,000 square miles of ocean there could soon become the largest national marine sanctuary in the continental U.S. It could also make history as one of the first federal sanctuaries to be spearheaded by a Native American tribe, part of a growing movement to give tribes a say over the lands and waters that were once theirs.
The campaign has spanned more than a decade, after Walker’s father nominated the area with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 2015. Becoming the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary would mean the waters are largely protected from development, like oil rigs and wind turbines.
Walker and other tribal members are looking for more than just conservation – they want to be co-managers of the sanctuary. Under the Biden administration, tribes have been given decision-making powers over public lands in a handful of places, in an effort to repair centuries of exclusion and displacement.
“We are not wanting to be employees of NOAA,” Walker says. “We are wanting to be separate and equal, so that we have autonomous decision making.”
NOAA is expected to release details about how co-management might work in a few weeks, as part of a final proposal for the sanctuary, the last step before it’s designated. But Walker is already getting started by helping set up an ecosystem monitoring…
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