Above photo: The Blue Creek segment of the Klamath River will now be home to a salmon sanctuary and community forest courtesy of a $56 million land transfer to the Yurok Tribe. Western River Conservancy.
The Yurok Tribe completed a $56 million land transfer along the Klamath River.
Creating the Blue Creek Salmon Sanctuary and Yurok Community Forest in California’s largest land-back deal.
The Yurok Tribe has gained control and stewardship of 73 square miles of land along the Klamath River in a $56 million transfer — the largest land-back deal in California’s history.
The tribe announced on June 5 it had completed the final phase of the land-transfer partnership with Portland, Ore.-based nonprofit Western Rivers Conservancy, a process that began in 2022. With the land under their control, the Yurok have designated 15,000 acres of the 47,097-acre property as the Blue Creek Salmon Sanctuary and established the remainder as the Yurok Community Forest.
“The impact of this project is enormous,” Joseph L. James, chairman of the Yurok Tribe, said in a statement. “We are forging a sustainable future for the fish, forests and our people that honors both ecological integrity and our cultural heritage.”
The conservancy began purchasing the land in phases from Seattle-based forestry firm Green Diamond Resource Company in 2009, according to a WRC statement. The organization used a combination of loans, carbon credits from offsets secured by forest management, and private philanthropy. WRC also utilized the New Markets Tax Credit program, a federal program that provides returns on community development investments.
The nonprofit paid $56 million for the acreage, along with a final $3.3 million payment to the Yurok to support future stewardship efforts of the ancestral lands.
The land transfer, in addition to being the largest in California history, is the latest large transfer in the ongoing land back movement, which has seen thousands of acres returned to tribes through deals similar to this one. In 2022, the Nature Conservancy supported a 28,000-acre transfer to the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa Indians in Minnesota. The Conservancy is also working on an ongoing 31,000-acre transfer for the Penobscot Tribe in Maine.
Those partnerships are often sought as a way to provide more stringent protections for the land in question from fractionation and private development, per prior Tribal Business News reporting.
Western Rivers Conservancy President Nelson Matthews said the transfer protects the land from development while placing it under tribal stewardship.
“Blue Creek and its watershed are critical to the health of the entire Klamath fishery,” Matthews said. “The Yurok Tribe has the resources and the deep cultural connections that sustained this land for millennia, and now they can continue to do so.”