Elk are again roaming on lands that California has returned to the Tule River Indian Tribe

In the scrub-brush foothills between the long flat fields of California’s San Joaquin Valley and the mighty peaks and Sequoia forests of the Sierra Nevada, state leaders and elders from the Tule River Indian Tribe gathered Wednesday to mark the return of 17,000 acres of ancestral land to the Tule River Indian tribe.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office called it “the largest ancestral land return in the history of the region and a major step in addressing historical wrongs against California Native American tribes.”

The former cattle ranches, one known as the “Hershey Ranch” and the other as the “Carothers Ranch,” include grasslands, oak woodlands and dark evergreen forests. They sit just south of the 55,000-acre Tule River reservation and abut the Giant Sequoia National Monument.

They were purchased in 2024 and 2025 with support of private funders, the Conservation Fund, and the California Natural Resources Agency’s Tribal Nature-Based Solutions program, which uses state bond funds to return ancestral lands to tribes.

The initiative is part of a state plan to conserve 30% of lands and coastal waters by 2030 and is also part of what the governor’s office calls a “first-in-the-nation effort to address historical wrongs committed against California Native American tribes.”

The Tule River acquisition restores some of the tribe’s sacred homeland, and will enable a host of conservation projects, including protecting the Deer Creek watershed, protecting habitat for California condors and reintroducing tule elk. The tribe last year worked with state officials to reintroduce beavers to the south fork of the Tule River.

“This land return demonstrates the very essence of tribal land restoration, which expands access to essential food and medicinal resources,” said Lester R. Nieto Jr. “Shine,” Chairman, Tule River Tribal Council in a statement. Nieto added that the tribe “envisions this land located in the Yowlumne Hills as a place to gather, heal, and simply be” and that it is part of the tribe‘s “long history of asserting and affirming its sovereignty.”

In his own statement, Newsom said that “the historical wrongs committed by the state against the Native people of this land echo through the natural worlds of California ecosystems that lost their first and best stewards.” He added that the land return celebrated Wednesday “marks a critical step in deepening the relationship between the state and the Tule River Indian Tribe.”

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