Save the Date – Annual Meeting Wednesday December 7, 2016

Post date: Nov 27, 2016 8:08:09 PM

This year’s Annual Meeting will take place 7pm, Wednesday evening, December 7, 2016 at the Bonny Doon School Multipurpose Room.

While we will have the usual election of board members and report on our finances and activities during 2016, the highpoint will undoubtedly be the presentation. In October, you may have noticed that CAL FIRE performed prescribed burns totaling about 7 acres, to maintain the part of the fuel break that we completed along Empire Grade from the Ben Lomond Camp to about half a mile NE of Alba Road. What you may not know is that the burn was conducted in cooperation with the Amah Mutsun Land Trust. We are very lucky to have Rick Flores come that evening to discuss the nexus of culture and ecology that represents, see below.

Fire on the Central Coast: Implications for Cultural and Ecological Restoration

This talk will explore how the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band are relearning traditional ecological knowledge to return to the path of their ancestors and care for Mother Earth.  Historically, fire was widely used on the Central Coast to manage ecosystems and promote native plant resources.  Without the use of fire our landscapes are changing and culturally important plant species are disappearing.  Today, the use of fire can be used to both restore cultural practices, and therefore culture itself, and our degraded ecosystems.

Rick Flores is a graduate student in the Environmental Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz. His research focuses on the efforts of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band (AMTB) to relearn traditional ecological knowledge and become active stewards in their traditional territory once again after a period of colonial dispossession. He is also the Steward of the Amah Mutsun Relearning Program at the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum, which is a collaborative effort between the Arboretum and the AMTB to assist the tribe in the relearning of plant identification, ethnobotany, and traditional resource and environmental management practices, as well as educating students and the public about California Indian lifeways. In addition, he is a Research Associate for the Amah Mutsun Land Trust which uniquely merges conventional land trust approaches with indigenous knowledge, techniques, and ideals, and is committed to protecting and celebrating cultural resources through creating opportunities for the AMTB to engage in traditional ways across the landscapes of their ancestors.