California's Central Coast Could Gain First Indigenous-Named Marine Sanctuary in US

California’s Central Coast is home to one of the world’s most biodiverse stretches of ocean. It’s full of rare and endangered species like gray whales, peregrine falcons and sea otters. It’s also the ancestral homeland of Native American tribes, including the Indigenous Chumash and Salinan peoples.

For years, the Northern Chumash have been working to create a new national marine sanctuary that would protect these waters from offshore oil drilling and other development. If the federal government approves the designation this summer, it would be the first marine sanctuary in the U.S. to be nominated by, and named after, an Indigenous tribe. It’s the culmination of decades of tribal conservation work — but it’s also the legacy of a father and daughter.

A sanctuary decades in the making

In 1972, the federal government created the National Marine Sanctuary system. Within the next few decades, two sanctuaries were designated on California’s Central Coast: Monterey Bay and Channel Islands. Together, they protect about 7,500 square miles of ocean. Sanctuary status bans new offshore oil and gas development, disturbing wildlife and historical resources, discharging sewage and more. It allows fishing and recreational activities like boating within certain limits.

Northern Chumash tribal members have been lobbying for a third protected stretch of ocean, which would be called the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary off the coasts of San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara Counties.

“This has been an ongoing dream of the Chumash people and the community for more than my lifetime — almost 50 years now,” said Violet Sage Walker, chair of the Northern Chumash Tribal Council (NCTC).

Sage Walker is the daughter of the late Fred Collins, a former tribal chair famous for his environmental activism around the Central Coast. He proposed a new sanctuary to join the existing Channel Islands and Monterey Bay sanctuaries to create one continuous 20,000-square-mile stretch of protected ocean.

“This issue here is so big that we need another layer of protection so that my grandsons and my great-grandchildren won’t see oil wells off of our coast here,” said Collins, in 2015, the year he proposed the sanctuary to the federal government.

“This is a legacy I intended to leave here, that our children will never see oil drilling going on, [or] fracking off of our coast,” he told the crowd at a renewable energy conference in San Luis Obispo.

The federal government accepted Collins’ proposal that same year.

“[It was the] first tribally-led tribal nomination of a National Marine Sanctuary ever,” Sage Walker said.

The proposal was stuck in bureaucratic limbo until 2021, when the Biden administration gave the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) the green light to begin exploring the designation, an extensive, multi-year process of scientific evaluation and gathering public comment.

But Fred Collins died just before NOAA began taking these steps — and long before he could see the sanctuary become official. Three years later, the federal government is expected to announce its final decision on designating the sanctuary this summer.

But there’s a catch: If approved, the new marine sanctuary may not look as Collins originally intended. Last fall, the federal government proposed a change that surprised many tribal members.

Minding the ‘gap’

After receiving tens of thousands of public comments, NOAA released an “agency-preferred alternative” in August 2023. It includes a new map that would remove Morro Bay, Cayucos and Cambria from the sanctuary boundaries. This gap would leave the ocean around Morro Rock, a Chumash sacred site, out of federal protection.

NOAA cited several reasons for the new proposal. One is that members of another Central Coast Indigenous tribe, the Salinan, voiced their opposition to a marine sanctuary named after the Chumash tribe in an area the Salinan also consider their ancestral waters.

Another key concern is the plan to build renewable wind energy sites in the region. Three companies now have leases to put massive floating offshore wind turbines into the waters of Morro Bay, which would require laying underwater cables to channel that energy back to shore.

“We looked at that and thought that might be just too much industrial development within a National Marine Sanctuary,” said Paul Michel, Regional Policy Coordinator for NOAA’s West Coast sanctuary program.

Michel said the gap in the proposed boundary is one possible solution to balance the interests of all ocean users.

“There’s a lot that sanctuaries bring to communities, especially in this stretch of coast where there’s just so many issues and complexities and uses — from Department of Defense to nuclear power plants to launching missiles at Vandenberg [Space Force Base], offshore wind energy,” Michel said. “This is a busy coast.”

Initially, some Chumash tribal members balked at leaving a gap in the sanctuary boundaries, especially excluding Morro Rock, an area sacred to their tribe. Shortly after the announcement, they held an event called Rally at the Rock to advocate for Morro Bay’s inclusion in the zone protected by the sanctuary.

Sage Walker and other Chumash tribal members sang songs, met with local leaders and called for people to submit public comments asking NOAA to close the gap. Morro Rock is not only sacred to the Chumash but other Indigenous tribes, and the waters around it would otherwise be left out of sanctuary protection in NOAA’s counter-proposal.

In April, the Northern Chumash Tribal Council announced a compromise with the wind companies. In a joint statement, they asked NOAA for a phased approach of leaving the gap in place for now, then later, expanding the sanctuary to include Morro Bay and connecting the boundary with the existing Monterey Bay Sanctuary.

Sage Walker said it’s a way for offshore wind to co-exist and protect Central Coast waters.

“No compromise makes everyone come out perfectly happy, or else it wouldn’t be a compromise,” she said. “But I think that this shows that we’re able and willing to work together. And we really need to focus on … protecting the planet and protecting the ocean.”

Offshore wind farms have never been built on the West Coast, so it isn’t clear how long a phased-in plan would take. In the meantime, Tribal Council leaders said this is the best way forward to get the sanctuary designated this year and eventually expand the boundaries to protect an unbroken stretch of ocean.

“If we can get a marine sanctuary designated now, we see that as a win,” Sage Walker said.

A history of tribal activism on the Central Coast

In 1978, Chumash tribal members occupied an area north of Santa Barbara to protest a planned liquefied natural gas plant. This was less than 10 years after a devastating oil spill contaminated Santa Barbara waters, and Chumash protesters were determined to stop more fossil fuel development in the region.

“Today, you don’t see a natural liquefied plant there,” said Slo’w Gutierrez, a Northern Chumash elder who was part of the 1978 occupation. “We stopped it.”

For Gutierrez, the new marine sanctuary would be a logical next step in the Chumash tribes’ centuries-long history of protecting the coast. He said it would go a long way to prevent fossil fuel development, just like the 1979 protests did.

“We’re just trying to keep that as natural as possible because, in the future, we want our kids to see what we’ve seen and do what we did when we were young,” Gutierrez said. “[If] you have people drilling out there … sooner or later, there’s an accident.”

Fred Collins’ legacy

When Collins died in 2021, the Chumash held a ceremony for him in Montaña de Oro, just south of Morro Bay. They placed his ashes in a tomol (a plank-built boat) and rowed it into the sea.

“It was a good ceremony for my dad. It was worthy of his stature,” Sage Walker said.

PJ Webb was there, too. She’s the Northern Chumash Tribal Council’s legal advisor and helped Collins write the original proposal for the sanctuary.

“[The ceremony] was triumphant. It was something that I may never see again in my life,” Webb said. “It was just a beautiful thing. And it was special because this was one of Fred’s favorite places. To have all these different Chumash elders come out here and hold ceremony was very moving.”

If the marine sanctuary is designated this summer, Webb said it will be a fitting tribute to Fred Collins.

“He said it many times. He said it as he was dying — that ‘It’s the most important thing I’ve done in my life.’ That’s a pretty incredible accomplishment,” Webb said. “That’s a legacy.”