The following is a press release issued by Redwood Nation Earth First!
Priscilla Hunter holds the microphone at a community meeting she called to gauge the community’s response to CalFire’s proposal [Photo credit: Redwood Nation Earth First!]
A community Rally will be held at the Calfire office on Main St. in Ft. Bragg on Thurs. Oct. 20 at 1:30 p.m. to protest CalFire’s proposal for “co-management” of Jackson Demonstration State Forest (JDSF) with Indigenous Tribes.
CalFires’s unilateral proposal was made on Sept. 26, in a letter from CalFire Registered Professional Forester Kirk O’Dwyer addressed to Priscilla Hunter, Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians Historic Preservation Officer. Offering co-management of a mere 75 acres out of the nearly 50,000 acre publicly owned forest, the CalFire proposal made no mention at all of protection for Sacred Sites, a key demand of the Tribes. Both Caspar 500 and Soda Gulch, another THP with numerous important cultural and sacred sites, qualify as cultural landscapes, yet current harvest plans propose to bulldoze roads right through the Sacred Sites.
On Sunday, October 9th, over 80 people attended a meeting call by Priscilla Hunter to gauge the community’s response to the Cal Fire letter. Community members expressed outrage at the insulting paucity of CalFire’s much vaunted ‘vision’ for co-management of Jackson, the ancestral home of the Northern Pomo and Coast Yuki tribes. After the meeting, the Coalition to Save Jackson Forest issued a response opposing the terms of the letter and enumerating six demands, including:
- Restoration of good-faith negotiations with the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians
- Protection measures for Sacred Sites
- Implementation of the Betts Commission Report (1999) recommendations to protect the many Sacred Sites within JDSF, including the Caspar 500 and Soda Gulch sites.
- An Indigenous model of management and scientific inquiry within JDSF that prioritizes forest protection and restoration over profit.
- Cessation of all herbicide and hack and squirt operations in JDSF in support of both Tribal cultural values and the goals of the Measure V Initiative passed overwhelmingly by the citizens of Mendocino County.
The rally will begin at Town Hall at Laurel and Main Sts. and march to the CalFire office. The press and public are invited.
That’s not our community. If that’s our community then you’re calling these 40 people our community then that means our community is nothing but Ultra leftist liberal elderly people who have mental illness issues and dementia who are demanding people stop doing their job that they’ve done for over 100 years.
To be quite Frank the actual population of this County would like to see the woods thinned out so that we don’t die in fires
Look at them! These people are at the end of their life. They have nothing to fear.