Herbs will replace concrete outside this building acquired by the Wiyot Tribe.
The Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab at Cal Poly Humboldt.
Gardens outside the tribal office.
“You know that song, ‘We paved paradise and put up a parking lot’?” The question comes from Michelle Vassel, tribal administrator of the Wiyot Tribe. I’m interviewing Vassel to learn about how land acquisitions are bolstering the Wiyot’s food sovereignty efforts. I nod, affirming the Joni Mitchell reference. “Well, we want to do the opposite of that. We want to take a parking lot and make it paradise. Someplace we would all want to live.”
You might think Vassel is speaking figuratively in her description of the Wiyot’s work through the Dishgamu Humboldt Community Land Trust. You’d be wrong. In May of 2023, as I showed up to learn more about the Trust’s work, I found myself staring at deteriorating asphalt behind a vacant commercial building on the edge of downtown Eureka, California. The Wiyot’s plans for the site include transforming this pavement into a garden, full of traditional food and medicinal plants. It takes real vision to imagine these potholes and parking spots full of green, but then, vision is something Vassel and her colleagues have in spades.
That vision spills over into interesting places, including the bureaucratic world of administration for land management, where the Wiyot are trying something new. Most community land trusts (CLTs), which acquire parcels of land to protect and preserve in perpetuity, are structured“Component units” are organizations that are legally separate from but accountable to a local government, which has financial responsibility for them. Some public utilities or housing authorities, for instance, are component units. And the Wiyot Tribe isn’t just another community organization, but a sovereign tribal nation — it has its own elected government (the Tribal Council), its own constitution, and so on. Existing as a component unit gives the Dishgamu Humboldt CLT the flexibility it needs to conduct business, while ensuring that land put into the trust remains under the care of the tribe and complements its other goals, from providing affordable housing to improving access to healthy food for its members.
