Recognizing Sawalmem | Gaining Grounds for Sacred Waters

In May of this last year, Cassandra Ferrera celebrated on a Zoom call with members of the Winnemem Wintu tribe, their lead fundraiser, and a team of solidarity attorneys from the Sustainable Economies Law Center, as they finally transferred the title of 1,100 acres of Winnemem Wintu land into Sawalmem, the tribe’s newly formed legal entity. These special lands are adjacent to their current ranch on Bear Mountain just outside of Redding, California.

It was a quiet moment, but represented a considerable accomplishment: two years of groundbreaking work by the tribe; their legal team; Cassandra, the tribe’s real estate strategist; and the local community. The Winnemem Wintu people, unrecognized by the Federal government—and now an unincorporated association with church status conferred by the IRS—were exercising their hard-won legal right to hold land title in a manner consistent with their cultural lifeways.

The Winnemem Wintu tribe is a small but mighty tribe who has been fighting for almost a decade to reintroduce their sacred salmon, the winter-run Chinook, to the McCloud River in what is now called the Shasta Cascades. As a cultural practice of caretaking the land and water over millennia, the tribe ensured the safe travel of the Chinook upstream to reproduce. But their land, and many of their sacred sites, were flooded when the Shasta Dam construction began in the late 1930s.

From a Vox article last year:

"The tribe dedicated themselves in 2016 to restoring the winter-run Chinook salmon population through a 300-mile prayer journey, working on new passage plans for the fish that avoid the dam, and collaborating with the Maori peoples and biologists of New Zealand, home to the genetic descendants of the Chinook salmon. In May 2022, the Winnemem Wintu signed a co-stewardship agreement with NOAA Fisheries to scale up their efforts. The tribe also deposited 40,000 eggs in the McCloud River from California state hatcheries last year."

Cassandra Ferrera, co-founder and director of Commonweal’s Center for Ethical Land Transition, was introduced to the tribe’s Chief Caleen Sisk during a project in 2021. She was struck by the dedication of the tribe to their ancestral homeland and waters, and their unfailing determination in the face of every government and legal deterrent. With funding from the Wend Collective, Cassandra worked for two years as part of a legal team with the Sustainable Economies Law Center to find a solution to a problem facing many unrecognized indigenous tribes: how to secure land titles for an entity not recognized by the federal government or known to title companies.

First, the legal team helped them to create a landholding entity called Sawalmem, a word that translates to Sacred Water.

“There are plenty of smaller tribes that are not federally recognized that are going through the process of rematriation,” Cassandra said. “The Winnemem Wintu couldn’t hold title as a 501c3 because of their cultural structure: they did not want to conform to the requirements of a non-profit. They needed a legal entity that would allow them to hold title as they reacquire their land, and to self govern, as a tribe.”

Once Sawalmem was an entity, the team worked to educate and convince the title companies to recognize Sawalmem.

“During this whole process, we were working to center indigenous mindset rather than the real estate narrative, and many things had to be different,” Cassandra said. “Our multi-stage strategy was to first have a recognized non-profit, Canticle Farm in Oakland, act as fiscal sponsor for that 1,100 acres—we didn’t want to risk the title company having an issue with Sawalmem, or any racism from the neighboring community toward the tribe. Once the title was in the hands of Canticle Farm, we could then move it into Sawalmem.”

They closed escrow on the Canticle Farm purchase last year, and moved the title to Sawalmem in May.

“It was a very subtle moment: Salalmem closing escrow on its own—not with a fiscal sponsor, but acting on its own behalf to support Chief Caleen and the tribe,” said Cassandra. “It was bittersweet: the fact that we had to spend so much time on this at all, but also recognizing that we did it. That thing that we saw was needed, that
we had to do, we had done it….and it’s important to acknowledge and to celebrate.”

This was a first step in the tribe’s vision toward rematriation. With this first purchase under their belts, the tribe is now ready to move on to the next, much
larger goal: acquiring 3,500 acres of land along their sacred McCloud River.

“We appreciated Cassandra and the Center for Ethical Land Transition team as committed partners, joining us on this journey in a time when we didn't know when or how it would happen,” Chief Caleen Sisk said. “We appreciate the spirit of prayerfulness and togetherness they embodied throughout the journey. The trust, the partnership, and the commitment they demonstrated has really helped us reach a new level of faith that has
opened up doors and possibilities.”

The work with the Winnemem Wintu tribe is just one of the Center for Ethical Land Transition’s projects, exploring ways to decommodify, rematriate, and increase accessibility to land for Indigenous, Black, and people-of-color communities. Other projects last year include the successful facilitation of a complex land transition near Nevada City, CA between a Quaker group and the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe and work on their first in-house ethical land transition online journey—a course that will share their model for working toward ethical land transition.

The Center for Ethical Land Transition is one of several programs at Commonweal that support our connection to, healing with, and stewardship of, our lands and waters. Find out more about these programs:

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Natura Institute for Ecology and Medicine: naturainstitute.org
Commonweal Retreat Center: commonweal.org/retreats
Center for Ethical Land Transition: centerelt.org
Retreat Center Collaboration and the Racial Healing Initiative: retreatcentercollaboration.org