Learn about the Indigenous Food Sovereignty Movement and how it supports the ecocultural restoration of indigenous land.
“You know that song, ‘We paved paradise and put up a parking lot’?” The question comes from Michelle Vassel, Tribal Administrator of the Wiyot Tribe. I’m interviewing Vassel to learn about how land acquisitions are bolstering the Wiyot’s food sovereignty efforts. I nod, affirming the Joni Mitchell reference. “Well, we want to do the opposite of that. We want to take a parking lot and make it paradise. Someplace we would all want to live.”
You might think Vassel is speaking figuratively in her description of the Wiyot’s work through the Dishgamu Humboldt Community Land Trust. You’d be wrong. In May of 2023, as I showed up to learn more about the Trust’s work, I found myself staring at deteriorating asphalt behind a vacant commercial building on the edge of downtown Eureka, California. The Wiyot’s plans for the site include transforming this pavement into a garden, full of traditional food and medicinal plants. It takes real vision to imagine these potholes and parking spots full of green, but then, vision is something Vassel and her colleagues have in spades.
That vision spills over into interesting places, including the bureaucratic world of administration for land management, where the Wiyot are trying something new. Most community land trusts (CLTs), which acquire parcels of land to protect and preserve in perpetuity, are structured as nonprofit 501(c)(3)s. Dishgamu (pronounced DISH-gah-muh), instead, is a “component unit” of the Wiyot Tribe. “Component units” are organizations that are legally separate from but accountable to a local government, which has financial responsibility for them. Some public utilities or housing authorities, for instance, are component units. And the Wiyot Tribe isn’t just another community organization, but a sovereign tribal nation — it has its own elected government (the Tribal Council), its own constitution, and so on. Existing as a component unit gives the Dishgamu Humboldt CLT the flexibility it needs to conduct business, while ensuring that land put into the trust remains under the care of the tribe and complements its other goals, from providing affordable housing to improving access to healthy food for its members.
This innovation — placing a CLT under direct tribal governance — also means this region, which many might associate with last century’s “Back to the Land” movement, is now a hub for the movement for land return, or #LandBack. Through Dishgamu, those who’ve purchased land in Wiyot ancestral territory (encompassing much of what’s now called Humboldt County) have a means by which they can return that land if they choose to do so.

And many people are doing just that. In April of 2023, I listened to an area resident, psychologist Randy Crutcher, talk on a panel at the Wiyot-sponsored Decolonizing Economics Summit about his decision to return parcels owned by his family to the Wiyot Tribe. Crutcher inherited responsibility for his family’s land when his parents — teachers who had dabbled in real estate, providing affordable rental units in the area — died. Inspired by a similar action undertaken by the City of Eureka, which transferred ownership of Tuluwat, an island in Wigi (Humboldt) Bay, back to the Wiyot, Crutcher provided a test case on how individuals might do the same.
Dishgamu means “love” in Soulatluk, the Wiyot language, and nothing quite encapsulates love like the Wiyot’s restoration of Tuluwat. The Wiyot Tribe has spent millions on cleanup efforts, removing tons of toxic debris left by an abandoned ship repair site, and navigating long permitting processes to remove invasive species, such as Spartina, from the shoreline.
And that’s after a decades-long campaign — spearheaded by Vassel’s mentor and former Wiyot Chairwoman Cheryl Seidner — to have Tuluwat, which is at the heart of the Wiyot’s creation story, returned to the tribe. Now, 30 years later, the Wiyot are back on the island.
What may sound like a happy ending is built on more than a century of immense pain: the Wiyot’s long absence from the island is the result of a series of planned and monstrous massacres in 1860, when settlers killed hundreds of Wiyot as they slept while gathered on Tuluwat for their annual World Renewal Ceremony. Wiyot were then banned from stepping foot on Tuluwat — until now.
What is Indigenous Food Sovereignty?
The restoration of Tuluwat is an incredible story. But the Dishgamu Humboldt CLT is already busy laying the groundwork for additional visionary stories. There’s the Jaroujiji Youth Housing Project, for instance. (Jaroujiji means “a good place to rest” in Soulatluk and is the original name for Eureka). The project is a dispersed site of three separate buildings that will provide transitional youth housing, where youth will also be given opportunities to learn new skills. That’s the site where parking lots will literally become gardens. And numerous other projects are shoring up the tribe’s food sovereignty efforts.
There are many ways to define “food sovereignty,” but Vassel’s definition is pretty simple: “having the ability to gather things available in your environment, things you would traditionally eat because they’re in the place where you live.” She contrasts that to the kinds of food choices one is often pushed into when shopping in a modern grocery store, whether that’s buying lettuce from California or beef from Brazil, and all the fossil fuel consumption associated with those choices.
Reintroducing Traditional Foods
That simple ability to gather local foods is something the Wiyot have been missing for a long time. This point really hit home for Vassel in her prior role as Director of Health and Human Services, where she conducted a survey to see why people weren’t eating traditional foods, which are known to help address various health risks, including diabetes. “The more traditional food you eat, the less of these [risk] factors exist,” Vassel says. But 74 percent of those surveyed said they didn’t eat traditional food because they lack access — those foods are typically restricted on private land.

In summer of 2022, former Chairwoman Seidner shared with the Humboldt-based podcast the EcoNews Report what it meant for the tribe to finally have land for gathering:
“When we went hazelnut gathering or huckleberrying, we were always going over a fence. To see my grandmother … hop a fence in a dress is really interesting. … I never thought we were trespassing or doing anything illegal, because that’s what we always did. Then, when I got older, I got a little more afraid, because people might come up with a shotgun or something. … So having land of our own to go gather things is really important to me, and it’s a good thing.”
The need for access is leading to creative developments of all sorts for providing foods where people live and work, be it the envisioned gardens replacing the parking lots at the Jaroujiji Youth Housing Project, or a potential food forest at the nearby College of the Redwoods. Farther up the road, tribal staff sit on the steering committee for the new Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab and Traditional Ecological Knowledges Institute at Cal Poly Humboldt. Founded after a student-led fundraising drive, the Food Sovereignty Lab will feature indoor food-preparation areas and outdoor space — recently renamed “Wiyot Plaza” — for experiential learning about food systems. Before it opened, the Food Lab launched a pilot project in partnership with the broader Wiyot community and multiple community groups, including the Native Women’s Collective, to supply boxes of produce and traditional foods and medicines to Wiyot members free of charge.
‘Ecocultural Restoration’
None of these projects ties together food sovereignty and land return quite like the acquisition of Mouralherwaqh (pronounced “more-RAH-share-wahg”), 46 acres of intact and undeveloped forest and wetland on the southern end of the bay. Walking the forest in springtime, the understory is a tangle of green, but once you begin to look, the vibrance and diversity becomes apparent: There’s the outline of leaves of wutwurrulha, and though it’s early, there are a few we’daw berries high up already turning golden. (Those are the Soulatluk names for salmonberry plant and salmonberries, respectively. The language uses different words for the bush and the berry of many plants.) Lower down, I find the tiny pearly blooms on bushes of both viqulhat (salal) and vou’gulhat (huckleberry). When I asked Vassel about traditional foods that make Mouralherwaqh important, berries were at the top of the list. I can see why.

Yet some of what’s valuable here lies hidden from view — like the roots of the d’uk, or Sitka spruce, an important element in Wiyot basketry. The tribe’s staff in the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is still assessing what’s here, finding evidence not just of opossums and raccoons but also maqh (bear) and dutgu’shanilh (mountain lion). Game cams will find out if the land acts as a corridor for many such species to access the coast, as the tribe believes. Birds are present for sure; the presence of egret and heron rookeries prevented the land from being fully logged in 2014. The lower portion of Mouralherwaqh is wetland, bringing in waterfowl and making it a potential location for hunting, not just harvesting.
Whatever foodstuffs the land might offer, there’s plenty of work to be done to make the forest more habitable for the plants. Vassel calls this “ecocultural restoration.” Past use has led to heavy presence of invasives common after human disturbance. Yellow scotch broom is everywhere, and I leave from my walk coated in its mustardy powder. The spruce are covered in ivy. The Wiyot’s DNR is working on removal plans, but it’ll have to go through a permitting process. Just as at Tuluwat, the tribe will be putting plenty of time and resources into the land’s recovery.

The work at Mouralherwaqh is a reminder that restoration isn’t just returning land to some imagined pristine state, absent of human presence. The notion of wilderness as it developed in the 19th century largely missed the way forests — here in California especially — were being cared for. “We need to bust the myth that Indian people were random gatherers,” Adam Canter, the tribe’s Natural Resource Director, said for an article published in BioScience. “They were master permaculturists.”
The question is “restoration not to what but for what,” Zack Erickson, a forester for the Wiyot, tells me. He’s quoting Cutcha Risling Baldy, a professor at Cal Poly Humboldt who’s been involved in the establishment of the food sovereignty lab. At Mouralherwaqh, that “for what” has many possibilities. It’s an example of the type of restoration work the tribe hopes can also be accomplished through the Dishgamu Humboldt CLT, which has as part of its mission the preservation of green space. This tract of forestland represents a special opportunity to conserve wetland and salt marshes, allowing it to migrate inland.
It’s the type of steps-ahead thinking I’ve begun to recognize in my time learning about the Wiyot’s work. It’s not just people living on seashores who will be displaced by warming oceans in future years; it’s the other plants and animals on which we depend. By conserving land that starts with water and moves upland into woods, the Wiyot are preserving homes for these species, and their own hunting and foraging grounds as well.
Land Back Abundance
“I don’t call it a gift. I call it a return. From my family, whose values aligned with this action, in a beautiful way,” Randy Crutcher told the online crowd in April of 2023. So what if, like Crutcher, you feel inspired by and aligned with the idea of returning land? What’s useful, and how do you proceed?
The first thing to know is whether you live in ancestral Wiyot territory, which the tribe describes as “Little River to the north, Bear River Ridge to the south, and from the Pacific Coast out to as far as Berry Summit in the northeast and Chalk Mountain in the southeast.” Those inside this area can contact the Dishgamu Humboldt CLT to talk through the process, and find more info on the Wiyot website. Those outside of this region can use the Native Land map to find the names and contact info for tribes in their area. Other tribes may not yet be set up with the same kind of infrastructure Dishgamu has built, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be interested in working with you. It may just mean there’s more to figure out about how to proceed.

If you’re wondering which kinds of land are specifically beneficial for the tribe’s food sovereignty efforts, Canter at the Wiyot’s DNR suggests — at least for them — thinking about coastal prairie and coastal shrubland, noting that “shrublands are often overlooked by land owners” but “provide really important cover for lots of wildlife and birds,” as well as many traditional food plants.
Before I leave from my too-brief tour, I visit the parcel returned by the Crutcher family. It’s nestled behind some houses in Eureka, and it hosts a tiny grove of redwoods. It’s in town, but Dishgamu is preserving it through a conservation easement. I drive there with David Cobb, the CLT’s Advancement Manager at the time, who chats with the neighbors nearby and lets me poke around and take photos.

It’s late afternoon, and the fog has finally burned off, letting the sunlight pour through the trees onto the spring nettle, or vilh, at their base. The beauty, once again, is both metaphorical and physical — I think about how one harvests nettle in the springtime, drinking its tea to cleanse away the unhealthy accumulations of winter, in preparation for summer abundance. Isn’t this a fitting plant to see, here at the end of my visit to lands returned with the aim of healing relationships between the people who live here? And that healing itself is making way for the return of practices that will help so many other plants, and people, grow into further abundance.
It’s a hint of that paradise that Vassel wants to make sure we all get a chance to live in.
Meg Wade is an Oregon-based writer and community organizer.