Community Engagement: Challenges and Opportunities

Joins us for a luncheon with Zakiya Luna, UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and keynote speaker for the Campus Dialogue on Race.

RSVP required.

Luna's research interests include: Gender and Sexuality; Law and Society; Race, Gender and Class; Social Movements and the Sociology of Reproduction.

The 15th Annual Campus Dialogue on Race runs Oct. 29-Nov. 9.

Native Pathways Speakers Series

Hawk Rosales, Executive Director of the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council will present Conserving Native Peoples’ Land and Marine Environments, an overview of the history and work of a Northern California intertribal cultural lands conservation organization that has received international acclaim for its work to protect, conserve and restore the ancestral homelands of the Sinkyone Indian people in southern Humboldt and northern Mendocino Counties.

The presentation will include a PowerPoint with photographs and information about the Sinkyone region and the Sinkyone Council’s work to return traditional Native stewardship to these wilderness lands.

Topics of Mr. Rosales’s presentation will include the cultural history of the Sinkyone people; the unique structure of the Sinkyone Council; the development of partnerships with other NGOs, government agencies, universities and the public to achieve remarkable environmental victories; the use of legal processes and instruments to secure recognition and protection for Tribal use-rights in off-reservation lands; and the management and policy models this paradigm can provide for indigenous communities throughout the world.

Mr. Rosales’s discussion will showcase three areas of the Sinkyone Council’s work:

1) The Council’s recent acquisition of the Four Corners property;

2) Tribal use rights and the Marine Life Protection Act Initiative; and

3) The emerging role of Native land trusts within the land conservation movement.

Hawk Rosales is Executive Director of the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council, a Tribal non-profit conservation organization comprised of ten federally recognized Northern California Indian Tribes. Hawk has worked with the Council since 1990. Formed in 1986, the Sinkyone Council works to reestablish local Tribal stewardship in the Sinkyone region of the North Coast through culturally informed land conservation, restoration of the redwood ecosystem, management of traditional resources, environmental education, Native rights advocacy, and partnerships with various conservation organizations and agencies.

In 1997, the Sinkyone Council established the first-ever InterTribal Wilderness on 3,845 acres of Sinkyone ancestral land acquired from The Trust for Public Land. Hawk led the campaign to secure the public and State support that enabled the Council to complete its acquisition of this land, which is permanently protected with conservation easements—the first such agreements in the U.S. to be executed between a Tribal entity and private land trusts. In March 2012, the Council added to its wilderness lands with the gift of the 164-acre Four Corners property from Save The Redwoods League, which the San Francisco Chronicle featured in a front-page article.

Since 2009, Hawk has spearheaded the Council’s involvement with the Marine Life Protection Act Initiative, in which the Council took the lead role in advocating for the State’s recognition and protection of the traditional gathering, harvesting and fishing rights of North Coast Tribes affected by the MLPA. The Council—together with its counsel Berkey Williams LLP—provided legal arguments, helped advance new policies and negotiated a regulatory solution adopted in June 2012 by the Fish and Game Commission that will ensure binding protections for North Coast Tribes’ aboriginal rights and continued cultural usage in the North Coast’s new State Marine Conservation Areas authorized by the MLPA

The Native Pathways Speakers series is sponsored by the Department of Native American Studies and the Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

RJA: Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth