California announces largest land return in state's history

California just announced the largest land return in its history. The ACT as part of a larger land back movement, a push to reconnect Indigenous people with their ancestral lands. The Esland Tribe has been working since 2020 to acquire those lands through programs like the Wildlife Conservancy and Big Sur Land Trust. We met with them in Monterey County to learn the benefits of that homecoming. It is beautiful. All of this land is yours. All the land that you can see in the hills is all part of the preserve system that we have here as tribal leader of the Aslan Nation. The name of this land is called Caffenet Caffen Tom. Little Bear Nason helped his people buy back some 14,000 acres in the majestic hills of Monterey County last August. Land his ancestors were forced from hundreds of years ago. We we're never separated from the land. As far as the connection, even though we're physically disconnected from the land, we are connected to the trees. We remember ourselves through the trees. The trees tell stories, Stories of the stewards who once tended these forests and those now charged with his care. Chanel Keller performs a sacred ritual of both gratitude and cleansing. Everyone wants us to provide answers for how to save the land without us having a relationship on it. That is irresponsible. We need the return of our lands so that we can build a relationship with the land so that we can come out here and harvest the land. This whole forest floor right now around us as we sit here is full of food sources. There's roots much like potatoes. There's carrots, which and parsnips. All these foods are here still. Their goal? To strengthen a forest now vulnerable to disease and Mother Nature, using cultural practices handed down for generations. When I was growing up, we could ride horses and hike through the forest and see through it. And now, 50 years later, everything is growing over. The trees are falling over and dying, and sick trees are ripe for Northern California's greatest threat, massive wildfires, not to mention mud slides that leveled parts of neighboring Big Sur. The Aslan seek to manage those threats as a native forestry service, so to speak. Lee and I have been working together, I think since about 2011, 2010. These forests are here because native people tended them for thousands of years. Doctor Lee Klinger has studied ecosystems across the globe and is zeroed in on this area. What stood out? Mainly the difference in the shapes of the oaks between the large oaks which is spread out, versus the younger oaks which were not tended that ended up growing straight up right like oaks normally do. The result of deliberate pruning to encourage farm production. So basically how they were tended to impacted how they grew, correct? They encourage these broad spreading canopy because it makes it a lot easier to collect acorns for one reason. It's the most efficient shape at maximizing fruit, or in this case, acorn production. That was one method to increase farm production. Another more important today, protecting the trees themselves. We burn off a little area and then that would take out limbs like this that are dead. It would clean the Spanish Moss up. It would clean some of the leaves up. So here we have mistletoe, which is a parasite on the oaks. It's huge. Yeah. That's not going to go away unless we get fire back in the landscape. Cultural fire. We call it cultural fire. Yeah. It's a practice dismissed by early settlers and reintroduced by the US Forestry Service when scientists realized its effectiveness in preventing larger, more destructive fires. And the elders always taught us that if you don't burn, it'll get overgrown, it'll grow against the trees. And the lightning fire comes a natural fire. It'll burn through and take all the trees out. So we were always working around these trees because we learned that from nature. Doctor Klinger believes the Essland's more intensive approach can be scaled up. I've developed something called fire mimicry, and actually it's stuff the native people have been doing for thousands of years, as I found out afterwards, clearing and cutting and and thinning the forest like firewood, fertilizing the soils with ash and biochar and getting the mosses and lichens off the tree. So you're saying you can reverse the mortality of a tree? Yes, many hundreds, thousands of them. I've done. This is not a hypothetical. It's been proven that that can work and make a healthy ecosystem. Why do Europeans get it so wrong? We weren't doing farming the way they would see it, by ripping the earth and planting seeds. We were working with the forest. We were, you know, propagating the forest. We tended to the earth. I admire the tree here. I come here and give thanks and gratitude. We do as a tribe, tending to the needs of many precious species that inhabit this plane. Is it too late? It's not too late. It's it's very, very, very close. It's razor thin. Whether we can turn or not, the more people we awaken to what is going on with the forest, We can awaken people to start working with their forest in their own backyard. It starts in your own yard. You know, the idea of farming a forest was so foreign to me as I, I don't know about you guys, but just the idea that there were people here who tended to trees like we tend to crops and it, it was just fascinating. It's forest management. I mean, it's, it's important and it's, it's beautiful there. None of the trees have some issues, but it's just stunning to look at.