Parks Stewardship Forum

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.