The Kashaya Pomo Cultural Landscape Project: A Community-Based Approach

Summary

In order to more effectively co-steward Kashaya Pomo cultural resources, the California Department of Transportation and the Kashaya Pomo Tribe conducted a multi-year community-based cultural landscape study. This study documents that for some as yet immeasurable time back into antiquity, the lives of Kashaya ancestors were structured by a landscape that included burn-managed ecosystem components, clearings for villages and other Kashaya places, trails, and boundaries. Their accumulated bank of multigenerational landscape labor and knowledge structured the lives of, and benefited, each subsequent generation up to the present.

This study also documents the enduring relationship that modern Kashaya tribal members have with their ancestral homeland, regardless of their proximity to it, and the importance of it to their cultural identity and well-being. Links between Kashaya tribal members and their places, between the past and the present, and between tangible and intangible heritage, have broadened our view of what is to be stewarded and how. We now see a vital part of stewardship to include protecting the linkages between the Kashaya community and their heritage in ways that support their identity in the present.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage