A group of Native tribes are being given back ownership of hundreds of acres of California’s redwood forest.
InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council and Save the Redwoods League (a non-profit) released statements this week to announce the change of ownership.
The Save the Redwoods League said it donated the 523-acre forest to a group of ten Indigenous tribes that make up the Intertribal Sinkyone Council. It is the second land donation made by environmental advocacy groups to the council.
The redwood forest — formerly called Andersonia West — will again be known as Tc’ih-Léh-Dûñ, which means “Fish Run Place.”
“Renaming the property Tc’ih-Léh-Dûñ lets people know that it’s a sacred place; it’s a place for our Native people,”Christa Ray, a board member of The Sinkyone Council, stated this in a Tuesday statement.
“It lets them know that there was a language and that there was a people who lived there long before now.”
According to CBS, the Sinkyone Council shares how Sinkyone people “”We were forced to remove them from the forest’s soil by European American settlers many generations ago.”