Reimagining Consultation in Native California: The Owens Valley Paiute Wildfire Project

How might small tribes/nations in California's Owens Valley most productively engage federal entities such as the National Forest Service when seeking to protect cultural resources and advance tribal interests? This question is at the heart of a new project focused on wildfire science, management, and mitigation in the Eastern Sierra region. Proposed by the authors of this paper to several small Owens Valley tribes, including the Lone Pine Paiute-Shoshone Tribe, the Big Pine Paiute Tribe, and the Bishop Paiute Tribe, and then supported by the National Science Foundation, this project began in 2022 and will continue at least until 2025. Convening regular meetings with tribal members and representatives, the project originally centered on issues of wildfire management across multiple jurisdictions, including state, federal, and tribal entities.

The convenors of the project and authors of this paper are a scholar of religion and two cultural anthropologists, all of whom work at the intersection of contemporary Indigenous communities and law. Drawing upon our joint experiences and competence, we are currently working with our partners to reimagine consultative practices in the context of large government-sponsored projects that trigger various environmental and cultural protection mechanisms such as the National Historical Preservation Act and the National Environmental Protection Act and related state-level laws and policies.

Our partners have made clear to us the many ways consultative regimes are failing them, functioning too often as box-checking exercises in a manner familiar to many Native peoples. Such practices are far from reaching the international standard of free, prior, and informed consent as articulated in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Working with our partners to envision ways to close the gap between "mere consultation" and active consent, we have spent considerable time brainstorming as a group about best practices in such settings. One major upshot of this work is that the group is actively working on ways to create and resource a tribally-led non-profit that would serve tribes in the region by taking the lead on consultative matters vis-a-vis government agencies.

We are eager to share our story thus far and to glean input from our peers at the AAR. In particular, we will discuss the significance of our partners` insistence that the aforementioned consultative practices, when pursued in a status quo fashion, leave out their primary concerns or sideline them in ways that dismembers their significance. Namely, tribal representatives are disheartened by the persistent categorical failings of government agencies to see culture as anything more than archaeological sites (important as these are) and nature as anything more than isolated species and bio-systems. Our partners are pushing us to see what they wish to advocate for in consultative settings: that natural landscapes are themselves "cultural resources" and that the relevant expertise needed to understand this proposition should come from tribes directly. For example, some federal land managers in the region understand piñon groves in the region as a fire risk in need of management without adequately appreciating ways such groves are foundational to Paiute traditions, stories, and ritual practices. Foremost, few land managers appreciate the future-oriented claims of our Native partners who consistently speak of the importance of such groves for teaching and perpetuating tradition. As we hope you can see from this short example, we are involved in a process of rethinking consultation in ways responsive to such challenges from our partners. If we gain traction in the Owens Valley, we hope the model of a tribally-led consultative consortium will be scalable and translatable to other settings. 

After sketching the basis of the Owens Valley project, our paper will turn to two primary topics. First, we will discuss ideas charted above about rethinking the dynamics and foundations of consultative practices. Second, we will reflect on the nature of religious and cultural claims made by our partners that have thus far escaped legibility in consultation settings. We will conclude by framing several considerations for recalibrating consultative mechanisms so this problem is diminished.