FIRST STEWARDS

Native people were the first stewards of this land. The Native American presence on the Central California coast and mountains, stretching over fifteen thousand years, shaped the landscape that later European settlers would encounter.

“Native American people of the Central California coast have been intimately involved with the landscape for many millennia … the timber and meadowlands first encountered by Spanish explorers, settlers and later, loggers, owed many of its virtues, as extolled by the incoming immigrants, to the regular treatments and harvesting practices of the indigenous people.”

Courtesy of Mark Hylkema

Spanish explorers often witnessed the setting of fires. In 1769 Padre Juan Crespi of the Portolá Expedition recorded that the Native people of the Santa Cruz region were burning meadows.

The San Lorenzo Valley was part of the homeland of the Sayant people, one of about fifty Ohlone triblelets located between the San Francisco and Monterey Bays. The Sayant used fire to expand grasslands to promote the growth of edible plants and increase forage to attract more game.

Courtesy of Mark Hylkema

“Native meadowlands of the California landscape produced seeds that were once harvested by the ancestral Ohlone people and milled into flour for food. Over the millennia, native burning practices, set to keep coniferous forests out of seed-producing meadowlands, had an effect on the physiology of these plants such that they became fire adapted. Mature redwood trees (too big to harvest with stone tools) were also kept within bounded areas by thinning younger lower story trees for firewood, a behavior which acted to keep the forest healthy.” 

The fire scars and fire-etched hollows of the Big Trees display evidence of this long-time Native resource management. The Sayant management of these resources in the San Lorenzo Valley was interrupted in 1791 with the establishment of Mission Santa Cruz. The dawning of the mission era marked the removal of the first stewards from their ancestral homeland, ensuring that the lives of the Sayant people would forever change.

Many descendants of the region’s Native people who survived extraordinary hardships brought on by European settlement are now represented by the Amah Mutsun tribe, the Muwekma Ohlone tribe and the Pájaro Valley Indian Council. In recent years, we have finally come to recognize the important role Native people played in creating this landscape. California State Park management has begun working with Native descendants to provide new opportunities to restore some Ohlone traditional resource practices at Henry Cowell and other state parks on the Central Coast. It is now our responsibility to join with the descendants of the first stewards in the continuing stewardship of these resources for future generations.

Sources: “The Native American Cultural Landscape of the Santa Cruz Mountains and Northern Monterey Bay Coast” and “So, What Exactly is a Native American Cultural Landscape?” by Mark G. Hylkema in A Split History – Redwood Logging and Conservation in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Sana Cruz Museum of Art & History, History Journal Number 7, 2014.