The Indigenous Conservation Council, which is made up of representatives from all federally recognized tribes in Virginia, sent the Chesapeake Bay Program a resolution in January calling for a seat at the table.
Many critical restoration goals in the 2014 Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement will not be met by the 2025 deadline. The Bay Program, a federal-state partnership guiding the cleanup efforts, is inviting change as it revises the agreement’s priorities beyond 2025.
“This is the chance for the tribes to be heard … to say we need to be a part of this,” said Jessica Phillips, tribal citizen and environmental director of the Chickahominy Indian Tribe/Eastern Division.
No Indigenous nations were involved in drafting the 2014 agreement, which came two years before the first Bay watershed tribe gained federal recognition. There are now seven in Virginia, each represented by the ICC.
The resolution states that tribal nations are not citizen stakeholders or special interest groups but have a government-to-government relationship with the United States. They should therefore be represented, with the ICC as signatory, on the Bay Program’s decision-making body, the Chesapeake Executive Council.
The Bay Program has added signatories before. The Executive Council, established in 1983 to preside over the restoration effort, has since 1987 consisted of the governors from Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia, plus the mayor of the District of Columbia, the chair of the Chesapeake Bay Commission and the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Now, the council also includes governors from Delaware, New York and West Virginia.
Melissa Ehrenreich, executive director of the Indigenous Conservation Council, said the group hasn’t officially decided who would represent it on the Bay’s Executive Council.
The resolution also calls for establishing and funding an Indigenous Guardianship Program that would help tribes build capacity to protect and conserve land. There are many guardianship programs in Canada run by Indigenous peoples. They consist of paid, trained Indigenous staff that steward land and water.
Phillips of the Chickahominy Indian Tribe – Eastern Division suggests that each tribe could have its own program that would help steward land throughout the Bay watershed. New signatories to the Bay Program qualify for grants from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that help reduce nutrient pollution, fund Bay Program staff salaries and support scientific analysis. It’s unclear how those funds could apply to the proposed guardianship program. Ehrenreich said they plan on developing this program even if they don’t get signatory status.
Dana Adkins, tribal member and environmental director of the Chickahominy tribe, said staff from state agencies have told him in past years that becoming a signatory would be “a heavy lift.”
“Give us the capacity that we can have our own experts in house to help us do the heavy lift,” Adkins said. “And I don’t think that’s an unfair ask.”
If the ICC does become a signatory, it plans on bringing Indigenous knowledge to the Bay Program’s conservation efforts. This traditional ecological knowledge, often referred to as TEK, is collected and passed down through generations within a culture.
“It’s really important to work with the local communities,” said James Rattling Leaf, a TEK specialist with the University of Colorado Boulder and member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. “Even if tribes have been displaced from areas … there’s still connection to those places.”
Many tribes in Virginia subsisted for millennia on species like American shad, Atlantic sturgeon and freshwater mussels. Phillips said tribes could bring a unique perspective to goals surrounding these species. All seven of the federally recognized tribes are already doing restoration work, from rebuilding fish populations to conserving land. The Nansemond Indian Nation, for example, is building oyster reefs along its namesake river, and the Rappahannock Tribe is reacquiring its ancestral land for conservation.
Ehrenreich said the ICC is also developing a protected tribal lands metric that identifies land owned by tribes, culturally significant land of interest to the tribes and areas where tribes want to protect ancestral territories.
Ehrenreich pointed out that the challenge will be “weaving back together” the ecosystem. Indigenous perspectives stress seeing the environment as one system. The Bay Program also takes a holistic view but functions with a focus on discrete issues: agricultural pollution, stormwater runoff, wastewater treatment, fisheries and aquatic life, etc. Cleanup goals for the Bay and its rivers are also designed by calculating how much pollution a water body can handle and still meet water quality goals — the total maximum daily load of nutrients, for example. Contrarily, Adkins said, tribes would want to consider ways to entirely avoid adding pollutants to rivers and streams.
Josh Kurtz, secretary of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, chairs the Bay Program Principals’ Staff Committee, which helps turn directives from the Executive Council into action. The department has had initial contact with the ICC about its declaration.
“Maryland supports Indigenous communities having a stronger voice and increased participation in the Chesapeake Bay Program’s partnership,” said Gregg Bortz, DNR’s media relations manager, in an email. “We want all voices to be heard as we address the issues facing our shared watershed.”
Bortz said the Principals’ Staff Committee plans on determining how to address the resolution when it meets on May 23. Ehrenreich plans on sharing the resolution again at that meeting and in the upcoming public feedback period for the revised Bay Agreement, which opens on July 1.
“I’m happy that we are now getting to the point where it looks like we may have a seat at the table,” Adkins said. “It’s not done yet, but at least the executive committee is listening to us.”