This article begins with a very brief overview of the diverse, multilayered, traditionalist relationships that underpin Native California land stewardship. From there it summarizes the impacts of Spanish, Mexican, and early American colonization on Native Californians and their eons-old relationships with the land, including the outlawing by early Spanish colonizers of cultural burning. These summary discussions provide context for a deeper understanding of the significance of ground-breaking, mid-20th-century Native California organizational initiatives to restore ancestral land management, beginning with the 1940 establishment of the Pomo Indian Women’s Club and the 1951 founding of the Northwest California Hoopa Pottery Guild, an effort to preserve ancestral basketry designs in fired clay that would eventually lead to the restoration of regional basketry traditions and the application of cultural burning techniques necessary to generate the growth of the healthy, flexible shoots used to weave a shapely basket. This article ends with the history of the first-ever cultural gathering policy by a California-based, land-holding agency (California State Parks).

This article will detail the wide-ranging and effective land stewardship and management initiatives by a Native California organization, the California Indian Basketweavers Association (CIBA). Founded in 1992 to “preserve, promote and perpetuate California Indian basketry traditions,” CIBA has a proud history of working with public land-holding agencies to initiate policy changes around the management and gathering of basketry plants on those lands, including the reduction and sometimes outright elimination of pesticide spraying, the encouragement of cultural burning, and an unprecedented, joint US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management gathering policy for ethnobotanic materials. Currently, CIBA spearheads training programs in land stewardship and cultural burning through its Following the Smoke II and Rekindling Culture and Fire projects. It has also inspired the establishment of other Native basketweavers associations in various regions of the US.

For public land management agency managers and staff, co-stewardship and co-management may just be another element of the job, but for Native peoples it’s their very life. This article details respectful Tribal consultation from Native California perspectives, the foundation upon which successful co-stewardship and co-management of public lands rests. For those managers and staff who are unfamiliar with the Tribes and Tribal communities in their area, we begin by providing a note about naming terminology and some sources for identifying Native groups who are/were historically located in a given area. From there, after introducing the concept of respectful Tribal consultation, we describe the relationship and trust-building process between Tribal governments and their designated representatives and public land management agency managers and other staff, relationships that must be proven and nurtured across time, rather than initiated as time- and process-challenged business arrangements. We also explicate “community protocol,” the etiquette, customs, and traditional ways of interacting that support, protect, and promote the community, so once you get to the “business” part of the relationship, there can be equality, honor, and respect within it. Next, we provide links to best-practice models, resources, and agreements for effective collaboration and consultation in the stewardship of public lands. We end by making a case for the integration of natural and cultural “resources” in the procedures and policies under which Tribal consultation and co-stewardship and co-management of public lands takes place. Many of these processes are time tested and active in current co-management projects.

In 1997, Karuk Indigenous Basketweavers and the Orleans Ranger District of Six Rivers National Forest in Northern California established Following the Smoke, a multiple years-long, award-winning, summertime project initiated and led by LaVerne Glaze (Karuk, 1932–2017) and other Karuk Indigenous Basketweavers members. Initially conducted under the aegis of the US Forest Service (USFS) Passport in Time (PIT) program to “engage volunteers” in the USFS heritage program, and later under the aegis of California State University, Humboldt (now California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt), Following the Smoke, which concluded in 2012, has inspired other similar projects on public lands in the state, including Following the Smoke II of the California Indian Basketweavers Association. This article will detail the intent, content, and outcomes of Following the Smoke, which centered on a robust, organizational effort to encourage the appreciation of the need for culturally appropriate stewardship and management of vital ethnobotanical “resources” and the application of cultural burning to achieve those ends. It ends by providing two examples of programs and initiatives through which the convenors and facilitators of and participants in Following the Smoke continue to magnify its teachings, followed by a discussion of contemporaneous collaborative research being conducted by the Karuk Tribe about cultural burning and related topics.