Returning Yurok Land Undoes Conservation Movement’s White-Supremacist Origins
Yet another #LandBack success is helping rewrite the future of California’s North Coast — in a good way.
First, the facts. Last week the Yurok Tribe, the Save the Redwoods League, the National Park Service, and the California State Parks signed a memorandum of understanding to return a 125-acre ecologically sensitive and culturally important site to the tribe. The MoU represents the first time that tribal land will be co-stewarded by that tribe, the National Park Service, and California State Parks.
The site, known as ‘O Rew in the Yurok language, is currently the property of the Save the Redwoods League and is undergoing rehabilitation and rewilding. When that effort wraps up in 2026, the league will convey title to the Yuroks, California’s largest tribal nation.
Located off Highway 101 along Prairie Creek near the town of Orick, ‘O Rew will serve as a southern gateway to Redwood National and State Parks, particularly the popular Lady Bird Johnson Grove. The Yuroks plan to build a visitor center highlighting both the tribe’s history and its living culture and guiding visitors to the parks’ wonders.
‘O Rew lies in the approximate center of Yurok ancestral territory and was one of the many areas from which the tribe was removed by force in the late 1800s to exploit the redwoods. A major lumber mill operation paved over most of the site, burying Prairie Creek’s channel and floodplain. When the mill shut down in 2013, Save the Redwoods League bought it. For the past 10 years the league has worked with experts, including the Yurok Tribe, to restore the creek and bring back steelhead, salmon, and native vegetation.
At the March 19 event to mark the signing of the agreement, Joseph L. James, chair of the Yurok Tribe, thanked “the Save the Redwoods League for committing to repatriate this critical part of our homeland,” citing the project as “a new conservation model that recognizes the value of tribal land management.”
Sam Hodder, president and CEO of Save the Redwoods League, seconded the motion. “Today’s agreement starts the process of changing the narrative about how, by whom, and for whom we steward natural lands,” he said.
Indeed, the league Hodder leads once headed a phalanx of conservation organizations dedicated to preserving wild America for white folks and keeping the riffraff out.
The Save the Redwoods League’s origin story tells how in 1918 John C. Merriam, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and Madison Grant took a road trip to Humboldt County to see for themselves the rapacious felling of coast redwoods for lumber. Standing under the giant trees at Bull Creek Flat, just beyond the endless clamor of axes and saws, the three resolved to protect what remained of the forest. Thus was the league born.
There’s more to the story, though, and it cuts to the heart of the ‘O Rew MoU’s significance. Merriam, Osborn, and Grant were all passionate leaders in the pseudoscientific movement called eugenics, which sought to protect the white race from assault by such subhuman forms as Jewish and Italian immigrants, African Americans, and tribal peoples. Eugenics allowed the powerful to demonize those disadvantaged groups on “scientific” grounds. It led to such outrages as the fiercely restrictive and unabashedly racist Immigration Act of 1924 and a host of state laws requiring sterilization of the “feeble-minded.”
Merriam and Osborn were both academic vertebrate paleontologists who contorted Darwin’s theory of natural selection to put white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants atop the evolutionary ladder and dismiss the rest of humanity as degraded pale shadows. Grant, a lawyer by training and a wealthy, full-time conservationist by avocation, centered eugenics in his popular The Passing of the Great Race. It came out two years before the Bull Creek Flat epiphany and argued fiercely that inferior races posed an existential threat to the old-stock Americans Grant called Nordics.
The time for action had come, Grant declared: “Neither the black, nor the brown, nor the yellow, nor the red will conquer the white in battle. But if the valuable elements in the Nordic race mix with inferior strains or die out through race suicide, then the citadel of civilization will fall for mere lack of defenders.”
The slow slide toward the bottom had already begun. “If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all ‘distinctions of race, creed, or color,’” Grant wrote, “the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo.”
Biographer Jonathan Spiro makes it clear that Grant identified the redwoods with those old-stock Americans. “The Nordics, who in their day had conquered most of the Old World, were now making their last stand against the invading hordes of immigrants,” Spiro writes. The redwoods, too, were making “their last stand against the invading hordes of loggers and developers.” Grant was preserving and protecting more than trees.
Osborn and Merriam felt the same way. The Save the Redwoods League became the trio’s way to raise money from their wealthy friends, buy up private tracts of redwoods, and set the trees aside as hallowed symbols of besieged white supremacy. Were the three founders to learn that ‘O Rew is to be returned to the Yuroks, they would surely rage in racist protest at letting the wrong people run the redwoods.
In fact, the Yurok Tribe has proved itself expert in landscape and wildlife management. Besides the Prairie Creek restoration project, the tribe has been central to the hard battle to remove four salmon-stopping dams from the Upper Klamath River and rewild the exposed reservoirs. And, in a two-decades-long project, the Yuroks are bringing condors back to California’s North Coast.
The record is clear: the redwoods can have no better stewards than the Yurok Tribe.
Bits, Pieces, and Links
• John Muir was a close friend to Henry Fairfield Osborn, and they worked together against the Hetch Hetchy Dam project in Yosemite. Osborn recruited Grant and his East Coast conservationist network to help out. Muir associated with a long list of eugenics supporters, and while he never expressed support for their ideas, he likewise never distanced himself from their beliefs.
• Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race came out in four editions, each larger than the prior. When it was translated into German as Der Untergang der grossen Rasse, Grant received fan mail from a young unknown who declared the book his “Bible.” He went on to make a notorious name for himself as Adolf Hitler.
• This Yurok Tribe press release provides an excellent summary of what’s happening with ‘O Rew.
• Save the Redwoods is doing an admirable job of owning up to its origins in white supremacist conservation and rewriting the script.
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