The Chumash Tribe’s Long Struggle to Protect California’s Coastal Waters

The Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians is working on a proposed marine sanctuary on California's Central Coast-but planning has been complicated by the development of offshore windfarms that will need access to sanctuary waters. How is the Tribe managing the tradeoffs of these projects? We spoke with Sam Cohen, the Tribe's government affairs and legal officer, to learn more.

First, tell us about the proposed Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary. Where is it, and why are the Chumash seeking to protect these waters?

The Chumash have a rich maritime history dating back to the invention of the plank canoe-we call it a tomol. Tribal members sailed in the tomol between all the Channel Islands just south of Santa Barbara as far as Ventura, and close to Los Angeles. This was a treacherous journey, but it created a familiarity with the ocean. The Northern Chumash Tribal Council submitted the sanctuary nomination to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 2015, but after five years, they were not making much progress, so our congressman asked us to intervene and assist. NOAA issued a notice of intent to begin the designation process for the proposed Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary in 2021.

This whole area is of humongous significance to the Chumash. The sanctuary lies in an area where cold ocean currents hit the shore and are forced to surface, creating a rich area of nutrients that feeds a variety of ocean-going life. Morro Bay is the point where great white sharks start their southern migration, and there's a great variety of pelagic fish that live in the open ocean. The tribe worshiped swordfish, dolphins, and whales. The Chumash have ascribed spiritual significance to Morro Rock at Morro Bay and to Point Conception, a peninsula you pass to reach the Santa Barbara channel. This is traditionally considered to be where souls ascend to heaven.

This sanctuary has been hailed as a new model for Native collaborative management of public lands. What makes it different?

We started this adventure by looking at other national marine sanctuaries. In Washington state, the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary is co-managed by five federally recognized Washington state tribes along with NOAA. We worked with an ocean scientist, Dr. Mike McGinnis, who commissioned a white paper on tribal co-management because there really weren't any established writings on the subject. We used both the Washington experience and the paper to convince NOAA to create an Intergovernmental Policy Council (IPC)-the formal name for the co-management structure used by NOAA-for the Chumash Sanctuary.

The Washington tribes have fishing treaties that we don't have in California, which means the state and feds have limited recourse to control tribal fishing. In California, we have less leverage because no tribes have fishing treaties. We hope to participate in policymaking, however: things like cultural access or granting regulatory exemptions for underwater fiber cables and wind turbines which will pass through the sanctuary to get power back to shore.

The Department of Defense has approved an offshore windfarm for these waters. What would tribal involvement look like?

There are currently two leases up for consideration, one in Morro Bay and one in Humboldt. The tribes near Humboldt have all opposed that lease. We're cautious-we think the Morro Bay project is viable as long as we're careful about how we implement it. We're supportive of the leases.

Then there's the CADEMO Project off Vandenberg Space Force Base. The Morro Bay leases involve multiple turbines and a whole lot of cables. The CADEMO project needs a complete exemption for the turbines themselves, and it needs to be grandfathered in via existing permits or holes carved in the marine sanctuary where the turbines will exist.

So far, the only agreement we've inked is with CADEMO. This is a community benefits agreement to fund the Santa Ynez Oceanographic Institute, which will support tribal ecologists and undersea archeologists. On land, we send out tribal monitors who look through what's excavated. That model doesn't work for offshore wind, so we'll have to adjust our model. We're doing some scuba training, which goes down 100 feet. Most of the offshore wind infrastructure will be in much deeper water. It will be floating, with cables anchored to the ocean floor. The best we can hope for is to shadow them and report on findings as they occur.

The problem for us is resources: we've been working on these projects for last five years. We need capacity-building assistance so we can review studies as they go on. We want to have confidence in these studies when they're incorporated into the environmental impact statement. The Morro Bay leases are 15 years down road, and CADEMO is only five years away. This project could test the offshore wind hypothesis.

Final thoughts?

We like to think of ourselves as stewards of the environment, and we want these projects to be built as responsibly as possible. Wind is a terrific source of electricity that doesn't cause climate change. We support our governor and the president on offshore wind, and we want to make this work if we can.

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