From June, 2025... #California’s #YurokTribe gets back ancestral lands that were taken over 120 years ago

By Associated Press
PUBLISHED: June 5, 2025 at 9:34 AM PDT

ON THE KLAMATH RIVER, Calif. (AP) — "As a youngster, Barry McCovey Jr. would sneak through metal gates and hide from security guards just to catch a steelhead trout in #BlueCreek amid northwestern California redwoods.

"Since time immemorial, his ancestors from the Yurok Tribe had fished, hunted and gathered in this watershed flanked by coastal forests. But for more than 100 years, these lands were owned and managed by #TimberCompanies, severing the tribe’s access to its homelands.

"When McCovey started working as a fisheries technician, the company would let him go there to do his job.

" 'Snorkeling Blue Creek … I felt the significance of that place to myself and to our people, and I knew then that we had to do whatever we could to try and get that back,' McCovey said.

"After a 23-year effort and $56 million, that became reality.

"Roughly 73 square miles (189 square kilometers) of homelands have been returned to the Yurok, more than doubling the tribe’s land holdings, according to a deal announced Thursday. Completion of the land-back conservation deal along the lower #KlamathRiver — a partnership with #WesternRiversConservancy and other #EnvironmentalGroups — is being called the largest in California history.

"The Yurok Tribe had 90% of its territory taken during the #CaliforniaGoldRush in the mid-1800s, suffering massacres and disease from settlers.

" 'To go from when I was a kid and 20 years ago even, from being afraid to go out there to having it be back in tribal hands … is incredible,' said McCovey, director of the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department."

Read more / listen:
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/2025/06/05/californias-yurok-tribe-gets-back-ancestral-lands-that-were-taken-over-120-years-ago/

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https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/466