Coast Miwok Federal Recognition: The Forty-Year Restoration

The national seashore you are entering was established in nineteen sixty-two to protect this peninsula from residential and commercial development. The interpretive program it has carried for most of its history has concentrated on the dairy farms and the coastal geology.

This is Coast Miwok territory. It has been for several thousand years, and the people whose ancestors lived on this land have spent the last sixty years watching a national park tell their story as a footnote to someone else's.

The Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo peoples of the Point Reyes and Tomales Bay area were incorporated into the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, a tribal entity that was formally recognized by the federal government, then terminated. The termination came in nineteen fifty-eight, under the federal Termination Policy that Congress applied to dozens of California tribes in that decade. Stripped of federal recognition, the tribe lost access to federal services, protections, and the legal standing that comes with being a recognized sovereign nation.

The restoration process took more than forty years. The tribe filed a petition in nineteen ninety-two. Congress passed the Graton Rancheria Restoration Act on December twenty-seventh of the year two thousand, restoring federal recognition after forty-two years of administrative limbo.

The tribe now operates a casino in Rohnert Park and has begun acquiring land for cultural purposes. Their ancestral territory, which encompasses most of what you are driving through, remains overwhelmingly in federal and private hands.

The Coast Miwok have been here since long before the dairy farms, the national seashore designation, and the tourism that followed. The land the dairies occupied was their land first. The park that protects it was built on their history while minimizing their presence in the interpretation of that history. That accounting is still being revised.