‘Leave the Wild…You Already Took Enough Land’: Native Voices Challenge Great Redwood Trail Development

The Grand Canyon of the Eel River, from Dos Rios to the Humboldt Redwoods, is the most rugged landscape within the 196-mile Eel River system. [Photo from Staff / The Wildlands Conservancy]

The Northwest Pacific Railroad was completed in October 1914. Its tracks were laid into the geologically unstable canyon along the Eel River corridor, part of the ancestral homeland of the Kinesté (pronounced Kin-es-tet) people, which is what the Wailaki called themselves before first contact.  Michelle Merrifield, a Wailaki and Nomlacki tribal member who lives in Round Valley, vehemently rejects the trail from start to finish. “In the 1910s, 1915s, [that railroad] basically bulldozed right through village sites, desecrated and decimated our lands and our ancestral burial sites,” she said in an interview at the Southern Humboldt Community Park on Sunday, May 19th, after hosting the Kinesté Community Coalition meeting opposing the trail. “If you look at the maps, you see, wow, there’s a lot of tribal people that had been there. Where are they? Where did they go? And that saddens me.” 

 She continued, “I’m a third-generation Round Valley native. So I had great grandparents that were up there in the mountains. And they were forcibly moved out of there. That’s what we hold onto – out there.” She gestured behind us, toward the hills behind Garberville that lead to the Eel River Canyon. “That’s our lineage. That’s our DNA, that’s where we come from. Where this trail is coming through is exploiting all of that information.”  

At a previous Kinesté Community Coalition meeting in Richardson’s Grove in September, Louisa Morris, a representative for the Great Redwood Trail Agency, suggested placing signage along the trail to educate hikers about the culturally sensitive sites surrounding them. 

Merrifield doesn’t “think it’s necessary”: “Putting it on signs, that, ‘back in this time, these tribal people were here,’ or, ‘Oh, look at these village sites,’ ‘Oh, look at these petroglyphs’—that… that sounds like a tourist attraction for their trail.” 

Louisa Morris, when asked to comment on May 22nd, stated, “It was a suggestion–we would not want to do anything like that if tribal people (whose ancestors lived there) did not like the idea. We want to work with the Kinest’e Coalition, Wailaki people, tribal governments and members, to collaborate and create a trail project that we all feel good about. I believe that I speak for the Great Redwood Trail team when I say that we want to listen, respect, and find a way forward together with everyone’s ideas, values, and input.” 

Page 50 of the Draft Master Plan currently suggests “Install interpretive signage and tribal artwork along the trail that is developed by local tribal people.”

GRTA Executive Director Elaine Hogan added via phone on May 25th, “Any signage that is put along the trail that has anything to do with the history of Native American tribes will be done in partnership with Native American tribes. So it would not be us creating the language. That would very much be done in partnership. So, I understand that there’s a very delicate balance between exploiting Native history for the benefits of tourism, and authentic representation of the history.”

In an earlier interview with Merrifield on April 10th in Round Valley, she expressed that the GRTA prioritizes outsider tourism above the needs of Native people: “Our territory, we had our village sites in there. When they herded us out of that area and into Round Valley, we weren’t able to get back up there. It’s fenced, it’s no trespassing, we’ll be shot on sight. We wonder how to get back in there.” Merrifield asked, how can tribes be expected, or “pushed,” to consult about this trail, “when they haven’t even been allowed to return to that land? Letting strangers through there, but WE haven’t been back yet.”

Merrifield chuckled, “Then, the Great Redwood Trail people, they go, ‘You get to go back up in your territory again!  Yay!’ And we’re like… no, that’s not how we’re asking. So the Wildlands Conservancy, now they’re saying, ‘It’s open to the public! Tribal people come too!’”  Too? “We haven’t been out there in over a hundred years. There were a lot of massacres of tribal people up there. They herded hundreds of families, tribal members [to Round Valley]. And they had the Citizens Militia, paid to hunt down tribal people.”

Merrifield continued, “We’re acclimated to Round Valley just because this is our home site now. But some refer to it as a concentration camp because that’s how they treated us when we got here. Our roll numbers, our ID numbers, you know, might as well tattoo that on us as well.”

On October 14th 2023, at the Dyerville Overlook Great Redwood Trail Community Event, Nikcole Whipple,  Round Valley tribal member, Nomlacki and Yuki descendent, and Save California Salmon representative for the Eel River region, described the term “public lands” as eliciting the feeling of a blow to the chest: “Every time I hear ‘public lands,’ it’s like a stab in my heart, [since] why we have these public lands is because they were stolen from the tribes.”

When asked, “What does the term ‘public land’ mean to you,” Elaine Hogan responded via phone interview on May 25th: “So, since the massacres of the Wailaki people in the 1850s and 60s, they’ve been cut off from their ancestral lands. And displaced. And the creation of the Great Redwood Trail is an opportunity for us to partner, a government agency, the Great Redwood Trail Agency, to partner with the Wailaki people, to gain access to that land and to be able to have stewardship of that land.” 

Hogan continued, “And it’s also an opportunity to, to clean up the hazardous waste left from the railroad industry. And for Native people to gain access to their former village sites and cultural sites that are of importance to them. By the land being opened up to the public, it represents an opportunity for them to have stewardship over it, to work in partnership with us, as a public agency, the Great Redwood Trail agency, to work in partnership with us to steward those lands. And so I see it as a real opportunity.”

Hogan added, “There’s a permitting system we are planning to have in the Eel River Canyon. I mean, we could even…” She paused, then laughed, “I mean, we have so many ideas, … honestly, we just haven’t gotten to the point to have that dialogue with them. But, you know, we could have things like Native-guided tours of the Eel River Canyon. Where the elders of the tribe have trained the youth to be backpacking guides that lead people on tours of that area, and walk them through the cultural sites. We could create village sites, replicas, similar to what is in Sue-meg village in Trinidad.”

During the May 19th Kinest’e Community Coalition meeting opposing the trail, Merrifield emphasized, “At least know the history of why we’re resistant to just opening that up to the public. I mean, there is a history that is not settled with tribal people up there.”

Merrifield reiterated, “There had been a lot of genocide of our tribal people in… those backwoods, the wilderness areas.”  The Great Redwood Trail strikes Merrifield as a continuation of a “settler, colonial” enterprise. When the colonial rush to know the world swept through her ancestor’s landscape, cultural genocide in the Eel River Canyon was facilitated by the very railway system that the Great Redwood Trail is now “capitalizing on.” She stated, “This trail makes it feel like that all over again.” 

Hogan responded on May 25th, “We are really looking forward to this trail being a place of healing for them, and not exacerbating scars of genocide with the creation of the railroads. So we’re really hoping to work in partnership with tribes.”

When asked where the Draft Master Plan addresses protecting cemeteries and petroglyphs, including rock art sites referred to by Eel River Wailaki tribal historian Ben Schill on May 19th as “the monuments of the Wailaki,” Hogan replied on May 25th, “The Draft Master Plan is the culmination of what we heard from all of our tribal engagement, our tribal partners and community stakeholders over the past two years. And so, the specific tribal recommendations that we heard are summarized into 13 tribal recommendations. I don’t have the exact page number. And one of them includes consulting with tribes to identify those culturally sensitive sites. And looking at potential reroutes. Or potential ways to mitigate harms to those sensitive, and culturally important, sites along the trail. At this point, we have received recommendations from tribes that those are things we need to pay attention to.” 

Ben Schill stated on May 19th, “Understand… Inaction to protect the vulnerable sites will make the [GRTA] board directly responsible for their future degradation.”

Merrifield added, “My thoughts on the wild up there, is, leave the wild to the wild and leave it alone. I mean, you already took enough land.” She went on, “The state of California sold that land. And that’s why some of the landowners have had that area up there for over 50 years, and they’ve kept it wild, they kept it to themselves, mostly…They settled there, that’s their property, and they don’t want it open to the public.”

Merrifield continued, “And this trail is going right through [the ranchers’] property. They’re like, ‘what are we going to do, if the public starts coming through? Using our bathrooms…’ It’s beautiful up there, but we’re not public people. We’re more private. You’re trying to push more [people] on through there? So, my campaign is opposing this trail. Or, let us be stewards of places we haven’t gone in for a very long time and help us preserve what we know to preserve.” 

Speaking to the concept of traditional ecological knowledge, Merrifield added, “There’s a lot of indigenous medicines out there, plant life. And, of course, animal life, that’s trying to come back after being wiped out, like martins and some fishers, and the elk. And condors that might come down from the Klamath River to the Eel River corridor. But they won’t if there’s backpackers and mountain bike traffic through there.” Merrifield referenced the Yurok Tribe Condor Restoration Program (YCRP), an example of the power of Native stewardship efforts to bring large gains, such as this apex scavenger, absent for over a century, back to the land. 

Merrifield additionally worries about the effect of the trail construction on the salmon runs. Eel River Wailaki historian Ben Schill concurred saying “The building of the railroad not only destroyed sites and cemeteries, but it dumped so much excavated material into the river that the huge salmon runs were terribly affected and remain a fraction of what they were.”

Perry Lincoln is the founding director of tribal nonprofit Native Health in Native Hands, or Cho-ge xo-la be’ (pronounced Cho-get ho-la-bet), a Wailaki phrase for “The medicine is in our hands.” He mused, “Do we think about the porcupine? Do we think about the eel? Do we think about all those other animals that are extinct? So many shell animals that were in the river are not even in the river anymore. So all of this adds up to what we’re talking about today. If we have a trail through the Eel River corridor, is it going to cause more damage to life?”

Merrifield spoke to feeling pressured and rushed to review Great Redwood Trail documents with a strained expression. “So they’re telling us that they’re taking our comments about this trail into consideration, but where are they taking them? Then they released the 586-page Draft Master Plan, to try to give us an idea of the game plan, but they gave us, what, 30, 60 days to make comments on it? That’s not right. It feels unfair–hurry up and read through that, and they give us a deadline.” 

Nikcole Whipple echoed Merrifield’s sentiment about having enough time to voice concerns. She referenced “the Bay Delta Project” and “the Voluntary Agreements used to fast-track the permitting process, bypassing CEQA and Tribal Consultation”: “The state intentionally held the CEQA process over a period of time during a holiday season, so none of the tribal governments were in office or working, and the 30 days lapsed, and so some of the big tribes in the Sacramento valley got left out and they are moving forward.” 

Whipple added,  “It’s a tactic, it’s what they do. We need to jump on providing public comment, otherwise we’ll get left out and told ‘Your time period already passed’.”  Whipple continued, “Something to include in our public comments are the fallacies documented in the Master Plan regarding tribal engagement. ‘Community engagement where tribal people are’ is not the same thing as tribal consultation. We know they didn’t reach out to this many tribal members. They didn’t consult. Their numbers are false.”

When asked to respond to Whipple’s comments, Elaine Hogan replied on May 25th that “60-day comment periods on government documents are pretty typical. However, we remain open to dialogue and communication. This is a multi-generational project and so this is not the only opportunity for input. This is really meant to be an ongoing dialogue and partnership over generations.” 

“I understand that a 60-day comment period may feel limiting,” Hogan continued, “but it is just the beginning of our interactions together. And I want people to feel like they can reach out to us, and ask us to come to their meetings.”

Hogan explained, “Part of the reason that we haven’t been able to have the individual conversations with the Wailaki about where, specifically, their cultural sites are that we need to avoid in constructing the trail, is because we don’t have funding for planning any of those parts of the trail, through the Eel River Canyon. What we have right now with the Draft Master Plan is a real high-level overview.”

Nikcole Whipple emphasized, “Every time we go into a meeting we’re told something differently. The agency will tell us there is plenty of time and the trail is not a done deal, and then in another meeting the agency will say that there is ‘legislation’ and the trail is a ‘done deal.’ We are continually misinformed, and it is confusing.”

Whipple added, “In Ukiah, the trail has been done for at least five years, and it’s a homeless encampment where multiple fatalities have occurred.”

Attorney Shannon Wilhite gestured to page 51 of the weighty draft Master Plan, printed in full at the May 19th Kineste Community Coalition meeting. She sighed, “There is a vision statement stating that they will work collaboratively with Native American tribes. And so far we haven’t seen it. A huge fault is that they state that they have been working collaboratively. But there hasn’t been any collaboration with most of the tribes, with the tribes that are opposing it, or have issues with it.”

Wilhite explained, “They talk a lot about Blue Lake Rancheria, who want the trail, and who they’re working closely with. But there’s our group and a bunch of other tribes that they’re not collaborating with. Round Valley Tribe, as Nikcole Whipple was saying, is over 5,000 members, and they only spoke to a handful of people. So they’re not really representing what the indigenous people are wanting.” 

Merrifield shared her opinion about the railroad debris. “You’re building a trail on top of an abandoned railroad track, and you don’t even plan on cleaning that up? Which they later came back and said, they MAY clean some stuff up. But they’re not telling us where it is, what it is, and when. So they just do a smoke screen, like, ‘We’re cleaning it up! Relax! Get off our backs!”

Merrifield went on, “Well, we wanna know where this ‘clean-up’ is going to take place. My 55 years of life, I’ve seen those old abandoned railroad tracks as like a scar on Mother Earth. From north to south, it looks terrible. We can see the abandoned railroad tunnels, we can see the creosote-soaked railroad ties still jutting out of the earth.”

 According to railstotrails.org, “If railroad ties are old, creosote may ooze out, leeching toxins into the soil and poisoning plant life, insects and small animals, the flora and fauna of the rivers.”

“There are railroad tracks dangling in mid-air, from the slides and earthquakes. And then there’s railroad cars along the banks. They purposefully left the railroad cars to rust and corrode along the banks of the water of the Eel River. I don’t like that. It bothers me, because if you look back in history, settlers haven’t cleaned up any of their garbage. It’s an eyesore to me,” sighed Merrifield. “It’s garbage, it’s not a natural habitat for wildlife. They are going to create more garbage, if they put any kind of porta potties…there’s no one to monitor any part of this trail to help clean up the garbage.” She emphasized, “More people… More garbage!”

At a December 17th event by Native Health in Native Hands, the “Na-Lu-La (Thank You in Wailaki) Celebration,” Behavioral Health Specialist and local tribal member Monica Super stated in her closing speech, “Our people believe there is an umbilical cord inside of the earth and it’s connected with the one we get from our mother… We have hundreds, if not thousands, of stories that tell about our ancient landscape and our sacred spaces, that are really set there by the creator as our health system.”

The Great Redwood Trail project holds complex implications for the communities it touches. While proponents emphasize potential economic benefits and increased public access to California’s rural beauty, some tribal members like Michelle Merrifield and Nikcole Whipple highlight deep-seated concerns about historical injustices, cultural preservation, and environmental impacts. For them, the trail is more than just a path through the wilderness; it intersects with their history, culture, and identity in a way that they fear could lead to further erosion of their connection to the land.