This story was originally published by Shasta Scout and shared through the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Rural News Network. ICT is a member of INN and the network.
Marc Dadigan
Shasta Scout
As a Wintu cultural monitor, Shawna Wilson says she always carries her hard hat, clipboard, and tribal ID card in her vehicle because she never knows when she might have to step into her role and stop a construction project.
California law requires that state and local agencies contact the appropriate tribes when they’re planning development projects within their ancestral territories. After a consultation process, agencies often broker agreements with tribes to place cultural monitors like Wilson on construction sites to prevent damage to ancestral village sites, sacred places, cemeteries and other cultural resources.
However, the system doesn’t always work as intended. Even though agencies should consult with tribes long before breaking ground, Wilson says she often learns about construction projects in her Wintu homelands, which includes the Redding area, when she happens to drive past them.
“It can be difficult to navigate when you’re dealing with foremen who don’t want to listen or slow down their work,” said Wilson, a member of the Wintu Tribe of Northern California. “But it’s important we speak up for our lands and ancestors.”
Sometimes her tribe is left in the dark simply due to poor communication, but Wilson said sometimes public officials falsely believe they don’t have to consult with her tribe because the Wintu are federally unrecognized.
Wilson and several California tribal leaders say excluding non-recognized tribes, which violates state law, could soon become encoded into California regulations, much to their alarm. A state commission is currently evaluating a proposal that would remove unrecognized tribes, including the Wintu, from an important list agencies use to determine which tribes to consult.
The public comment period on the draft regulations will end on Tuesday, Jan. 26.
Known as the tribal contact list, it’s been curated by the tribal-led Native American Heritage Commission for 50 years. The list is a valuable resource for public officials because it can be challenging to know which tribe is culturally affiliated to a given place, given the sheer diversity of tribes in California and the sometimes overlapping nature of tribal territorial boundaries.
For non-recognized tribes — many of whom suffer from their exclusion from federal Indian funding and legal protections as well as the lack of a land base — the list is a lifeline, one of the few legal avenues they have to advocate for their place-based ways of life, they say.
“It’s going to make the exclusion and silencing we experience now more permanent.” Wilson said.
For this story, Shasta Scout interviewed seven representatives of non-recognized tribes from throughout the state. They all say their removal from the list could leave their territories extremely vulnerable to cultural and environmental destruction. In many cases, tribal representatives said, the nearest recognized tribe that would be consulted for any given project may be some distance away and may also lack the experience and capacity to advocate for homelands that are not their own.
Hereditary Chief Caleen Sisk said her tribe, the Winnemem Wintu, is the only one qualified to advocate for their ancestral homelands of the McCloud River watershed, where they have been working with government agencies to protect sacred sites, revitalize ceremonies and restore the river’s ecology for decades. For example, the tribe has spent more than 20 years resisting the Bureau of Reclamation’s raise of Shasta Dam and since 2022 have been working with state and federal agencies to restore salmon to the McCloud.
In part because of the Winnemem Wintu’s advocacy for their river, the State Assembly passed a joint resolution in 2009 urging the federal government to recognize the tribe. Sisk said she doubted the Redding Rancheria, the closest recognized tribe that has Wintu members, would have the resources or knowledge to work on the river.
“If we don’t have the right to speak up for our sacred sites, who is going to do that? Other tribes don’t know where the sacred sites are or know how to protect the river,” Sisk said. “[The proposed regulations] would be opening up thousands of acres of land that will have no one to protect it.”
Cultural monitor Wilson echoed Sisk’s concern that the Rancheria could become the one stop shop for Redding-area tribal consultations when they “don’t represent the full Wintu history or all of the Wintu voices.”
Redding Rancheria Chairman Jack Potter noted that his tribe has regularly written letters for the other Wintu tribes, supporting their cases for recognition and their inherent Indigenous rights. He added that Redding Rancheria tribal members can empathize with unrecognized tribes’ struggles today because Congress terminated them as a tribe in 1959, and it wasn’t until 1983 that the courts restored their sovereign status with the U.S. government.
“We were also without a voice at one time. We honor and respect the entire Wintu country because if we don’t respect all Wintu people ourselves, how can we expect other people to?” he said.
Non-recognized tribes call proposal “administrative erasure”
Under the proposed regulations, the current list would be discarded, and only federally recognized tribes, such as the Redding Rancheria, would stay on the revised list. About 60 non-federally recognized tribes, including three Wintu tribes whose territories cover parts of Shasta County, would be forced to apply to the commission for consideration to be re-added to the list. The current draft of the regulations indicates that would require extensive documentation and records, and tribal leaders say it would likely be a long and uphill battle to get added back to the list.
When a tribe is federally recognized, it means that the United States has established a government-to-government relationship with a tribe as a sovereign nation, although U.S. law does place some constraints on tribes’ ability to self-govern. Historically this relationship with the U.S. was established primarily by treaties and the establishment of reservations held in trust for tribes by the federal government.
In California, it’s well known that many historical and legitimate tribes lack federal recognition because of systemically oppressive actions by the state and federal governments’. Numerous government studies and academic analyses have concluded that the lack of recognition is rooted in the state’s complex history of unratified treaties, the impacts of the Spanish Missions — which fragmented many tribal societies through enslavement and high death tolls — and the devastating state-led campaigns of genocide and removals that accompanied 19th century Euro-American settlement.
In recent decades, being on the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ official list of federally recognized tribes has become a precondition for tribes to access federal funding and legal protections, such as receiving an eagle feather permit, protection for ceremonies on public lands and many other rights specific to tribes, including the ability to operate gaming businesses.
Tribal legal advisors and scholars told Shasta Scout the proposed changes to the contact list would undermine decades of established practice at the Native-led Heritage Commission. The commission was created in 1976 to help tribes protect their cultural sites, and the group has historically been careful to be inclusive of both unrecognized and recognized tribes, they say.
“It’s very transparent that these regulations are not about enabling California Indians to engage with our sacred places, to practice our religions or our traditional ecological knowledge. It’s really about creating this discriminatory hierarchy among our tribes and prioritizing recognized tribes,” said Olivia Chilcote, a tribal member of San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians and associate professor of American Indian Studies at San Diego State University.
Native American Heritage Commissioners declined to answer questions about the proposed regulations for Shasta Scout noting that those regulations are still in draft form and haven’t been finalized, according to an email from Gita Chandra, Communications and Special Projects Director for the California Natural Resources Agency.
Regulations with unclear motivations and legality
Claire Cummings, a legal advisor for the Winnemem Wintu, said the proposed regulations would violate the equal protection principle outlined in the state’s constitution. She said the regulations arbitrarily creates two separate classes of California Indians and would give the NAHC a new role of judging the legitimacy of different tribes. This is a role it is not legally entitled to wield, Cummings explained.
“The issue here is sovereignty. The law clearly states that California must protect the sovereignty of unrecognized tribes, but now the NAHC is trying to put itself in the position of deciding who is and isn’t worthy of sovereignty,” said Cummings.
Cummings as well as tribal leaders also said it’s unclear why the NAHC is pursuing the regulation changes and that commissioners have not explained what problem they’re trying to solve.
The proposed regulations do refer to problems with disputes over tribal boundaries as well as “splinter” tribes, and sets up a process by which the NAHC would evaluate these conflicts and the legitimacy of unrecognized tribes. However, unrecognized tribal leaders interviewed by Shasta Scout do not think NAHC is the appropriate body to be acting as a final judge on these disputes.
Potter, chairman of the Redding Rancheria, said he believes the proposed changes to the contact list are designed to address what he calls “boy scout clubs,” or illegitimate groups who are staking claims to tribal lands.
“I don’t think it’s their intention to eliminate anyone. I think they’re just trying to figure out how to deal with these imaginary groups who have ties to nothing and have legitimate tribes going around and around in the courts,” Potter said.
Cummings said the law is clear that tribes have the power to put themselves on the list, and it’s the NAHC’s role simply to facilitate that rather than evaluate the legitimacy of other tribes. NAHC commissioners are politically appointed by the governor, and historically there has been a mixture of unrecognized and recognized commissioners. Today, there is only one unrecognized commissioner and five who are enrolled with recognized tribes.
Tribal representatives are also concerned about commissioner ties to wealthy gaming tribes, some of whom were co-sponsors on a 2025 bill that similarly would have excluded unrecognized tribes from the state’s environmental review process.
“It’s really concerning for me that the NAHC would have this kind of discretionary authority to judge our tribal communities and it really raises serious questions about who has the ability, time and resources to review the documentation they’re requesting,” said Chilcote, the San Diego State professor.
Chilcote also noted that the commission’s proposed regulations create an evaluation process that is similar to a petition process the Bureau of Indian Affairs created in 1978. For decades that process had been criticized as highly political, unnecessarily laborious and discriminatory toward California tribes, none of whom have been recognized through the process since 1983.
“To say (the commission) is going to decide who is the right tribe is antithetical to our cultures and the history of how our communities functioned,” said Chilcote. “There were always shared territories, places that were sacred to many of us.”
A barrier to healing
The proposed regulations come at a time when non-recognized tribes in California have made tremendous progress in cultural revitalization and healing some of the scars of the historical genocide and land dispossession.
In recent years, many non-recognized tribes have restored land bases and re-engaged in traditional environmental stewardship, often with state partnerships. For instance, since 2023, the Winnemem Wintu have been co-managers with state and federal wildlife agencies on a historic project to restore salmon to the McCloud River where the fish have been absent for nearly 80 years.
However, if they are removed from the contact list, non-recognized tribes fear these informal and formal partnerships may be undermined, and they may be excluded from funding streams such as the state’s $101 million Tribal Nature-Based Solutions grant program.
In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an official acknowledgment of California’s role in the 19th century genocide, and initiated a Truth and Healing Council to investigate reconciliation. Many tribal leaders are now wondering how their removal from the contact list fits into this vision.
“There’s no truth and healing for us if we can’t protect our sacred sites, if we can’t get back to the river and get back our salmon,” said Sisk, Chief of the Winnemem Wintu. “Taking us off the list is just another type of the same genocide.”