It took decades, stacks of legal paperwork and countless phone calls, but, in the spring of 2025, a California Chuckchansi Native American woman and her daughter walked onto a 5-acre parcel of land, shaded by oaks and pines, for the first time.
This land near the foothills of the Sierra National Forest is part of an unusual category of land that has been largely left alone for more than a century. The parcel, like roughly 400 other parcels across the state totaling 16,000 acres in area, is held in trust by the federal government for the benefit of specific Indigenous people – such as a family member of the woman visiting the land with her daughter.
