What is Good Stewardship of Cache Creek?
For over twenty years, Native cultural practitioners have been carefully tending a two-acre patch of land in a former Teichert gravel pit along Cache Creek, just outside of Woodland.
With attention to detail, ancestral knowledge and patience, they’ve worked at the edge of a shallow pond, coaxing Native plants and animal relatives to return to this “capai” – the Patwin word for creek.
For over a century, many plant populations that have traditionally been used by Native Wintun people have had their populations significantly reduced by Euro-Americans for various reasons. Dogbane, for example, was a target of removal by settler ranchers whose cattle ate the poisonous plant after native grasslands were overgrazed. These grasslands, less than 200 years ago, sustained vast herds of tule elk, deer, and pronghorn antelope. Other culturally significant plants such as cattail and tule, found in marshes and wetlands, served no apparent purpose to western society, despite their critical role in maintaining healthy waterflows and biodiverse ecosystems.
Fast forward to the early 2000s, Native flora and fauna began gradually returning to the Tending and Gathering Garden at the Cache Creek Nature Preserve, guided by Indigenous land stewards and culture bearers. But the dogbane and other plants weren’t exactly flourishing. Something was missing: fire.
Maidu/Wintun Cultural Practitioner and Artist Diana Almendariz’ latest painting, “Good Fire and Water,” focuses on the transformative power of fire to restore degraded ecosystems such as this mined-out gravel pit, one of many along a 14 mile stretch of lower Cache Creek where currently eleven gravel mines permitted by Yolo County are excavating much larger and deeper pits.
“The first thing you’ll see during a cultural burn is the hawks returning. They see the smoke and know there will be rodents fleeing the flames, so they come in close for a meal..."
explained Almendariz at a recent community gathering organized by Nina Fontana, research faculty in the Native American Studies Department at UC Davis, who commissioned the painting.
Cultural fire is the carefully-controlled burning of landscapes and plants such as tule by Indigenous people to stimulate healthy plant growth, control pests, replenish nutrients and steward entire ecosystems – forests, wetlands, meadows, grasslands and woodlands were all carefully managed by Native people with the technology of fire.
Tule, for example, once covered large swaths of the central valley. Tule was used as a versatile building material by Native people for thousands of years, in much the same way that gravel is used extensively for construction projects by the dominant society today. Tule is a regenerative, renewable resource that filters toxins out of water, actively sequesters carbon, creates an inch of fertile topsoil a year as it decomposes, and helps replenish groundwater and sustain rich biodiversity from healthy microbes to salmon. Gravel, on the other hand, is a non-renewable resource mined from creeks and rivers that contributes to 40% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Over the past five years that Almendariz has been leading cultural burns at the Tending and Gathering Garden, she has witnessed a cascade of benefits to the ecosystem. The dogbane has finally become well-established and the red-winged blackbirds and their beautiful songs are proliferating. “All of nature responds to fire,” shares Almendariz.
Wetland Banquet
Look closely at the tule in Almendariz’ painting. Trace the long green reeds down to their roots at the edge of the wetland. You will see a rich layer of activity in the water. Tiny invertebrates like copepods and mayfly nymphs are feeding off the bacteria attracted to the sugars exuded from the roots of the tule. This biofilm is where the web of life begins.
Floating on the surface of the water you’ll see ash from the fire. This carbon rich ash – biochar – encourages beneficial bacteria to grow, which becomes even more food for a diverse array of invertebrates. In a healthy wetland, aquatic organisms are constantly filtering the water and helping to maintain an ecological equilibrium that keeps toxic algae blooms, harmful bacteria outbreaks and disease-carrying mosquitos in check.
UC Davis entomologist and vector-borne disease specialist Geoffrey Attardo explains,
“The water has this 24-7 workforce of tiny organisms, living their lives, that help break down nutrients so that plants can use them. The ash and biochar from the burn creates a buffet for the bacteria, which feed the insects, which feed the fish, which feed the otter and so on all the way up to the food chain. The foundation of all life is in wetlands.”
Aggregate Fever
Over the past 200 years, the Cache Creek watershed has been extensively mined for its natural riches. Upstream along the shores of Clear Lake, the Sulphur Bank mercury mine supplied over half the mercury used in the Gold Rush and operated until 1957. This mine is still poisoning the watershed to this day. The fish, once an abundant source of protein, are no longer safe to eat.
Extensive, deep-pit aggregate (sand and gravel) mining in the lower stretches of Cache Creek is now exacerbating the poisoning of Cache Creek wildlife. Beginning in 1996, Yolo County began permitting deep-pit gravel mining outside the main channel of the creek. These 70-foot plus deep pits are now filling with groundwater. The mercury churned up by the gravel mining is being converted to the highly toxic form methylmercury by bacteria that thrive in the anoxic conditions in the landlocked pits.
Testing shows that mercury is bioaccumulating in the fish living in the pits. The one pit where methylmercury levels have dropped is the shallow pond at the Tending and Gathering Garden. Attardo believes this is due to the presence of tule and cattail which effectively remediate the mercury by drawing the mineral up through their roots and respiring it into the atmosphere where it dissipates.
CEMEX – an $18 billion multinational cement company that operates its own shipping terminal in the port of West Sacramento to import cement from its plant in Sonora, Mexico – was recently granted a 20-year extension of their mine across a 3-square mile site adjacent to Cache Creek near the rural, predominantly farmworker town of Madison. Over 50 million tons of Earth will be extracted by this one mine alone, leaving huge 200-acre holes in the creek floodplain.
The county’s mining consultant, Heidi Tschudin, chief architect of the controversial Cache Creek Parkway Plan, claimed during a recent public hearing that mining is necessary to meet the region’s demand for economic growth. She explained that the state and county have deemed this an appropriate site for extracting this basic building material even if it results in more mercury pollution, permanent alteration of the aquifer, threats to sensitive groundwater dependent-ecosystems, disturbance to cultural resources and increased greenhouse gas emissions.
In other words, lower Cache Creek is a sacrifice zone for regional construction projects such as the expansion of the 1-80 freeway and endless urban sprawl. Ecologically destructive projects like the proposed Delta Tunnel, Sites Reservoir Dam and the solar farm at Coyote Creek in eastern Sacramento Valley will all require gravel – most likely from Cache Creek – to be built. Tschudin and county supervisors including Lucas Frerichs claim that Yolo County has the most stringent environmental protections, so this sacrifice is best done under our watch.
Stewarding the Future
Reflecting again on Almendariz’ Clean Water and Fire painting, we see a contrasting worldview based in the ecological understanding that all life is connected and interdependent. The tule wren, the snake, the invertebrates, the hawk, and the humans that tend to the land are all essential to the healthy functioning of the wetland ecosystem. Nothing can be sacrificed in the life-giving marsh economy without sacrificing the whole.
“It’s not that Mother Nature miraculously controls and guides the ecosystem – it’s this cooperation between all the life-bearing ingredients and the symbiotic relationship between the tule biome and its vast array of invertebrates who feast upon it. The Native cultural lifestyle sequesters carbon. Every time we gather tule, it grows back healthy and strong using carbon from the atmosphere. Everything is made of carbon - it’s the building block of life. Tule grows back quickly, so it can sequester a lot of carbon and detoxify the atmosphere and the water." - Diana Almendariz
Hundreds of people amplified this basic science during a Yolo County board of supervisors hearing on December 9. Although the five supervisors eventually voted to approve the CEMEX’ project, they amended the project agreement to restore 100 acres of the mine (currently being used as a settling pond to receive process wash fines) back to riparian habitat rather than conventional, fossil-fuel intensive industrial agriculture.
This marks a critical inflection point. For the first time in nearly 200 years, the environmental priorities of Native cultural practitioners are being recognized –and potentially valued – in Yolo County’s management of lower Cache Creek.
Next year, regional stakeholders will begin a ten-year review of the Cache Creek Area Plan. This will be an opportunity to ensure decisions about Cache Creek are guided by the region’s original experts in sustainability and well-being. The return of Native-led stewardship – good fire and water – to Cache Creek has begun. In fact, it is well underway.
