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Apple: A New Generation Preserves Tribal Land and Culture in America's National Parks

1 Cover Apple-national-parks-2023-YAS-ALCC-fuels-reduction-work(Click on image to Enlarge)

At the base of Yosemite National Park’s 7,573-foot-tall El Capitan lies a grove of black oak trees. As the wind blows, their leaves rustle like whispers to each other. Meanwhile, passersby stumble off the beaten path, seeking an up-close view of El Capitan’s pure granite rock face. These wanderers create social trails, as they’re called, which occur when park visitors repeatedly veer off planned routes and follow trotted-down footpaths through meadows and other grasslands. They’re one of many threats to this black oak grove that is sacred to the seven traditionally associated tribes and communities of Yosemite: the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation, the Tuolumne Band of Me-Wuk Indians, the Bishop Paiute Tribe, Bridgeport Indian Colony, Kutzadika’a Mono Lake Indian Community, North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians of California, and the Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians.

“It takes a very long time for those things to come back,” Nellie Tucker, crew leader for this season’s Yosemite Ancestral Stewards program (YAS) — who is also Southern Sierra Miwuk and Paiute — explains about social trails. “That’s one less blade of grass that a butterfly can land on, or something can eat. And then it becomes another space for invasive plants.”

This summer, the black oak grove in El Capitan Meadow is being restored by YAS alongside the Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps (ALCC), a group of Indigenous youth passionate about protecting the land and culture of their tribes and seeing nature returned to its original abundance and beauty. The YAS program, funded in part by the National Park Foundation’s Service Corps program and Yosemite Conservancy, is the first tribal conservation crew made up of young adults from the Yosemite National Park-affiliated tribes.

Since 2017, Apple customers have been able to support programs like this one through an Apple Pay campaign celebrating the National Park Service’s anniversary.

YAS and the ALCC are conducting fuels reduction work at El Capitan Meadow: felling dead trees and clearing downed limbs, dry brush, and other debris that could act as fuel for a wildfire should the area be struck by lightning or ignited in some other way. The crew’s work is guided by the teachings of tribal elders who hope to pass on their knowledge of caring for the land. Their efforts will culminate in a cultural burn of the debris, a tradition of using prescribed fire to maintain the health of land and vegetation that dates back thousands of years.

“Back in the day, to regulate how much leaf litter or invasive species were on the ground, Indigenous people would come in and plan out where they would burn and how they would do it,” says Nicole Long, a YAS crew member who is also part of the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation. “So they help the black oaks thrive because they’re a very resilient tree, just like all oaks, and they need the smoke and the fire to help reproduce, to help germinate, and to get rid of competition plants that can kill them.”

For generations, Indigenous people were cut out of the process of caring for this land. Forced removal has left these communities and their tribal lands in a state of flux, with national parks and protected areas benefitting from federal funds while tribes have been relocated, in many instances, beyond those park boundaries. From the 1800s right up to the 1970s, in the area that now constitutes Yosemite, many Indigenous families were forced onto reservations, their homes destroyed and their children forced to assimilate after being shipped off to boarding schools. The ramifications of that displacement and erasure of culture are still felt today: Unemployment among Indigenous people skyrocketed at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic to 28.6 percent. As of January 2022, that number has come down to 11.1 percent, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment data analyzed by the Brookings Institution.

Here in Yosemite, the Ancestral Stewards program is an attempt to introduce a new generation of the original caretakers to the land, while creating pathways to employment and career opportunities for Indigenous youth.

For more, read Apple's full press release here.

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