$100 Million Grant to Assist California Native Tribes With Buying Back Land

Native American tribes in California can apply for money to help buy back lands they lost during colonization, the California Natural Resources Agency announced Monday.

The intention of the $100 million Tribal Nature-Based Solutions grant program is to advance the state’s climate goals by giving tribes the opportunity to buy land for conservation and cultural projects.

“The purpose of the grant program really is to strengthen our partnerships with tribes in the natural resources conservation and environmental space,” said Geneva Thompson, Deputy Secretary of Tribal Affairs for the agency. The grant program is part of a broader strategy in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration to promote “nature-based” solutions to climate change, such as the 30×30 plan to conserve 30% of California’s lands and coastal waters by 2030.

“We know that the lands benefit and are healthier by being stewarded by tribes and by being lived with in relation to tribal traditional ecological knowledge [and] cultural practices,” Thompson said. The grant will assist tribes to “reacquire those lands to ensure that tribes are back in the stewardship role.”

Forestry management and restoration through cultural burning, or the use of fire to manage land, is one type of project that tribes can propose to apply for this money. Initiatives to recover ancestral knowledge and practices, such as traditional food harvesting, will also be considered. Newsom announced the grant program during a Truth and Healing Council meeting last year.

Thompson said in the process of developing guidelines for this grant program, 45 tribes were consulted and ancestral land return was a top priority. Housing for tribal members was also a concern brought up by tribal representatives, she said, but lands purchased through this grant program cannot be lived on.

There are 109 federally-recognized tribes in California, and more than 40 tribes have applied for federal status. Thompson said that all California Native American tribes are eligible to apply for the grant, regardless of federally-recognized status.

However, some tribes have raised concerns over the focus of the grant program. Muwekma Ohlone Chairwoman Charlene Nijmeh said in an email that her tribe is open to developing a project for this grant, but “too much focus is on plants and animals and not the native people. It’s a perpetuation of colonialism and performative allyship.”

A representative for the tribe also wrote in an email that they were not informed of the grant program. Chairwoman Nijmeh also said her tribe was also not included in Newsom’s Truth and Healing Council initiative.

The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, which currently has 614 members, is not a federally-recognized tribe. They lost that status in 1927 when their tribe, along with more than a hundred other tribes in California, were deemed not in need of land by a report on landless tribes (CGI) issued by an agent for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (at the time called Indian Services).

With few exceptions, tribes that did not gain land then still are landless today, including the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, whose members say they’ve called the San Francisco Bay Area home for more than 10,000 years.

In 1851 and 1852, tribes across California signed 18 treaties with the U.S. government, relinquishing their territories in exchange for a total of 7.5 million acres of reservations — but the Senate never ratified them. Native people, who had already left their territories, were turned away from the lands allocated in the unratified treaties.

Governor’s Office of Tribal Affairs Secretary Christina Snider-Ashtari said in a press release that the grant program “is a step in the right direction to begin to address some of the historical wrongs committed against California Native peoples.”

The California Natural Resources Agency will be hosting a series of webinars for interested tribes, and the first round of applications will be due on Aug. 28.