Spurred by state funds, the Land Back movement is alive and well.

Sara Rubin here, thinking about what a thrill it is when we make tangible progress on what seem like impossibly big unwieldy issues. There are almost always reasons, from political to practical, that enable the status quo to prevail. One such big issue: reparations to Americans whose ancestors endured immense harm. 

How do you begin to quantify what is owed to Black Americans descended from enslaved people, or to Indigenous Americans? Almost as soon as the public discussion begins, it can get so stuck in thorny questions with no universally obvious answer, so progress stalls. 

One remarkable exception to that is in the ongoing story of the Land Back movement locally, in which the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County has acquired at least 3,206 acres of land, alone or in a partnership, since 2020. They’ve also entered into comanagement agreements on more acreage. 

The latest chapter is the 1,760-acre Tularcitos Creek property in Carmel Valley, which on July 18 was sold from The Wildlands Conservancy to the nonprofit tribal entity, and is the subject of a news story in the current issue of the Monterey County Weekly.

As staff writer David Schmalz reports, the $8.6 million purchase price was funded with state dollars from the Wildlife Conservation Board and the State Coastal Conservancy. The state’s commitment to funding such projects is a big part of what has enabled them to happen. The tribe’s 2020 acquisition of Big Sur land formerly known as Adler Ranch was thanks to Prop. 68—the 2018 voter-approved bond allocated $4.1 billion for parks, environment and water projects, with $30 million of that earmarked for Indigenous groups. State funds were appropriated for tribal land projects in the 2022-23 and 2023-24 budget cycles, launching a $101 million grant program. 

These might be relatively small figures in terms of both dollars and acres when it comes to attempting to correct for unquantifiable wrongdoing generations ago, but something is certainly better than nothing.

And the current tribal leadership has a meaningful vision for what to do with the Tularcitos property that is covered in Schmalz’s story. I encourage you to give it a read.