Fighting for the First Indigenous-Led Marine Sanctuaries

Off the coast of San Luis Obispo County and Santa Barbara county lies a 7,000 square mile area of the Pacific Ocean known for its expansive and biodiverse kelp forests, coastal dunes, wetlands, and habitat for endangered species such as blue whales and leatherback sea turtles. This area is also home to the Northern Chumash Tribe, who has occupied California’s central coast for over 20,000 years, and has sacred sites submerged offshore. As of November 9th, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forwarded the Northern Chumash Tribe’s proposal for this area to be designated as the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary. If passed, it would be known as the first tribal-led marine sanctuary in the United States.

The push to designate this sanctuary marks a significant milestone in indigenous-led conservation worldwide, as well as a milestone in the fight for ocean advocacy and protection, according to Violet Sage Walker, the Northern Chumash Tribal Council Chairwoman. Many covering the designation of this sanctuary, however, fail to recognize the three other indigenous led sanctuary campaigns occurring in the United States - one in Alaska’s Pribilof Islands, the Mariana Islands, and Hawaii’s Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.

“The Chumash were the first ones to have the idea,” said Angelo Villagomez, an indigenous conservation leader and advocate from the Mariana Islands. “They looked around, and were like ‘We're sponsoring this so we'll call it the first indigenous led conservation effort.’ Other groups were doing it too but never thought of it in that lens.”

Chumash Sanctuary’s potential designation can be attributed to a 40 year effort led by the late Tribal Chief Fred Harvey Collins, who gathered local community members and elected leaders along the central coast of California to push for designation of the sanctuary as the first indigenous led in the United States.

“Indigenous peoples have a unique perspective,” Chief Collins said of the sanctuary’s designation. “When incorporated with science, our perspectives highlight Grandmother Ocean’s life and connectivity in a living matrix of thrivability. The connectivity of life in Grandmother Ocean needs our assistance in understanding ways to support the life force of our Grandmother Ocean.”

Nine years ago, as a result of the Chumash Tribe’s effort, in 2013, the Northern Chumash Tribal Council launched a campaign to secure formal sanctuary designation. The nomination was accepted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2015, and 7 years later we are now seeing it enter the formal designation process.

“I really liked the way that the drafters of the sanctuary nomination talked about it in the sense that they are the first indigenous led sanctuary nomination,” Villagomez said, “and I agree with that, but it's not that they're the first indigenous led marine protected area, and to a certain degree, our understanding of what indigenous-led means and what a marine protected area is and how the two play off each other has evolved over time.”

Concurrently, the Mariana Islands have been pushing for sanctuary designations since 2007, Papahānaumokuākea since 2000, and the Pribilof Islands since 2021. The fight for each is unique in it’s own way, but all represent strides for returning land and oceans to its original stewards, though none have officially been passed.

“On Pacific Islands they all have traditions and words for things that look a lot like what we would call an MPA, they tend to relate somewhat to the idea of the sacred,” Villagomez said. “It can be a combination of natural resource management but also the sacred. People have noticed that and there is scholarship about indigenous ideas of our relationship to nature and our relationship to the creation and what that means for conservation.”

The Chumash proposed sanctuary is currently under the “scoping” phase, which is the first phase in the four step designation process. This phase calls for public input on the boundaries of the sanctuary, resources that should be protected, and other issues that should be considered in the planning. After this phase comes the sanctuary proposal, followed by public review and finally sanctuary designation. This process will likely take years, according to Villagomez, but he is confident it will become designated eventually.

If designated as a sanctuary, the reserve aims to promote responsible and sustainable ocean usage dedicated to “the nurturing of relationships to Nature and the Ocean in the deepest ways possible,” according to the sanctuary’s website. Since the Chumash Tribe are the original stewards of this land, management will also prioritize ecological and cultural ways of knowing with federal conservation management. It will additionally place a focus on protecting water quality and cultural resources and prohibit any future development of oil and gas mining. The sanctuary additionally plans to confer on renewable energy projects including offshore floating wind on the Central Coast.

While indigenous management of oceans has been prevalent in the past, management has declined in the past centuries due to the effects of colonization, marginalization of indigenous communities, and Western conservation practices that inherently view humans and nature as separate entities incompatible of thriving together. This has resulted in top-down conservation initiatives that ignore local perspectives and needs, and separate indigenous communities from knowledge systems and cultural practices that have been utilized for thousands of years.

This exclusion of Indigenous peoples’ voices, knowledge systems, and cultural perspectives from conservation has hindered our conservation movement from reaching its full potential. Studies have shown that indigenous managed lands, which make up almost a quarter of the land on earth, boast higher biodiversity, and are more effectively stewardarded due to learned knowledge of the land that western cultures lack. In prioritizing indigenous sovereignty and land justice within our conservation movement through actions such as establishing and acknowledging indigenous led MPAs, we can carve a path towards addressing social injustices and simultaneously enhance biodiversity conservation.

“It's pretty cool to see native groups reclaiming our definition of conservation,” Villagomez said, “and sort of standing up and saying that, you know, we are the best stewards of nature and we will be the ones to lead this.”

Throughout the rest of the world, there are growing examples of indigenous led and co-managed marine protected areas. Such examples include Australia’s Sea Country Indigenous Protected Areas Program, Chile’s Native People’s Marine Coastal Spaces, Fiji’s Ulunikoro Marine Conservation Area, Nicaragua’s Cayos Miskitos and Franja Costera Marine Biological Reserve, and the Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site in British Columbia. At the heart of many of these reserves is the recognition that land, sea, and people are interconnected.

In the United States, though we are seeing some instances of tribes being given their ancestral lands, such as the Esselen Tribe in Big Sur, or the Yurok Tribe on the Klamath River, and the introduction of indigenous led marine sanctuaries, the country needs to prioritize land repatriation and indigenous conservation more than it currently is. Though this sanctuary is a step in the right direction and could serve as a baseline for future conservation partnerships between the federal government and tribes, it is only the first step in a long process of returning stolen land to its original owners.

Support the Chumnash National Sanctuary here.