Since 1986, InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council has worked to return indigenous tribal stewardship to lands that, 150 years ago, were violently taken from Native peoples. The Council, a consortium of 10 federally recognized sovereign tribes, conducts its work to honor the Sinkyone Indian ancestors who have gone before us, and for the sake of generations yet to come. Returning Indian stewardship to Sinkyone has been a process of community activism, intertribal organization, and collaboration. This process halted clearcut logging in Sinkyone's coastal rainforests, and led to establishment of America's first InterTribal Indian Wilderness.
In local Athabascan dialects, the Sinkyone people were referred to as Sin-ke-ne, Sin-ken-ye, Yis-sing-ku-ne, Sinkinne, Sinkunna, and Sinkyone. All these variations of "Sinkyone" are words provided by local Indian people to ethnographers in the early 1900s. Indian people also provided ethnographers with specific information about their tribal territories. The ethnologies largely agree on the boundaries of Sinkyone territory. The eastern boundary of Sinkyone territory is defined generally by the main system of ridgelines immediately east of and parallel to the reaches of the mainstem and South Fork Eel River located approximately between Leggett and Scotia. From there, Sinkyone territory extends to the Pacific, its western boundary being the coastline located approximately between the mouths of Usal Creek and Four Mile Creek. Sinkyone territory is bordered to the north by Mattole, Bear River, and Wiyot territories; to the east by Nongathł, Lassik, and Wailaki territories; and to the south by Yuki, Cahto, and Coast Yuki territories.
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Sinkyone's fragile redwood ecosystem is still recovering from the rampages of large-scale timber extractions. The Council's cultural conservation work focuses largely on redressing massive loss of soils, sediment pollution to stream and ocean waters, and consequent disruption of the land's cultural and biological integrity. The Council has created nearly 100 jobs for tribal members who work on the Sinkyone land to help solve these problems. In leading the return of local tribal members to Sinkyone land, we collaborate with our member tribes, environmental organizations, land trusts, philanthropists, agencies, and community members.
Models like the Sinkyone movement show that tribes can expand cultural conservation initiatives to areas outside their reservation boundaries. Native land trusts like our Council together with conservation easements can produce effective stewardship of culture and ecology to ensure that important areas of land are protected for and enjoyed by future generations of all people.
InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness is a community-based model that can be applied to other places where Native people long to revitalize their traditional roles as stewards of the land. This re-connection is producing a new paradigm in sustainable cultural-ecological conservation led by the land's first people.
For more information: (707) 463-6745
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TOC for Forest & River News, Winter 2007