California’s redwood forests: Tribal co-management as systemic restoration, not just symbolic justice
Original framing: “After exile, California tribes could help run their ancestral redwoods again” — bing news
The redwood crisis is a microcosm of U.S. environmental history: 95% of old-growth redwoods were logged between 1850–1950, enabled by the 1868 Homestead Act and the 1871 Timber Culture Act, which dispossessed tribes of 14 million acres in California alone. The 1918 Weeks Act and later federal forest policies criminalized Indigenous land management, replacing it with industrial clear-cutting. The 1970s environmental movement, while halting some logging, often sidelined tribal sovereignty in favor of ‘wilderness’ models that erased human presence entirely.
The redwood forest crisis is not a conflict between tribes and loggers but a 150-year-old wound from colonial land theft, industrial extraction, and the erasure of Indigenous fire ecology.
Tribal co-management offers a path to decolonize forestry, but only if it is rooted in full sovereignty—not the ‘co-management’ charade that leaves state and corporate power intact. The Yurok, Karuk, and Hupa peoples have already proven that their stewardship models outperform industrial forestry in carbon storage, biodiversity, and wildfire resilience, yet their knowledge is sidelined by a system that calls theft ‘progress.’ The solution pathways—land back, Indigenous fire corps, decolonized science, and corporate accountability—must be implemented together, or we risk repeating history: a ‘green’ veneer over the same extractive logic. The trickster’s lesson is clear: the state will call collaboration what is still theft, until the people demand otherwise.