UC Is Finalizing Its Land-Use Rules Without Involving Directly Impacted Tribes

The University of California (UC) is circulating its first-ever systemwide framework governing tribal access, co-stewardship, and land-use agreements across 80,000 acres of UC-managed land. The framework was developed by UC Tribal Lands Workgroup, composed entirely of UC staff with no Tribal government representatives, and Tribal advisory bodies were only invited to review the document after it was drafted. Faculty senate divisions and systemwide committees have until May 19 to submit feedback, with the Academic Council taking up the report in its May 27 meeting. UC-affiliated Native advisory councils are also being consulted. But the tribes whose ancestral homelands include UC Berkeley — among them, the Muwekma Ohlone, who’ve been fighting for federal recognition since 1927 — do not appear to have been asked.

Though the framework applies systemwide, the document’s only visual example is a map of UC Berkeley land holdings overlaid with Indigenous territorial boundaries identifying Ohlone and Karkin territory. Berkeley is only named twice in the document’s text, yet its land anchors the document’s central illustration. The Tribes whose ancestral territory that map documents were not among those consulted in its development.

Some California Native leaders say the omission of the Tribes is not an oversight. It reflects a structural problem baked into the framework itself. Native Nations are sovereign nations, and as the U.S. established itself, these Nations agreed in Indian treaties to nation-to-nation relations, not nation-to-state or nation-to-private corporation relations on matters of Tribal governance. “Tribes are not decision makers in governance structures,” said Morningstar Gali, organizer with the International Indian Treaty Council and member of the Ajumawi band of the Pit River Tribe.

Katherine Florey, a federal Indian law scholar at UC Davis, said the elision stood out. “Unrecognized Tribes are not mentioned; they are sort of implicitly excluded,” she said. “California has a lot of Tribes that are not federally recognized, and that’s because of our own history and ways in which Tribes were mistreated by California politicians. I do think that’s a really striking omission.”

While UC says the framework is not limited to federally or state-recognized tribes, the draft proposal does not appear to lay out a clearly defined consultation mechanism for Tribes that are neither federally nor state-recognized. The framework identifies, as an opportunity for the framework’s implementation, a map of UC Berkeley land — an area exclusively comprising unrecognized Tribes. The framework also retains UC approval authority over activities, including prescribed and cultural burns for wildfire management, which the university says require heightened safety review and legal compliance.

The framework also governs reburial agreements: the process by which ancestral remains and cultural items held by UC are returned to Tribal communities. According to Monica Arellano, former vice chairwoman of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, between 9,000 and 12,000 Muwekma Ohlone ancestors are currently held across UC and Bay Area institutions. “I know with a large number of ancestors that are still there that need to go home,” she said. Under the framework as written, the Tribe most directly affiliated with those remains has no clearly defined pathway to participate in decisions about their return.

UC Berkeley reported 11,900 Tribal remains to the federal government, but has only made 60 percent of those available for return through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA. Rosemary Cambra, former Muwekma Ohlone Tribal chairwoman, said of NAGPRA returns: “There has been a very quiet underground silence of trafficking of human bodies.”

Asked whether land return is within the scope of the co-stewardship relationship, a UC spokesperson declined to answer, instead restating that the report was developed “primarily to guide UC leaders and staff in engaging in respectful, collaborative, and intentional Tribal consultation.”

No Path to Create One

Three groups descended from the Verona Band of Ohlone — the East Bay Tribal community federally recognized between 1906 and 1927 — claim the East Bay as their ancestral territory today: The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, the Ohlone Indian Tribe, and the Confederated Villages of Lisjan. Arellano says she was not contacted to consult on the UC framework. Andy Galvan of the Ohlone Indian Tribe and Corrina Gould of Sagora Te Land Trust, who represent the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, did not respond to requests for comment on any framework-related contact. East Bay Tribes have yet to be mentioned as having been engaged or meaningfully consulted from the agreement’s birth through the current campus review period.

East Bay Tribal leaders express concern that federally recognized Tribal members on the Native American Heritage Commission (NAHC) list — a litany of California Tribal representatives from recognized and unrecognized Tribes selected by the state to consult on cultural resources — are privileged over them in this framework for co-stewardship of East Bay Tribes’ lands. Cambra said: “We haven’t appointed them, we haven’t asked of them, nor should we,” adding, “if we are of sound mind, and we know who we are — are related to, and are born from — then we should be able to exercise that right, not defer to it.”

Gregg Castro, one of the only publicly identified Ramaytush Ohlone, aboriginal to San Francisco, was not consulted despite advising on Tribal co-stewardship initiatives at San Francisco State University and UC San Francisco, among others.

“Being recognized might mean you’re going to have to do something to compensate for what happened,” Castro said. “For unrecognized communities, it’s not a legal obligation.”

Legal obligations to Tribes tend to be organized around these categories: treaty rights, aboriginal title, statutory violations, or breaches of trust. The Morrill Act land grants, which the framework acknowledges as the basis for the establishment of the UC system, were themselves products of terra nullius, the colonial legal fiction declaring Indigenous lands empty and therefore available for seizure. The framework recognizes the theft without meaningfully dismantling its architecture.

In 2019, the Yurok Tribe granted the Klamath River legal personhood, leveraging treaty rights to force the removal of four dams in 2024 — the largest excision of dams in U.S. history. In 2022, the Wiyot Tribe officially recovered Tuluwat Island from the City of Eureka. But Castro notes that even when land returns do happen, the picture is rarely clean. “Tuluwat Island, that’s an actual land back,” he said. “The Tribe is the actual holder of deed to that land.” But the island, he noted, was an EPA Superfund site when transferred, meaning environmental damages are severe, diminishing its value to the City of Eureka. “You’re giving it back, but we now got to do the work.”

But Tribes without federal or state recognition have no claim within any of these categories, and under this UC framework, there is no path to create one.

Gali echoes Castro’s framing: “It’s within these areas that are considered prime real estate, especially on the coast and in the Bay Area — non-fed tribes, in terms of their inclusion, risk exclusion. That’s the intent. That’s the erasure.”

A Seat at the Table

East Bay Tribes are further distanced from authority within the UC framework when the document confers decision-making authority to Tribes, defined only as federally recognized Native Nations. When asked whether East Bay Tribes were meaningfully consulted in the agreement’s design, a UC spokesperson said their advisory bodies selected to review the framework include “Native tribal representatives,” which, by the framework’s own logic, are federally recognized Tribes. The committees are therefore structurally incapable of representing Muwekma Ohlone or other unrecognized East Bay Nations, even if individual members wanted to advocate for them, according to Florey.

Naming advisory bodies rather than Tribes also treats institutional affiliation as equivalent to sovereign representation. “There is not that government-to-government relationship deferring to Tribal sovereignty, but instead Tribes are ‘engaged,’” said Gali. Tribal sovereignty is sui generis, a legal status that predates and exists independently of federal recognition. The framework’s reliance on recognition categories to determine who gets a seat at the table collapses that distinction entirely, according to Florey.

“And so what does engagement mean? Engagement is not consultation. Engagement is not consent,” said Gali.

UC engaging members of other Tribes on governance of East Bay Tribes’ ancestral territories is causing the Muwekma Ohlone anxiety. “Recently we heard that it would be other [federally] recognized Tribes making decisions about our ancestors because we’re not recognized.”

Jonathan Cordero, Ramaytush Tribal chairman and executive director of the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone, who is currently writing a legal paper on the NAHC’s imprimatur, was pointed. “No one right now, even in the Native American Heritage Commission, is positioned or qualified to make determinations about Tribal territorial boundaries,” he said. “They’re placing themselves in the same position that lead agencies get placed in under NAGPRA — having to use their lack of expertise to make decisions that affect the fates of Tribes.”

Gali is invoking a standard that has a name in international Indigenous rights law: Free, Prior, and Informed Consent, or FPIC, enshrined in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Under FPIC, Indigenous peoples must be consulted before decisions affecting their territories are made, not after a framework has been drafted internally and circulated for institutional review. UC’s process inverts that sequence entirely.

UC noted that committee members are reviewed and nominated by the state’s NAHC. But the NAHC is currently the locus of another regulatory fight that Gali has been tracking for a decade. The pending regulations she has followed would remove unrecognized Tribes from the commission’s contact list entirely, ending their ability to consult on matters of their own culture by state law. “All of these efforts have been made to change — to be federally recognized only,” said Gali.

The distinction between engagement and consultation is stark and carries legal weight. Florey notes that the framework harbors no mechanism for resolving disputes when UC and Tribes disagree, leaving Tribes with no recourse if the university proceeds over their objections. “It seems to almost create an obstacle that people on the UC Davis side need to get through,” she said, “rather than a bestowing of meaningful legal rights on Tribes.” UC, she added, “holds all the cards,” when disagreements arise.

Asked directly if any advisory bodies in the development of the framework encompassed members of East Bay Tribes, a UC spokesperson declined to confirm, instead providing links to two committee membership lists. One list identifies these representatives of East Bay Tribes: Andrew Galvan of the Ohlone Indian Tribe and Katherine Perez of the North Valley Yokuts. Ohlone Tribes vary and reside throughout the Bay Area. Perez’s Yokuts Tribe is Central Valley-based. The UC’s closest approximation to East Bay Tribal representation is one individual — Galvan — whose own provenance in relation to the Muwekma Ohlone and whether he can speak for them is a distinction documented in federal acknowledgment records.

Cordero said the problem runs deeper than who is included. “If UC Berkeley is putting together a stewardship document for their lands in Chochenyo and Bay Miwok territory, then they should at the very outset invite in the Tribes from those territories,” he said. “Inviting other tribes in from outside of those homelands is a violation of the host Tribes’ sovereignty and rights.”

The distinction matters. A 2001 Bureau of Indian Affairs proposed finding declined to acknowledge the Muwekma Ohlone, finding insufficient evidence of continuous community identification between 1927 and 1985. It also documents longstanding disputes between Galvan’s Ohlone Indian Tribe, incorporated in 1971 by three Galvan siblings, and the Muwekma Ohlone petitioning group. The two are not the same community. The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe has continued pursuing recognition through federal courts in the decades since.

Recognition of the Muwekma Ohlone has been denied three times — in 2001, 2011, and 2013 — despite the Tribe’s assertion that their previous status as federally recognized Verona Band from 1906 to 1927 still stands. In July 2025, Union City became the first East Bay municipality to pass a resolution supporting their recognition, urging Congress and the White House to act.

Who Controls the Fire

Prescribed and cultural burns are part of a predetermined list of activities with significant cultural and legal weight authorized to occur on the 80,000 acres of UC-managed land prescribed burns are seen by Tribes as fundamental land care — promoting the health of hunting species, plant regeneration, and proactive forest maintenance that reduces the frequency and scope of wildfire harm. Cultural burns can produce similar ecological effects but carry spiritual dimensions that have historically been curtailed or prohibited under U.S. and state fire safety regulations – a tension that implicates First Amendment religious freedom protections and the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act.

Prescribed burns are increasingly being studied and promoted by scientists. A 2025 Stanford study measured what Indigenous people already knew empirically, finding that prescribed burns reduce wildfire severity by 16 percent and net smoke pollution by 14 percent.

In October 2025, Gov. Gavin Newsom also signed an executive order requiring state agencies to reduce barriers and encourage controlled burns to reduce wildfire risk. He signed California’s Prescribed Fire Claims Liability Fund pilot into law, calling it the Good Fire Act.

The Oakland Museum of California’s Good Fire exhibition, which drew both on Tribal Ecological Knowledge and fire science to make the case for controlled burns, illustrated how assiduously this consensus has entered mainstream California culture.

Good Fire co-curator and Oakland Museum senior curator Ryder Diaz spoke directly about the state’s approach to land management: “Fire suppression came about because of capitalism,” he said. “Don’t burn the forest, so we have more trees, so we have more lumber, so we have more profit,” adding, “Who is the real arsonist? Maybe you didn’t light the match, but you created the conditions for something really devastating.”

While UC sanctions controlled burns early on in the document, a caveat to that permission appears buried, requiring Tribes to seek approval, and UC retains ultimate approval power under the framework. The approval requirement echoes a longer history of parens patriae: the legal doctrine used to justify federal guardianship over Tribes by declaring them incapable of governing their own affairs. Here, a private university assumes a similar posture over ancestral land that its own mapping tool confirms belongs to someone else.

Gali compared the approval requirement to existing state park agreements with Tribes. “This is what you’re allowed to do, this is when you’re gonna come in,” she said. “We’re like, no, actually.”

Bayley J. Marquez, American Studies professor at the University of Maryland and a Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians Tribal member, said: “It sounds like Tribes have already been requesting these things of state institutions, and this is the UC putting in place a broader plan to protect their own liability.”

What’s Next

Not everyone in the UC system views the framework as a purely defensive apparatus. Andrew Jolivétte is a UC Santa Barbara Native American studies professor, a Ishak, Opelousa, Kaskaskia, and Chitimacha Tribal member, and a member of the campus committee reviewing the draft. He said his committee plans to endorse the framework, with conditions. “We will be endorsing it with one recommendation: that they include language about cultural protocols and procedures for research and partnerships with Tribes both on campus and on Tribal lands.” Jolivétte’s response echoes concerns raised by legal scholars and Tribal leaders about the framework’s silence on how Indigenous knowledge generated through co-stewardship would be governed and protected.

Cambra was direct: “The control will always go back to the universities. What does that do to the sovereignty of any Tribe?”

The framework will be taken up by the Academic Council on May 27. For the Tribes whose ancestral territory it governs, the question is whether the process will have meaningfully included them before that happens.

“At the end of the day, the bottom line is it’s a racist process that we have to submit to. And I don’t believe we have to,” said Cambra.

Marquez, who completed her doctorate at UC Berkeley and taught in its program in American Studies, was direct about the gap between institutional self-satisfaction and Tribal reality: “The university sees that as, ‘Look what we’ve done, and we’ve solved it.’ And, I think for most Native communities, it’s like, ah great, and what’s next?”