Three NorCal Tribes Announce Nation’s First Indigenous Ocean Protection Area

I mean, they were here before the CA gov, it's just that the CA gov has more firepower, tasers, and handcuffs, so we listen to them.

Otherwise I wish the natives would give us some tax cuts too.

The statement notes that the waters are “also claimed” by the California state government, which “supports the concept” of tribal stewardship. This whole thing seems pretty insubstantial.

Good question. I have no idea. I doubt there is precedent!

And I can’t wait to see how this gets legally tested — native rights haven’t been properly respected and these kinds if tests are deeply important in restoring rightful sovereignty and tribal agency to our hosts and neighbors.

I’m chuckling as I imagine they’re going to do a better job of protecting and managing the Earth than the government of California and Oregon have done over the last 150 odd years.

"We do not seek the permission of other governments and can no longer wait to act to preserve and protect this culturally and ecologically important place"

This is SOP for California politics. CA jurisdictions have been ceding territory to Indian tribes for a while. This is purely an economically motivated cash grab layered under miles of politically correct double-speak. There is an indian tribe in Montana that has a massive coal mine that wanted to run a rail line to a port through the area that was shut down last year. This is possibly another strategy to do the same thing.

Don't disagree on LoCo, but this post is just a publication of the tribes' announcement.

> I do not see any official press releases from the California state government on this particular topic.

Why would there be an official press release from the California state government?

> Obvs if they are declaring legal sovereignty it’s a pretty important development. But there is a big difference between a press release and the first time they take actions that contradict the presumed US sovereignty.

Tribal governments are subordinate-but-concurrent sovereigns to the federal government, similar to states, so while it might sort-of contradict California’s sovereignty, nothing in this story would even potentially contradict US sovereignty.

And, actually, it is more complex than that, because tribal governments also exercise concurrent sovereignty within their territory with the states in which their lands are located, rather than exclusive sovereignty, so it wouldn’t strictly contradict California sovereignty, either.

I think this misses the point and is honestly derogatory toward these tribes. They are the ones with the ancestral rights and knowledge to manage the land. They had vastly different strategies than we have implemented that more effectively preserved species and conditions for far longer than us. Painting them as merely profiteers without acknowledging that we are the ones who have taken everything they had and forced them into second-class citizenship in our capitalistic society is perpetrating the same colonial violence.

Wow this is an incredibly grim line of argument:

* These are tiny tribes [because the United States committed genocide on them, stole their children to be raped, tortured, and murdered en masse]

* These people are just casino operators [because the United States made their food supply extinct, banned them from any valuable land, and ultimately confined them to concentration camps on the worst plots of land we could find]

* Therefore, it just makes sense that the United States retain total control over this final plot of land

It’s not clear to me how we should handle this history and how it should bear on present day concerns, but the argument that effectively “we were close enough to a successful genocide that we might as well not pretend otherwise” is pretty astounding.

A close read of the statement suggests that this is more of a feel-good thing and not much to worry about. If those tribes get actual sovereignty over those waters, they’ll soon find them full of Chinese fishing trawlers.

I grew up in the area, those shores aren't tribal lands other than a few tiny bits. And most of it is already preserved shore/ocean, so this just appears to be a land grab attempt.

I agree that this area should be protected, but giving it to a few people based on ancestry is ridiculous.

Isn't this how most nations work? If one's parents are American, they inherit all the rights due to Americans, including the ability to run for political office. This gives the descendants of Americans sovereignty over a chunk of land in North America known as the United States.

They're indigenous, nothing is being "handed over" it's land that they were forced to live on when they were forced of their original land in the area. They already have sovereignty.

Tribes were sovereign, signed treaties that enshrined sovereignty—within limits,to be sure—and continue to exercise that sovereignty. Nothing is being handed over, it’s always been there.

Interestingly the idea that tribal membership is based on ancestry originated with Europeans and (white) Americans, more than native tribes. Historically (generalizing wildly), tribal membership is about citizenship in a community much more than it is about who ones’ grandparents were. Blood quotient was a US legal concept that reflected the American fondness for racial categories. A Navajo friend has Scottish and Arab ancestors who’d married into the tribe, just to give an example. Or check out _The Unredeemed Captive_, for a practice that would make no sense if tribal membership were racial.

Communities often want to continue as communities, in a way that’s only possible with self-determination. That can land as either a left- or a right-flavored interest, depending on who’s asking and the overall context. But it’s too big a part of human nature to brush aside.

Native tribes are and have always been sovereign entities, that didn't end with European colonization. The degree to which the US government acknowledges this has varied over time, obviously, but as recently as the SCOTUS case on the Indian Child Welfare Act (Haaland v. Brackeen[0,1]), it has at least recognized that sovereignty exists.

[0]https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/haaland-v-bracke...

[1]https://www.ncsl.org/state-legislatures-news/details/supreme...

> Agree with the ecological preservation objectives, hard disagree with handing over of sovereignty, whatever that actually means,to a group based on their ethnicity / ancestry.

I’m sure many people in the various tribes object to the handing over of most of their sovereignty over to the USA based on the guns held to their head (and where land was retained, it often being not merely a small subset of their land, but often completely different and worse land) but their vigorous excercise of the sovereignty they retain is not a “handing over” of anything to them “based on their ethnicity”, even to the extent that there is a rearrangement of sovereign rights between the three relevant sovereigns (state, federal, and tribal) such that there is something being handed over at all.