Sonoma County, Graton tribe will co-manage Tolay Lake

Greg Sarris still remembers the first time he wandered into the Cardoza family’s barn at Tolay Lake and saw, along with the farm tools and bounty of pumpkins, the vast collection of Indigenous charmstones recovered from the dry lake bed east of Petaluma.

“I was overwhelmed,” Sarris, chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, said by phone from Los Angeles, where he had delivered a lecture sponsored by the UCLA School of Law and timed to coincide with Indigenous Peoples Day.

The title of the lecture was “Tribal Leadership and the Future of Indian Country,” and Sarris’ expertise on the subject is more than academic. His tribe, which includes members of Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo ancestry, is asserting a growing agency in local land use.

The latest step came Oct. 4, when Sonoma County and the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria announced a 20-year co-management agreement at Tolay Lake Regional Park, the largest of the county’s parks at just under 3,500 acres.

“It’s very unique. And I think it’s very appropriate considering the cultural significance of that property,” said Sonoma County Supervisor David Rabbitt, whose district includes Tolay Lake. “The tribe should be the ones telling that story.”

County representatives frame this as the first such agreement in California between a local government entity and a federally recognized tribe.

“Unlike the contracts we’re used to, this is almost like an international agreement,” Rabbitt said. “It’s a different level.”

The Tolay Lake area is invested with rich precolonial meaning, Sarris said.

“It was important for so, so many people,” he explained. “It was close to the center of Coast Miwok territory. The village of Alaguali was right below there. And it was a gathering place. So for us, it contained thousands of years of history in the bottom of that lake.”

And then there were the charmstones, small, rounded oblong stones that many Indigenous tribes fashioned for use in healing ceremonies. Tolay was Sonoma County’s largest freshwater lake until a farmer drained it by dynamiting one end of the depression. The drainage exposed many charmstones, and more turned up every time the land was plowed or holes were dug — “thousands upon thousands,” according to Sarris.

“Most of those charmstones were used in healing ceremonies to take out disease,” Sarris said. “Once they were used, they’d throw them in the water to drown them along with the disease. We like to say this was our Stanford Medical Center.”

The Cardozas and local officials have, at times, offered to return charmstones to local tribes. “The irony is we didn’t necessarily want them, because we believe they are full of disease,” Sarris said. “Our belief is, leave them where they are.”

For the next 20 years, at least, the Graton Rancheria will have a more defined and hands-on role in making those sorts of decisions.

The agreement calls for comanagement of “park administration, services, policy development, visitor access and use, training, permit issuance, maintenance, and coordination with employees, volunteers, and independent agencies and organizations, and related activities.”

It also makes the tribe a partner in planning the development and infrastructure of Tolay Lake, including budgeting and public outreach.

“What’s most important, this is a 50-50 agreement,” Sarris said. “Whatever happens in terms of use of the park and restoration of the aboriginal landscape will be decided on equal terms with the county. That’s key.”

Potential conflicts exist. One could involve cattle grazing, a “historic” and ongoing use of the property but one that American Indian tribes often consider an invasive European introduction. If the two parties can’t resolve a dispute through regular meetings, the county’s proclamation says, it “shall be elevated to the Tribal Council Chair and the Board of Supervisors Chair.”

This agreement helps the tribe advance environmental stewardship, which Sarris called one of the tribe’s two basic missions, along with justice for native peoples.

“It allows us to work with the county and other groups to restore much of the landscape that has been damaged,” Sarris said. “For example, the oaks haven’t really been taken care of since European contact. Now we can look at how to work together to rake under oaks, burn under oaks and prevent worms from going back into the trees.”

That native ecological maintenance is likely to involve prescribed burns. In fact, if weather conditions permit, one of those may happen at Tolay Lake this fall, said Regional Parks Director Bert Whitaker.

The most obvious and easily achievable nod to local Indigenous heritage would be signage explaining how Tolay was used by the Coast Miwok and other tribes, along with talks and audio tours by tribal members. Sarris wants that, but he is adamant that the partnership go beyond symbolic gestures.

“I think signage is important. I think acknowledgment is important,” he said. “But it’s also important this is not a sales receipt for genocide and land theft.”

Graton Rancheria and Sonoma County Regional Parks have had informal discussions about Tolay Lake since at least 2005. They reached a memorandum of understanding for tribal monitoring of cultural resources in 2010, and the tribe’s expanded role was suggested in a 2018 master plan for the park, a year before it opened.

Graton Rancheria’s efforts to claim a stronger voice in management of public lands can be seen as part of a wider movement. In its purest form, this would look like the Land Back campaign, which seeks to restore territory to full Native American autonomy. But that can be complicated in California, Sarris said, where many small tribes exist in close proximity, and few have the resources to properly manage a large piece of land.

“I fully support the Land Back movement,” Sarris said. “It’s giving power back to a native tribe in the area. But the same goes for a 50-50 co-management agreement. We’re not here as an adviser or, you know, one day a year will be Indigenous Day and we’ll tell you how to make acorn soup.”

Increasingly, co-management is seen as a solution.

In September 2019, according to a National Park Service report, there were 56 agreements between the federal service and individual or multiple tribes; another 17 were pending. In June, the United States government signed an agreement to co-manage Bears Ears National Monument alongside the Five Tribes of the Bears Ears Commission in southeastern Utah.

And just a week ago, five California tribes were granted rights to manage land along more than 200 miles of coastline, backed by $4.6 million in state funds. The tribes’ work will include salmon monitoring after removal of a dam in the Santa Cruz mountains, and will also include testing for toxins in shellfish.

The Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria also have experience with co-management. Last year, they signed a government-to-government pact with the National Park Service that allows greater authority in decision making at Point Reyes National Seashore.

The tribe, it was announced then, would focus on cultural resource protection and the designation of eligible sites for the National Register of Historic Places. The tribe wants traditional ecological knowledge integrated into management practices for Point Reyes’ tule elk herds, which have been impacted by cattle ranching operations.

Sarris’ tribe is flexing its clout in other ways, too. Graton Rancheria has contributed $16 million in political donations in 2022, including $10.3 million to the Yes on 26/No on 27 campaign (in a heated battle to legalize sports wagering in California) and $5 million to support Prop 1 (which would enshrine reproductive rights in the state).

Sarris said he is proud of Graton Rancheria’s political endeavors as well as its commitment to helping steward lands like Tolay Lake, and that all of it is line with the tribe’s overall goals.

“The whole mission of the tribe with economic endeavors is to identify things that benefit Indians and non-Indians alike,” Sarris said. “My mother was white. We’re all here together. With the climate crisis, it’s imperative for tribes to take care of not just ourselves, but all the communities around us.”

Whitaker, the parks director, said he could envision the county entering into other co-management agreements with tribes. Rabbitt agreed, pointing out an arrangement in which the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians is working with the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District to look after a piece of recently acquired property.

“As long as the public is properly treating the land, and the stories can be told and there is a reverence for the history, I think it’s win-win,” Rabbitt said.

You can reach Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Skinny_Post.