Letter from Chairman Lopez, AMLT Board President

Dear Friends,

As we look back on the past year, there is much we wish to celebrate. Our Year in Review Newsletter contains stories from our Native Steward Intern program and our Youth Stewardship Summer Camp, reflections on our strategic planning process, an update on our native plant restoration work, and a welcome to our new staff. Below are some additional thoughts and updates I would like to share with you.

Updating the AMLT Strategic Plan

The Strategic Plan for our AMLT is currently being revised. This revision includes getting input from our full Tribal membership. This is very time consuming, but it is essential for ensuring buy-in from our Tribe and strengthening the relationship between AMLT and our larger Tribal membership.

A few driving thoughts we recognize is that, as a Tribal people, we carry thousands of years of Indigenous science within us on how to manage landscapes, wildlife, waterways, oceans, etc. The coastal prairie of the central coast of California was one of the most biodiverse landscapes in North America. Restoring the knowledge of our ancestors is essential if we are going to heal ourselves and heal the lands from the trauma that we both have experienced. Secondly, we’re well aware that about one-quarter of the world’s land is owned or managed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and by some estimates, 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity is found on these lands. And yet only a small proportion of these communities have secure rights to own, manage, and control their land and resources.

The Amah Mutsun peoples have been removed from our Indigenous territory for over 240 years. Our revised strategic plan will show that we are now returning “home” so we can work to restore landscapes, oceans and waterways, return fire to the land and restore our native plants to all landscapes. Our work will be guided by our culture and spirituality with the primary goal being to restore sacredness to all landscapes.

Redesigning our Native Stewardship Corp Program

This past year our Land Trust has been extraordinarily busy. Many of you know that we are redesigning our Native Stewardship Corp program. We recognized that our Native Stewardship Corps was functioning largely as a conservation fieldwork crew, and it was not fulfilling the entirety of our original vision. The vision for our stewardship program was that our stewards would work to restore landscapes to what existed before European contact, using a suite of Indigenous management tools. Our stewards would work on restoring our native plants back to their landscapes. These plants represent our foods, medicines, materials for making baskets, nets, and traps. The plants are also important for providing materials for women's and baby’s care, housing, clothing and so much more. But in addition to restoring landscapes, our stewards also need to learn how to use these resources for which they are intended, and we recognize that this cultural learning will take many years and careful thought and planning to achieve. Undoubtedly, the most important part of our stewardship work is restoring sacredness to the land and coast.

The redesign of our AMLT Native Stewardship Corps will include a focus on cultural relearning as well as leadership training so the Native Stewards can lead both Tribal members and the public in this work. Our stewards are key knowledge holders for our Tribe and they are responsible for ensuring that the traditional knowledge and practices pass onto future generations.

Tribal Marine Stewards Network

The Tribal Marine Stewards Network is designed to allow Tribes to work on projects within the traditional coastal territories of their Tribe. Our Network collaborates on projects when the need is shared by several or all Tribes. The network provides for programs dedicated to cultural practice, land and water stewardship and education. The Network seeks to establish long-term, consistent engagement with state and federal agencies, while implementing Indigenous Traditional Knowledge and Tribal Science into management practices.

The founding members of the Tribal Marine Stewards Network are; Resighini Rancheria, Tolowa Dee-ni’ Nation, Kashia Band of Pomo Indians and the Amah Mutsun Land Trust. The Network recently accepted Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians as a Network member.

An example of the types of projects all Tribes in the Network are doing is Tribal Intertidal Digital Ecological Surveys. This survey is conducted by suspending high resolution cameras above the rocky intertidal habitat at low tide. These cameras capture thousands of images of study sites; the photos are then stitched together using structure from motion software to create 3D habitat maps. This survey is conducted bi-annually to create a long term monitoring database that captures seasonal variation in community composition. This data allows us to determine how short and long term changes in sea level may influence the community composition and patterns of zonation in the rocky intertidal. AMLT was trained on this survey work in July and we’ll begin conducting these surveys in 2024. Our Ocean and Coastal Stewardship program has many innovative programs that we are excited to share in future newsletters.

Campaign to Protect Juristac

Many of you have been following our efforts to protect Juristac, our most Sacred Site, from being desecrated and destroyed by a proposed sand and gravel mining operation. Juristac is at the southern boundary of Gilroy. It’s shameful that the Santa Clara County General Plan will allow the destruction of this most sacred Native American site. If this site happened to be a sacred site to Catholic, Jew, Muslim, Mormon or any other world religion the County wouldn’t even consider the proposal. We are fighting for Juristac to be recognized on par with any other world religion. We are also working hard to get this struggle to be recognized as a human rights issue and an important conservation issue. We were successful in getting letters of support from cities, elected leaders, labor unions, Tribal governments, scholars, faculty members, faith communities, international letters of support and many more. We’re very thankful for all the support we’ve received.

When the comment period for the draft environmental impact report closed on November 7, 2022, over 7,500 comments were submitted. Our Tribe couldn’t have been more happy or impressed. Many of the articles were very scientific and technical dealing with issues such as Native American culture and spirituality, earthquake safety, wildlife corridors, water hydrology, air and noise pollution, etc. The County is now working to respond to each comment and then they will submit the Final Environmental Impact Report which will then be voted on by the County’s Planning Commission. For this Planning Commission meeting we will invite all supporters of Juristac, our friends and partners and many others to attend the meeting to show overwhelming public support to have the mining permit denied and to show it's time to stop the destruction of Native American cultural and sacred sites. We hope you will support us at that time.

Saaremi – (with my prayers)

Valentin Lopez

Chair, Amah Mutsun Tribal Band

President, Amah Mutsun Land Trust