Natural Resource Projects
Mooretown is engaging in restoration work to promote culture, restore wildlife habitat, and increase climate resilience. This vision is intrinsic to the Maidu people. As historically hunting and gathering people the Maidu have a deep connection to the landscape and their land’s environment. This is evident through their traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) style of management and care for their lands. The Tribe’s desire is to engage in climate resiliency work on their ancestral lands to promote community and environmental healing.
Featured Projects
Natural Resource Projects promote resilient watersheds with healthy forests, meadows, restored hydraulic mines and beneficial fire regimes.
Feather Falls Cultural Landscape
At the heart of the Concow Maidu’s aboriginal territory, this 4,000-acre landscape is vital to wildlife, plants, and human communities. In 2020, the North Complex Fire raged through the forest, killing nearly 100% of the vegetation and leveling the town of Feather Falls. The Tribe is now helping to restore and protect these lands with an Indigenous cultural landscape approach that integrates environmental science, archaeology and traditional ecological knowledge. Mooretown Forestry worked to remove hazard trees and repair roads. Cultural Resources worked to survey and protect cultural resources and Mooretown Natural Resources is establishing long-term monitoring and post-fire adaptive management as a foundation for restoring the ecosystem and protecting culturally important plants and other resources.
Hydraulic Mine Restoration
Thousands of hydraulic mines were created in the late 19th century by gold miners who “power washed away the soil.” These sites litter the forested landscape throughout the Sierra Nevada and continue to send large amounts of sediment into rivers and streams to collect in lakes and other sites downstream. Mine impacted sites are currently being left out of forest management activities, causing hot spots for fire with stressed unhealthy vegetation and allowing large amounts of sediment to clog up streams, rivers, and reservoirs. Mooretown Rancheria has been working with partners to identify hydraulic mine sites that are ready for restoration and sees hydraulic mine restoration as a natural extension of the forestry work taking place around these sites.
Traditional Ecological Knowledge
Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is both a set of practices and a way of understanding and interacting with a landscape and all of its inhabitants. The practices and understanding that form the basis of TEK are integral to cultural identity and have been cultivated by indigenous people over thousands of years through close contact with the natural world and handed down over generations. Mooretown Rancheria Tribal members are rebuilding connections to their ancestors’ traditional ecological knowledge by planning and conducting on-the-ground restoration on aboriginal lands they have been prevented from accessing for generations. TEK-based restoration will include cultural and prescribed burns, removal of invasive species, and reforestation with native species that are resilient to a changing climate.
Growing Natural Resource Professionals
Mooretown Tribal leadership seeks to invest in the next generation and is establishing a mentorship program for youth and young adult Tribal members ages 16-24 years old. This mentorship program will help to familiarize Tribal youth and young adults with TEK, archeological and environmental science expertise. The participants will receive hands-on experience and build valuable skills. The goal of this project is to engage youth in supporting landscape restoration and resiliency, sparking curiosity and engagement, and facilitating economic and workforce growth in the community.
Biochar
Biochar is made by burning woody biomass leftover from forest and fuels management to create a charcoal-like substance. Once excess fuels are transformed into biochar, it can be used to improve soil health and absorb contaminants left from legacy of mining to improve water quality. This is particularly important for hydraulic mine restoration and a highly beneficial element of forest management as it sequesters carbon in the soil to support healthy vegetation and reduces future fire risk. Mooretown
Racheria is working to develop a biochar workforce that can be part of its
forestry workforce and make a significant contribution to climate resiliency with this truly nature-based solution to climate change.
Meadow Restoration
Healthy meadows are vibrant stretches of landscape where wildflowers flourish and rain and snow soak into the ground to be slowly released as cold river flows. Meadows are biodiversity hotspots that sequester carbon and improve downstream water quality. They are also highly significant cultural landscapes that provided materials for food and basket-making. These are places where the original people of the land lived and built community with each other and other species of the land, water, and air. Mooretown Rancheria has identified more than 100 meadows within the footprint of the North Complex Fire that are in desperate need of restoration and conservation and the Tribe is growing the capacity to meet this need and be able to conduct the planning, permitting and restoration of these important places.