Feather Falls
Cultural Landscape
Through scores of generations, the Concow Maidu Tribe lived with and cared for a vibrant forested landscape at the northern end of the Sacramento Valley where the foothills rise to the crest of the Sierra Nevada. This landscape, spread between the Middle and South Forks of the Feather River, was and still is home to a diverse array of fire-adapted wildlife and plants—including owls, eagles, woodpeckers, butterflies, and bees.
In 2020, the North Complex Fire raged across this landscape. The high-severity burn killed nearly 100% of the vegetation and leveled the town of Feather Falls. Although this high-severity burn ravaged the mismanaged lands, it also created an opportunity for the Tribe to purchase a portion of its homeland, approximately 3,000 acres in the Feather Falls area. Further expanding this return of Indigenous hands to Indigenous lands, the Tribe entered into a nationally recognized Co-Stewardship Agreement with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) on approximately 1,000 acres adjacent to the newly acquired Fee Lands. This new access to previously neglected land is further bolstered by a Master Stewardship Agreement the Tribe has entered into with their most active and supportive Federal partner, the Plumas National Forest. The Tribe has been conducting hazard tree removal in the USFS Feather Falls area for several years, has helped reestablish the much-loved Feather Falls Trail (a nine-mile loop to a 600-ft. waterfall), and has conducted many of the surveys in the burned landscape to identify and protect cultural resources that had not been visited for generations.
The overarching goal is to reinstitute integrative, long-term post-fire management that supports wildlife and habitats across 4,000 acres that we call the Feather Falls Tribal Cultural Landscape. This project focuses on Postfire Restoration Planning, Tribal Wildlife Monitoring, and Capacity-Building and will advance habitat connectivity and support pollinator species and plants that are important for Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Once funded, this project will allow the Tribe to grow its burgeoning GIS department and support a full-time TEK specialist to work with the GIS technician to merge these different ways of knowing the land. These two positions will establish the monitoring plots and install the instrumentation using Tribal Interns as an extension of the Growing Natural Resource Professionals program.
The result of planning and monitoring will be a restoration portfolio that can be implemented as additional grants are secured to maximize habitat health, resilience, and connectivity across land ownerships. The overall monitoring, planning and restoration effort will build toward a resilient future that honors relations with plant and animal species.