B 34 · LAND&PEOPLE · FALL/WINTER 2016
ill Richardson adjusts the curved brim of a red baseball cap low over his forehead. It’s embroidered with a feather and the words “Native Pride.” With the hat and sunglasses conceal- ing his eyes, it’s hard to read his expression.
“My emotions are mixed,” he says,
haltingly. We’re gazing out over the family ranch his grandparents first purchased in 1925—coastal prairie of
purple needlegrass and oatgrass thrumming in the brisk sum- mer wind, million-dollar views of the Pacific as it pummels the base of the cliffs, 70 feet high, across Highway 1. Not one morn- ing of his life, says Richardson, has he walked out his front door without finding himself awestruck by the beauty of this land. Under the terms of the agreement he and his siblings have brokered with the Kashia, Richardson explains, he won’t have to give up the view: their arrangement includes the provision that he’ll live out his days in his family home. As we talk, two Kashia men walk up behind him and tap his shoulder. Richard- son turns—“Hey!”—and greets each with a hug. Divided by ancestry, the Richardsons and the Kashia are bound by the land they both call home. When tribal members wanted to gather seaweed or harvest abalone or perform a ceremony, it was the Richardson family who granted permis- sion. Bill Richardson and his two sisters grew up here, attending the tribe’s one-room schoolhouse just up the road on the Kashia reservation. Their playmates were Kashia kids, too. So it was more than a decade ago that the Richardson siblings first began talking with the Kashia about selling their land to the tribe. But the Kashia could not assemble the considerable re- sources needed to make the purchase. A deal remained a distant hope until 2013, when the tribe’s legal council called The Trust for Public Land. The organization had a long history of working with native peoples, restoring more than 200,000 acres to tribal ownership since the late 1990s. Could they help? “From a conservation standpoint, this property was obviously important because it’s a large stretch of beautiful, undeveloped coastline right next to a state park,” says The Trust for Public Land’s Brendan Moriarty. “But when we understood the signifi- cance of the land to the Kashia, we knew we wanted to help. Everyone involved—including state and local public agencies, the tribe, and the landowners, the Richardson family—we all wanted to see something happen.”
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