This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Last October, Aiyana James attended her first water potato harvest on the reservation of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe in northwestern Idaho. The weather was unusually cold, but she was determined to harvest her first water potatoes, a small wetland tuber that’s one of the tribe’s key traditional foods.

The smell of smoke and drying elk meat filled the air along the shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene, where the tribe set up food booths and educational stations. She waded into the frigid water barefoot to dig for the small tubers, while back on land, tribal members cooked them in a traditional pit bake, where elk, camas (a flowering plant with edible bulbs), and other locally harvested foods are layered.

James, who grew up in Portland, Oregon, and spent summers and school breaks on the reservation, was excited to take part in the harvest for the first time after moving to the reservation after college. But something was wrong: Early-season snow dampened the harvest, and although it was only a light dusting, tribal leaders spoke during the opening prayers about how unusual the conditions were. It had been a dry summer, and the water potato harvest was bad, something that has been happening more and more in recent years.

“I know that this isn’t supposed to be how it is,” James said. “Deep down within me, I’m like, ‘This just doesn’t feel right.’”

“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies.”

After their land in northwest Idaho was carved up by 1909 federal allotment policies, Western agriculture, and logging that persists on some level today, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe lost a massive amount of acreage and, with it, their ability to manage the land and maintain balance between environmental protection and economic development. Salmon and trout disappeared from the streams. Fires became more frequent and powerful. Water potatoes and other key plants like camas, once staple foods for tribal members, started to disappear.

Now, extreme drought is making the situation even worse.

All of this is part of a reinforcing cycle of land degradation and climate change that the Coeur d’Alene tribe has been fighting for decades. It’s a fight that James has now joined as one of the tribe’s first climate resilience coordinators.

To protect their land and community, the Coeur d’Alene are in the middle of an ongoing, multidecade effort that relies, in part, on elder knowledge to restore an important wetland.

The tribe is bringing back beavers and salmon, restoring native grasses, and repairing stream channels. Collectively, those efforts are designed to restore balance to the landscape, make it more resilient to future climate change by fostering interconnected ecosystems, and, tribal members hope, one day allow them to rely again on important ancestral foods like the water potato.

“We’ve been living off of the foods that are on our land for thousands upon thousands of years,” James said. “Reconnecting with that food reconnects us with our land.”

Across the country, ecological restoration is increasingly seen as a key part of the fight against climate change, and wetlands provide an especially important service in an era of global warming: They absorb carbon from the atmosphere.

For the Coeur d’Alene tribe, a healthy wetland signifies a way to curb rising temperatures that will provide the basis for the return of a rich food source and a traditional way of life. That a wetland serves as the lynchpin means that the tribe is taking on the restoration of an ecosystem that is especially threatened as the world’s climate trends hotter and more arid. Because wetlands are areas where water is at or near the surface for large parts of the year, severe bouts of drought made more common by climate change threaten their existence.

According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, more than half of the wetlands in the lower 48 states are gone, and the rate of loss is only accelerating. Between 2009 and 2019, an area of vegetated wetlands in the US the combined size of Rhode Island disappeared.

“You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.”

There’s an overarching effort underway to help these imperiled landscapes. The 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $1.4 billion for ecosystem restoration and resilience, while President Joe Biden also signed an executive order setting a national goal to conserve at least 30 percent of the country’s lands and waters by 2030.

The Coeur d’Alene aren’t alone in their focus on restoration, but they’re especially good at it. And their uniquely patient, humble approach could serve as a model for other communities working to restore the environment and prepare for climate change.

Tribal knowledge and expertise is especially important for restoration because Indigenous people are the ones who know what the land was like before it was degraded and what techniques will help restore it. The thread that ties it all together is traditional food, like the water potato. These cultural foods build connections between people and land and act as an especially tangible measuring stick of the impact that those connections can have on the environment.

James says that camas, for example, grows better when it is regularly harvested. But because so much Coeur d’Alene land is now owned by non-Indigenous people, tribal members often don’t have access to camas fields, and some that have been unattended for years are now suffering.

“We need these foods, but they also need us to flourish and to grow and get better,” she said. “If we do these things right and we focus on restoring our relationship and restoring our connection with our culture, sovereignty, and traditions, then that’s going to have lasting effects.”

On the Coeur d’Alene reservation, soil health and biodiversity have declined, the water temperature is rising, and extreme weather like heat waves and drought are increasingly frequent. But the tribe’s restoration work is beginning to pay off.

In the summer of 2022, an adult salmon swam in Hangman Creek for the first time in around 100 years. Two years after the tribe released juvenile salmon into the creek, and after an arduous journey out to the Pacific Ocean and back, the tribe welcomed salmon back to the creek for the first time in generations.

For Ralph Allan Jr., the tribe’s fish and wildlife program manager, it was the culmination of 20 years of work that began with long days of fieldwork like planting trees. Now, he’s leading the department as it prepares to bring salmon back to the reservation.

Allan is also working to plant the seeds for a new generation of restoration advocates. He has led an internship program to get college students out in the field and three tribal members are currently enrolled in fish and wildlife degree programs. At the water potato harvest, Allan makes sure that department staff are working with the youth, showing them how to harvest the potatoes and pulling the kids out of the mud when they get stuck.

This cultural and community work is part of the tribe’s restoration effort. Allan worries that the tribe’s younger generation is not as connected to the land as he was growing up. “We’re not just reintroducing the species of salmon back to our people,” he said. “We’ve lost that cultural connection to the salmon as well, so we’re reintroducing a whole culture of salmon.”

While salmon are a priority, they are just one piece of a complicated, interconnected ecosystem the tribe is working to restore. Take beaver dams. Dams raise the water table, extend the area along the banks of a river or lake that more animals and plants can inhabit, and keep more water on the landscape. All of this makes the area more welcoming to salmon and other wildlife, but also makes the landscape more resilient to drought and extreme heat because wetlands absorb and retain water that is released during drier periods, explains Tyler Opp, the tribe’s wetlands coordinator.

“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies.”

The beaver dams also support clean, cold-water habitats for salmon, but to do that, they need trees. Since 2019, the tribe’s environmental programs department has planted over 18,000 trees from about a dozen different species, and plans to plant another 4,000 by 2025.

The tribe has used beaver dam analogs—man-made approximations—to encourage beavers to return and posts to reinforce existing beaver dams. Gerald Green, a wildlife biologist for the tribe, says they are currently supporting about seven beaver dams in the creek.

Trees, beavers, salmon, water—they’re all part of a cyclical, interdependent system the tribe is trying to restore and support. Cajetan Matheson, natural resource director and a tribal council member, says that addressing climate impacts or restoration goals one by one will not work. “Everything is really related to each other,” Matheson said. “You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.”

These projects take time. Tyler Opp says that even though the scale of the work that needs to be done can be overwhelming, the tribe’s approach helps keep things in perspective.

By keeping longer-term goals in mind, like bringing salmon back, which could take decades, the tribe avoids Band-Aid solutions. The whole tribal government buys into this approach, year after year and generation to generation, and although the tribe is limited by funding and capacity, like many public agencies, this commitment allows them to focus on projects that will contribute to achieving that long-term vision. Despite the constraints, the tribe can unify behind a shared vision of the future, based on their collective history, knowledge, and appreciation for the land.

“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies,” he said. “The tribe doesn’t have to think in terms of the next budget cycle for getting work done. All of [the things we are doing] are done for future generations.”

Almost everyone I talked to in the Natural Resources Department credits that perspective to Felix Aripa, a tribal elder who died in 2016. He is seen as instrumental in setting the tone for the tribe’s restoration work.

Even Aiyana James, who never had the chance to meet him, says she’s listened to old tapes of Aripa. He was an early proponent of using beavers as a restoration partner and helped with things as straightforward as pointing out where a stream used to flow so that the technicians could use that as a guideline to restore the course rather than starting from scratch or guesswork. “The ultimate goal for anybody that works here in the Fish and Wildlife Program is to leave a legacy the way that Felix Aripa left his legacy and his mark on the program,” Allan said.

Before he passed away, Aripa helped Matheson and others put the tribe’s traditional seasonal calendar on paper. The calendar, which is based on seasonal indicators like tree sap rather than months and days, includes detailed information about foods, ecosystems, plants, animals, and human activities. “As we’re thinking broadly about how we approach restoration, it’s the framework that we can use,” Laura Laumatia, the tribe’s environmental programs manager, said. “It represents millennia of knowledge.”

So while the tribe is proud of their progress, they are still working for the future. “I think it’s nice to work for 20 years in the same place because you do see some changes happening,” Laumatia said. “But we know that the fruits of our labor are really going to be 70 years from now.”

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Last October, Aiyana James attended her first water potato harvest on the reservation of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe in northwestern Idaho. The weather was unusually cold, but she was determined to harvest her first water potatoes, a small wetland tuber that’s one of the tribe’s key traditional foods.

The smell of smoke and drying elk meat filled the air along the shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene, where the tribe set up food booths and educational stations. She waded into the frigid water barefoot to dig for the small tubers, while back on land, tribal members cooked them in a traditional pit bake, where elk, camas (a flowering plant with edible bulbs), and other locally harvested foods are layered.

James, who grew up in Portland, Oregon, and spent summers and school breaks on the reservation, was excited to take part in the harvest for the first time after moving to the reservation after college. But something was wrong: Early-season snow dampened the harvest, and although it was only a light dusting, tribal leaders spoke during the opening prayers about how unusual the conditions were. It had been a dry summer, and the water potato harvest was bad, something that has been happening more and more in recent years.

“I know that this isn’t supposed to be how it is,” James said. “Deep down within me, I’m like, ‘This just doesn’t feel right.’”

“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies.”

After their land in northwest Idaho was carved up by 1909 federal allotment policies, Western agriculture, and logging that persists on some level today, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe lost a massive amount of acreage and, with it, their ability to manage the land and maintain balance between environmental protection and economic development. Salmon and trout disappeared from the streams. Fires became more frequent and powerful. Water potatoes and other key plants like camas, once staple foods for tribal members, started to disappear.

Now, extreme drought is making the situation even worse.

All of this is part of a reinforcing cycle of land degradation and climate change that the Coeur d’Alene tribe has been fighting for decades. It’s a fight that James has now joined as one of the tribe’s first climate resilience coordinators.

To protect their land and community, the Coeur d’Alene are in the middle of an ongoing, multidecade effort that relies, in part, on elder knowledge to restore an important wetland.

The tribe is bringing back beavers and salmon, restoring native grasses, and repairing stream channels. Collectively, those efforts are designed to restore balance to the landscape, make it more resilient to future climate change by fostering interconnected ecosystems, and, tribal members hope, one day allow them to rely again on important ancestral foods like the water potato.

“We’ve been living off of the foods that are on our land for thousands upon thousands of years,” James said. “Reconnecting with that food reconnects us with our land.”

Across the country, ecological restoration is increasingly seen as a key part of the fight against climate change, and wetlands provide an especially important service in an era of global warming: They absorb carbon from the atmosphere.

For the Coeur d’Alene tribe, a healthy wetland signifies a way to curb rising temperatures that will provide the basis for the return of a rich food source and a traditional way of life. That a wetland serves as the lynchpin means that the tribe is taking on the restoration of an ecosystem that is especially threatened as the world’s climate trends hotter and more arid. Because wetlands are areas where water is at or near the surface for large parts of the year, severe bouts of drought made more common by climate change threaten their existence.

According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, more than half of the wetlands in the lower 48 states are gone, and the rate of loss is only accelerating. Between 2009 and 2019, an area of vegetated wetlands in the US the combined size of Rhode Island disappeared.

“You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.”

There’s an overarching effort underway to help these imperiled landscapes. The 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $1.4 billion for ecosystem restoration and resilience, while President Joe Biden also signed an executive order setting a national goal to conserve at least 30 percent of the country’s lands and waters by 2030.

The Coeur d’Alene aren’t alone in their focus on restoration, but they’re especially good at it. And their uniquely patient, humble approach could serve as a model for other communities working to restore the environment and prepare for climate change.

Tribal knowledge and expertise is especially important for restoration because Indigenous people are the ones who know what the land was like before it was degraded and what techniques will help restore it. The thread that ties it all together is traditional food, like the water potato. These cultural foods build connections between people and land and act as an especially tangible measuring stick of the impact that those connections can have on the environment.

James says that camas, for example, grows better when it is regularly harvested. But because so much Coeur d’Alene land is now owned by non-Indigenous people, tribal members often don’t have access to camas fields, and some that have been unattended for years are now suffering.

“We need these foods, but they also need us to flourish and to grow and get better,” she said. “If we do these things right and we focus on restoring our relationship and restoring our connection with our culture, sovereignty, and traditions, then that’s going to have lasting effects.”

On the Coeur d’Alene reservation, soil health and biodiversity have declined, the water temperature is rising, and extreme weather like heat waves and drought are increasingly frequent. But the tribe’s restoration work is beginning to pay off.

In the summer of 2022, an adult salmon swam in Hangman Creek for the first time in around 100 years. Two years after the tribe released juvenile salmon into the creek, and after an arduous journey out to the Pacific Ocean and back, the tribe welcomed salmon back to the creek for the first time in generations.

For Ralph Allan Jr., the tribe’s fish and wildlife program manager, it was the culmination of 20 years of work that began with long days of fieldwork like planting trees. Now, he’s leading the department as it prepares to bring salmon back to the reservation.

Allan is also working to plant the seeds for a new generation of restoration advocates. He has led an internship program to get college students out in the field and three tribal members are currently enrolled in fish and wildlife degree programs. At the water potato harvest, Allan makes sure that department staff are working with the youth, showing them how to harvest the potatoes and pulling the kids out of the mud when they get stuck.

This cultural and community work is part of the tribe’s restoration effort. Allan worries that the tribe’s younger generation is not as connected to the land as he was growing up. “We’re not just reintroducing the species of salmon back to our people,” he said. “We’ve lost that cultural connection to the salmon as well, so we’re reintroducing a whole culture of salmon.”

While salmon are a priority, they are just one piece of a complicated, interconnected ecosystem the tribe is working to restore. Take beaver dams. Dams raise the water table, extend the area along the banks of a river or lake that more animals and plants can inhabit, and keep more water on the landscape. All of this makes the area more welcoming to salmon and other wildlife, but also makes the landscape more resilient to drought and extreme heat because wetlands absorb and retain water that is released during drier periods, explains Tyler Opp, the tribe’s wetlands coordinator.

“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies.”

The beaver dams also support clean, cold-water habitats for salmon, but to do that, they need trees. Since 2019, the tribe’s environmental programs department has planted over 18,000 trees from about a dozen different species, and plans to plant another 4,000 by 2025.

The tribe has used beaver dam analogs—man-made approximations—to encourage beavers to return and posts to reinforce existing beaver dams. Gerald Green, a wildlife biologist for the tribe, says they are currently supporting about seven beaver dams in the creek.

Trees, beavers, salmon, water—they’re all part of a cyclical, interdependent system the tribe is trying to restore and support. Cajetan Matheson, natural resource director and a tribal council member, says that addressing climate impacts or restoration goals one by one will not work. “Everything is really related to each other,” Matheson said. “You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.”

These projects take time. Tyler Opp says that even though the scale of the work that needs to be done can be overwhelming, the tribe’s approach helps keep things in perspective.

By keeping longer-term goals in mind, like bringing salmon back, which could take decades, the tribe avoids Band-Aid solutions. The whole tribal government buys into this approach, year after year and generation to generation, and although the tribe is limited by funding and capacity, like many public agencies, this commitment allows them to focus on projects that will contribute to achieving that long-term vision. Despite the constraints, the tribe can unify behind a shared vision of the future, based on their collective history, knowledge, and appreciation for the land.

“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies,” he said. “The tribe doesn’t have to think in terms of the next budget cycle for getting work done. All of [the things we are doing] are done for future generations.”

Almost everyone I talked to in the Natural Resources Department credits that perspective to Felix Aripa, a tribal elder who died in 2016. He is seen as instrumental in setting the tone for the tribe’s restoration work.

Even Aiyana James, who never had the chance to meet him, says she’s listened to old tapes of Aripa. He was an early proponent of using beavers as a restoration partner and helped with things as straightforward as pointing out where a stream used to flow so that the technicians could use that as a guideline to restore the course rather than starting from scratch or guesswork. “The ultimate goal for anybody that works here in the Fish and Wildlife Program is to leave a legacy the way that Felix Aripa left his legacy and his mark on the program,” Allan said.

Before he passed away, Aripa helped Matheson and others put the tribe’s traditional seasonal calendar on paper. The calendar, which is based on seasonal indicators like tree sap rather than months and days, includes detailed information about foods, ecosystems, plants, animals, and human activities. “As we’re thinking broadly about how we approach restoration, it’s the framework that we can use,” Laura Laumatia, the tribe’s environmental programs manager, said. “It represents millennia of knowledge.”

So while the tribe is proud of their progress, they are still working for the future. “I think it’s nice to work for 20 years in the same place because you do see some changes happening,” Laumatia said. “But we know that the fruits of our labor are really going to be 70 years from now.”

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Coastal tribal communities in the Lower 48 live on the frontlines of climate adaptation, with some facing the daunting challenge of relocating altogether to safer inland places as sea levels rise. Between November 2022 and August 2023, a researcher from the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians (ATNI) and one from the University of Washington conducted listening sessions with tribal leaders, citizens and employees from 13 Northwest coastal tribes, posing questions about the status of climate adaptation plans and the greatest obstacles the tribes are facing.

The listening sessions resulted in a report called Climate Adaptation Barriers and Needs Experienced by Northwest Coastal Tribes, which was released this month. The report paints a picture of tribal governments that are perfectly capable and entirely ready to do more for climate adaptation—if they weren’t drowning in all the grant paperwork necessary to make it happen. And funding doesn’t always match tribal needs. “There’s a lot of funding for plans, not a lot of funding for infrastructure, ever,” reads a quote from one participant.

Included in the report, which involved other partners and funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is an addendum calling for Northwest coastal tribes who missed out on the listening sessions to contribute their own comments to further this research.

High Country News spoke with project co-leads Amelia Marchand (Colville), senior tribal climate resilience liaison for ATNI, and Meade Krosby, senior scientist at UW’s climate impacts group, to learn more about their findings.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The report gives a window into how challenging it is to run a tribe in general: Without long-term funding, you can’t make long-term plans. You can only plan projects for the next year, or whatever length of time you know you can staff. But how does it apply specifically to something like climate adaptation?

Meade Krosby: Nothing in this report would be surprising to folks who work in tribal government. None of these are really new problems. What’s perhaps new is this additional challenge of accelerating climate impacts—and the urgency that requires—and how this is presenting barriers to them getting done what needs to get done pretty quickly to reduce risks to tribal communities.

Amelia Marchand: Tribal governments are oftentimes understaffed. That was a theme that did come through, and it’s one of the key findings. And a lot of times those responsibilities for climate planning or climate adaptation, or looking at climate vulnerabilities, are just an additional duty that people have that’s added on to their job description. That’s very challenging in and of itself. And so there’s a lot of different novel approaches that tribes have taken to try to piece together all of their needs. It’s—just as Meade said—because this climate crisis is accelerating every year, temperatures are getting worse. Drought conditions worsen, ocean acidification increases. All of these things are compounding at once.

Would you say that the urgency of the moment is part of the impetus for conducting the study?

MK: Yeah, absolutely. We didn’t want to just assume what the tribes needed or how we could be useful. We wanted to actually ask them, “How is this playing out for you? How is adaptation going?” to figure out where we might be useful where the levers are. It’s also timely, especially because—not just the urgency of seeing climate change right now—but also this really unprecedented state and federal investment in climate action. There’s suddenly so much money moving in Washington state: With the Climate Commitment Act that’s opened up millions of dollars that have been directed to tribal governments, and, at the federal level, with the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, there’s now funds that are becoming available. But how are they being directed? Is that working at this moment? We heard so much about how that model is not working. There are so many barriers to tribes to accessing the money that’s intended for them.

Some tribes on the coast are having to consider relocating as an act of climate adaptation. What’s happening on the ground? Do they have viable paths forward with community relocation?

AM: It’s still very case-by-case, and some of that really comes down to who their neighbors are. They don’t just have to move inland, but they have to move upland, at Shoalwater Bay. The challenge to do that is really rough, because of all the infrastructure that needs to get to the new location. Through the support of their tribal leadership, (they’ve been) going through the community education process of what needs to be done, and then starting to educate, literally educate, the federal government and state government entities about how this endeavor looks. It’s not gonna happen overnight. They’ve been planning this for a very long time, and elements are finally starting to come into place. Relocation as an adaptation measure comes down to survival. Sometimes it is the only choice.

“There’s so many lessons there” for communities that “are going to have to face these same issues in the coming years, and the tribes are doing it first.”

MK: Planning is pretty cheap. Implementation is really expensive. And so what is really extraordinary when you go out to the coast is to see that this is actually happening. That’s a huge sacrifice to have to make. There’s so many lessons there for other kinds of communities who are going to have to face these same issues in the coming years, and the tribes are doing it first. They’re really leading the way. They’ve been leading the way on climate mitigation and adaptation for so many years, but they’re doing it. Supporting that work and learning from that work is going to be really important for everybody in years to come.

AM: There’s so much that other government agencies can learn from this type of coordinated effort.

It’s striking that biologists are having to spend their days working as grant writers instead of biologists. What do your findings tell us about that?

AM: It’s important that people know how common that is. I would say that’s almost a cross-country/Indian Country issue. Passionate, dedicated, experienced staff members oftentimes want to retain their jobs. It is their responsibility to go find the funding to do it. The tribe itself may not be able to fund all the positions that they want to do all the jobs that they want. So it comes to grants and contracts with federal, state, nonprofit, and academic institutions, which makes it even more challenging because sometimes the priorities of those different outside funders are either in conflict [with] or completely disregard tribal priorities. It’s not just that biologists and other types of specialty staff are trying to fund their positions and the work that they’re doing, but they’re also trying to navigate ways to meet the needs and goals and priorities of their tribes.

That can totally change the scope of their work, and it takes away tribal agency, doesn’t it?

AM: Yes, it does.

MK: That came up a lot, this whole external funding model, especially around the different priorities of federal agencies and how narrowly [defined] some of these funding pots are. It just totally undermines self-determination.

Who has the power to dismantle these obstacles, and whose responsibility is it?

AM: By and large, it’s the responsibility of the federal government, which created these conditions in the first place. The bare minimum place to start is by saying, “Okay, this is actually what you, the federal government and all of your federal family are responsible for doing, and here’s how you’ve been derelict in your duties. Now, can you please step up to the plate and help us correct these issues?”

MK: There was another really great report that came out in February on the unmet needs of Alaska Native communities that are facing environmental threats. We tried not to make recommendations, because we didn’t want to speak for the tribes. But we did note that both that report and listening session participants noted the need for a coordinated federal government response—essentially so that the federal government is coordinating itself instead of the tribes having to navigate coordination with the federal government. The very next thing that our project is doing is partnering with legal scholars and policy experts to look at possible solutions.

AM: It’s important that people understand we’re not done with the project yet. This is just one outcome of the project thus far, and there’s still more to come.

The world’s first Ohlone restaurant is nestled in a lush outdoor space at the edge of the University of California, Berkeley, campus. Cafe Ohlone/mak-’amham (“our food” in the Chochenyo Ohlone language) tempts customers with soft-boiled quail eggs, black oak acorn soup, and chia-seed flour brownies. Also, Cowgirl Creamery cheese with herb bread. “Some people ask why these foods are on the menu, even though our ancestors didn’t have that,” says co-founder Vincent Medina. “It’s because Ohlone people like it.”

Part of a growing movement of Indigenous restaurants dedicated to reclaiming cultural heritage and educating the public, Cafe Ohlone opened in 2018 with the goal of bringing oṭṭoy (repair) to a place where the Ohlone were long denied sovereignty. Kickapoo chef Crystal Wahpepah runs Wahpepah’s Kitchen in Oakland, and there’s Mitsitam Cafe at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. “Indigenous foods are the original foods of this continent,” writes Sean Sherman, who helms Owamni in Minneapolis. “It’s important we recognize that and start celebrating those foods.”

Thousands of Ohlone once lived along California’s coast and inland in roughly 50 groups, but Spanish missionaries and 19th-century state-backed massacres fractured their communities and left some survivors in exile. Medina (East Bay Ohlone), who runs the cafe with his partner, Louis Trevino (Rumsen/Carmel Valley), notes that the Ohlone presence has endured despite the hardships: “Our culture is beautiful, and we have always been here.”

At Cafe Ohlone, traditional foods meet modern tastes, highlighting continuity and adaptation. The restaurant incorporates recordings, storytelling, and education into the dining experience. Medina, an Indigenous language activist fluent in Chochenyo, is a powerful orator who often enlightens diners about Ohlone traditions. When I stopped by in May for a sunny lunch on the patio, I appreciated the recorded sounds of crickets, birds, and Chochenyo songs sung by the tribe’s youngest and eldest members. My grandma, a We Wai Kai Nation member, would adore the multigenerational Chochenyo rendition of “Angel Baby.”

The cafe serves another role, too: an attempt by the university to atone for past wrongs. For much of a century, the adjacent anthropology museum housed a vast collection of Native artifacts and bones. As I walk by, I queasily remember Ishi, one of the last Yahi Tribe members, who lived in the museum and was made to fashion arrows at the behest of anthropology professor Alfred Kroeber. In 1925, Kroeber controversially declared the Ohlone people “extinct” in Handbook of the Indians of California. This led to the Ohlone Tribe losing its federal recognition, while the building housing the museum was later christened Kroeber Hall.

After much upheaval, the university removed Kroeber’s name in 2021, but his legacy endures. He and other anthropologists of his era had led the widescale theft of 9,000 Native American remains and around 200,000 sacred artifacts. The campus still houses thousands of them, which it has been slow to return to tribal nations, though a university spokesperson tells me that some of the resources of the museum, now closed to the public, have been “redirected to the repatriation efforts.”

Medina sits on a university committee working to ensure that the remains are returned in accordance with the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Looking to “our ancestors as property,” Medina says, “has never been appropriate or right.”

He and Trevino are also trying to increase Ohlone visibility beyond the restaurant’s walls. For the past year, they’ve been raising money to buy a piece of local land. They imagine native plant gardens, a tearoom, and a dining space in a traditional tule house—a place for the Bay Area Ohlone to gather and practice cultural traditions. Their efforts align with the Land Back movement, which advocates for restoring Indigenous lands taken by colonization.

Obstacles include a hot real estate market and the considerable cost and complexity of launching and funding a nonprofit—easier tasks for federally recognized tribes. In late 2023, the pair were close to inhabiting a site with historical and symbolic meaning in Sunol, some 37 miles southeast of Berkeley. That deal fell through, but they remain optimistic. “Our work,” they note on their website, “is an act of love.”

The world’s first Ohlone restaurant is nestled in a lush outdoor space at the edge of the University of California, Berkeley, campus. Cafe Ohlone/mak-’amham (“our food” in the Chochenyo Ohlone language) tempts customers with soft-boiled quail eggs, black oak acorn soup, and chia-seed flour brownies. Also, Cowgirl Creamery cheese with herb bread. “Some people ask why these foods are on the menu, even though our ancestors didn’t have that,” says co-founder Vincent Medina. “It’s because Ohlone people like it.”

Part of a growing movement of Indigenous restaurants dedicated to reclaiming cultural heritage and educating the public, Cafe Ohlone opened in 2018 with the goal of bringing oṭṭoy (repair) to a place where the Ohlone were long denied sovereignty. Kickapoo chef Crystal Wahpepah runs Wahpepah’s Kitchen in Oakland, and there’s Mitsitam Cafe at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. “Indigenous foods are the original foods of this continent,” writes Sean Sherman, who helms Owamni in Minneapolis. “It’s important we recognize that and start celebrating those foods.”

Thousands of Ohlone once lived along California’s coast and inland in roughly 50 groups, but Spanish missionaries and 19th-century state-backed massacres fractured their communities and left some survivors in exile. Medina (East Bay Ohlone), who runs the cafe with his partner, Louis Trevino (Rumsen/Carmel Valley), notes that the Ohlone presence has endured despite the hardships: “Our culture is beautiful, and we have always been here.”

At Cafe Ohlone, traditional foods meet modern tastes, highlighting continuity and adaptation. The restaurant incorporates recordings, storytelling, and education into the dining experience. Medina, an Indigenous language activist fluent in Chochenyo, is a powerful orator who often enlightens diners about Ohlone traditions. When I stopped by in May for a sunny lunch on the patio, I appreciated the recorded sounds of crickets, birds, and Chochenyo songs sung by the tribe’s youngest and eldest members. My grandma, a We Wai Kai Nation member, would adore the multigenerational Chochenyo rendition of “Angel Baby.”

The cafe serves another role, too: an attempt by the university to atone for past wrongs. For much of a century, the adjacent anthropology museum housed a vast collection of Native artifacts and bones. As I walk by, I queasily remember Ishi, one of the last Yahi Tribe members, who lived in the museum and was made to fashion arrows at the behest of anthropology professor Alfred Kroeber. In 1925, Kroeber controversially declared the Ohlone people “extinct” in Handbook of the Indians of California. This led to the Ohlone Tribe losing its federal recognition, while the building housing the museum was later christened Kroeber Hall.

After much upheaval, the university removed Kroeber’s name in 2021, but his legacy endures. He and other anthropologists of his era had led the widescale theft of 9,000 Native American remains and around 200,000 sacred artifacts. The campus still houses thousands of them, which it has been slow to return to tribal nations, though a university spokesperson tells me that some of the resources of the museum, now closed to the public, have been “redirected to the repatriation efforts.”

Medina sits on a university committee working to ensure that the remains are returned in accordance with the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Looking to “our ancestors as property,” Medina says, “has never been appropriate or right.”

He and Trevino are also trying to increase Ohlone visibility beyond the restaurant’s walls. For the past year, they’ve been raising money to buy a piece of local land. They imagine native plant gardens, a tearoom, and a dining space in a traditional tule house—a place for the Bay Area Ohlone to gather and practice cultural traditions. Their efforts align with the Land Back movement, which advocates for restoring Indigenous lands taken by colonization.

Obstacles include a hot real estate market and the considerable cost and complexity of launching and funding a nonprofit—easier tasks for federally recognized tribes. In late 2023, the pair were close to inhabiting a site with historical and symbolic meaning in Sunol, some 37 miles southeast of Berkeley. That deal fell through, but they remain optimistic. “Our work,” they note on their website, “is an act of love.”