In California’s largest landback deal, the Yurok Tribe reclaims sacred land around Klamath River

More than 17,000 acres around the Klamath River in Northern California, including the lower Blue Creek watershed, have returned to the Yurok Tribe, completing the largest landback deal in California history.

The Yurok people have lived, fished, and hunted along the Klamath for millennia. But when the California gold rush began, the tribe lost 90 percent of its territory.

For the last two decades, the Yurok Tribe has been working with the nonprofit Western Rivers Conservancy to get its land back. The 17,000 acres composes the final parcel of a $56 million, 47,097-acre land transfer that effectively doubles the current land holdings of the Yurok Tribe.

The tribe has already designated the land as a salmon sanctuary and community forest and plans to eventually put it into a trust and care for it in perpetuity.

“No words can describe how we feel knowing that our land is coming back to the ownership of the Yurok people,” said Joseph James, the chairman of the Yurok Tribal Council, who is from the village of Shregon on the Klamath River. “The Klamath River is our highway. It is also our food source. And it takes care of us. And so it’s our job, our inherent right, to take care of the Klamath Basin and its river.”

Via Reasons to be Cheerful

The Ed's Up - Unbreaking

I hope you’re all hanging in there.

In the earliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic, people knew that the coronavirus that reached the U.S., but no one knew where exactly it was or how intensely it was spreading. There was barely any testing, and the trickles of data we had were not being collated. From that void rose the Covid Tracking Project—a group of volunteers who wrangled the data that we needed and that the nation’s top health agency was failing to provide. Their data became a bedrock for COVID reporters and government agencies alike. I think about the CTP a lot, as an example of what ordinary folks can collectively accomplish in times of crisis. It reminds me of what my wife Liz Neeley always says: there are no walls to put our backs against except each other.

Liz’s latest project is built upon the same principle. She and five other co-founders, including CTP leader Erin Kissane, have launched a new site called UNBREAKING to track how the current administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us.

Unbreaking is written for you, for us. Its purpose is to “help orient and ground our communities in clear and rigorously cited explanations of what’s happening to our government and why it matters.” The site consists of regularly updated explainers, written by the founders and a larger team of volunteers, that track the attacks on our institutions, why they matter, and the countermoves that are in play. As the team writes, “We believe that mapping the damage done and its human costs—and the pushback and resilience work already underway—is necessary groundwork for building and retaining political agency.”

Six pages are currently live, on: the federal workforce, food safety, Medicaid, the postal service, trans healthcare, and medical research funding. More will come. But if you want to start somewhere, try the page on medical research funding to see the extent of what this administration is destroying, and why it costs us all. It also doubles as perhaps the best explanation I’ve read of why research funding actually matters, whom it serves, and how.

Via Violet Blue's Threat Model - Covid: July 3, 2025