Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, thank you for joining us today. To start, could you please introduce yourself to our audience?
[00:00:05] Speaker B: Yes, it's Stephen Medrone, and I'm Humboldt County's fifth district supervisor, which includes the areas out here in Willow Creek Coupon all the way up to Witchbeck and up to Orleans, Solmes Bar. Basically, it's a huge district, goes all the way up the coast almost to Klamath, and includes everything north and east of the Mad River.
[00:00:29] Speaker A: You represent an area that includes the Hoopa Valley Tribe, a sovereign tribal nation. How does your role as a county supervisor overlap or intersect with tribal governance?
[00:00:38] Speaker B: Well, I come out here for office hours once a month. I think I'm the first supervisor in the history of the county that's ever done that.
And I do that because the Trinity Valley is isolated from the coast, especially in the wintertime, and it's important that people have access to their representatives, I believe.
And so I do that regularly. And in doing so, I have monthly meetings over at the neighborhood center where the tribal council meets. And usually one or more council members will come and talk with me about issues here in the valley, on the reservation and off, for instance, roads.
A lot of the roads in Hoopa Valley are actually county roads that we have a responsibility to maintain.
And then, of course, There's State Highway 96, which is a state highway, but there's a lot of other issues.
[00:01:35] Speaker C: So salmon issues have been in the news lately, from commercial fishing closures to hatchery shutdowns and pollution in local waterways. Does the county have an official stance on these issues? Do you have a stance on these issues, and what efforts might the county be taking to help with these?
[00:01:52] Speaker B: Yeah, well, yes, I do take a stand on these issues. I spent my entire professional career of over 50 years here in Humboldt county doing salmon watershed restoration, salmon habitat restoration and enhancement on just about every river in Humboldt, Del Norte, Trinity county, and even into Mendocino.
So, you know, salmon is a totem species for our native tribes. And more than that, it was a major food source, and in particular for our elders. I mean, with what's going on, even the elders aren't getting any allotments. Hardly. You know, lately it seems like.
So, yes, I do take a stand there, and I put my whole career behind all of that. It's very common. Water law is more complicated than any law at all. It has more books and papers stacked up around water law than anything. And in general, in water law, one of the principles is that if you're the first in time, the first in place, that you have the water. Right.
But then when the west got established and we were just doing horrible things to native peoples, especially like in Colorado with the big ranchers and the big miners, they established a water right in Colorado that was appropriated water rights. That's the only water right in Colorado.
In California, we're a dual water rights state where we have appropriated water rights and what's called riparian water rights. So you can collect the water off your roof here in California. In Colorado, you can't do that. It's against the law to collect the water off your roof because it belongs to somebody else. They own it.
So super complicated stuff. These things are being played out on the Eel river with the Potter Valley dams and Mendocino county and Sonoma County.
But the Trinity, you know, we thought we were getting pretty close to an agreement, but there have been differences of opinion.
And so the three parties have not come to agreement on how to move forward with that. And meanwhile, the federal government, I'm going to just put it bluntly, doesn't like Indians, at least that's what he says. Right. On many levels. Right. So it's not a great time for us, even if we're all in unison together, to go to the Bureau of Reclamation, a federal agency, and say, hey, we have a contract for no less than 50,000 acre feet. We want to call for it at these times of the year to enhance the fishery. And we have science behind that. We've done a study just completed last year that says, here's the things we could do to enhance the fishery with this water.
Danny Jordan is working as a council member for the time being to put together an agricultural plan for Huku Valley. At one time, there was a lot of food being produced right here in this valley, kind of like up in Orleans Valley, produces a lot of food, but also a lot of grapes for wine and other kinds of things.
So part of that is to develop an irrigation plan, you know, and get big grants to put in a whole irrigation system.
I think it's a fabulous idea, you know, to use that water to grow food for a while. Before the new store got built, it was a food desert when there was no market for a while. Right. That was pretty harsh, and that's helped improve things. But the ability to grow food is just phenomenal, and the water is there to do it. So that's another one of those things where the county and the tribe and downstream Yurok tribe are all working together, hopefully in collaboration with state agencies like Department of Fish and Wildlife, the California State Water Board and other agencies to effectively finally call for this water and get it coming into the communities for jobs, for food and for fish.
[00:05:40] Speaker D: As far as the executive order and other Trump era policies to clear cut the national forest in this region, especially considering there's a lot of sacred sites and other critical tribal resources, how do you think the county should react to this? You know, knowing that this is federal lands, but also one of the kids on the chalkboard, would you put chain yourself to a bulldozer to protect sacred land here outside of Hoopa?
[00:06:13] Speaker B: Yeah, good questions. Well, I got arrested for tree hugging, so I'm proud of it. Well, once again I will say I think we're really lucky to live in Humboldt county because you know, the tribes try to practice sustainable forestry here on the rez.
The Mid Klamath Watershed Council up in Orleans, along with the Karuk tribe with the Forest Service have probably the most advanced collaborative forest health program anywhere in the United States.
And they learned a long time ago that if the Forest Service learned that if you don't engage the community and you put forward these horrible timber harvest plans, especially after a fire, they want to come in and just clear strip the whole place, right, with no consideration for anything like the Klamath National Forest does, frankly a happy camping up in that area. And so when they do that, when they put forward horrible plans, they ultimately were getting sued and losing. So everybody was wasting their time and their money, you know, and then the project never went forward. Whereas the Six Rivers National Forest realized that they sat down with the Karuk tribe, with Mid Klamath Watershed Council and others, they could actually come up with a plan to do really important work that everybody would agree to. And they started doing that 10, 15 years ago and they were never getting sued. So great example of that. And at the county we have a fire safe council that has fire safe councils from all over the county, like the Mattol, Southern Humboldt, Willow Creek, prescribed burn associations now that do, you know, bring good fire back on the landscape.
So Humboldt county is very advanced in doing really good work. And so the Forest Service has adapted to that. But now you got this current administration with AI and Musk trying to figure out where the problems are in the government and then just get rid of them, fire them all, you know, these ones that are trying to save the forest or something, you know, and do good work. And if they got DEI in their name anywhere in their mission or anything, oh boy, chopping block, right? Bam.
So I'm glad to live in Humboldt county and frankly it's really neat to see this work is kind of taking a full circle back to what's called traditional ecological knowledge.
That is what the tribes been doing for thousands of years. Tribes didn't have bulldozers, chainsaws, they had fire. And they would use it to landscape and to replenish their plants that were important for basketry or food or other things. And they had their prime villages by the river, which fires almost never burned to the river.
They burn uphill. And so the uphill camps were summer camps, hunting and gathering camps and things like that. Pretty smart. I mean, and so it's neat to see, at least in this area or region and to some degree up and down the state because of what happened here, there's task force who are adopting these practices, who talk about them. More and more people are trying them out. So I think we're lucky to have that here. Does that mean the Trump administration is going to honor all that? No.
But are we going to stop doing what we do? No, we're going to keep doing it and keep trying to do good works, you know, and stuff. And so Humboldt's quite a leader on many, many levels tribally.
Well, as I think with a lot of our forestry and watershed work, salmon work and things like that, pretty amazing stuff.
And we only have like a 50 year history of doing this really as white guys. But we've come a long way from where we were at not that long ago with clear cutting, herbicide spraying and all kinds of horrible stuff that was going on in timber company lands, which some of it's still happening, but it's nowhere near like what was happening in the 70s, the 80s, when people, you know, their deer were having all these tumors because they were spraying 2, 4, 5T and 2, 4D, these Agent Orange components from Vietnam on the forest.
And bia, who kind of ran the forestry programs here in Hoopa, was very big on all that stuff. You were around to see all that era. Finally the tribe booted them out and took over, created their own forestry program and stuff. That was not easy. That was a big challenge. 25 years. How much? 25, 25 years. Yeah, yeah. But it's changed, hasn't it? Yeah, yeah, for the better.
[00:10:36] Speaker A: Why has the county seemed slow to act on the missing and murdered indigenous people crisis?
[00:10:43] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good one.
I am on the phone with Sheriff Hansel a lot on that particular issue.
It has always amazed me how some white kid will go missing on the coast in Trinidad and they will pull out hundreds and hundreds of people. Two little girls went missing in southern Humboldt. Hundreds and hundreds of people pulled out immediately to find these white people. You know, whereas like Emily Riesling and others never got that attention. And sheriff Ansell will often put his reasons for not responding quickly and completely to Public Law 280.
It's a really complicated law. It's something worth investigating and learning about if you live here on the rez. Because the county uses that a lot as why it doesn't do things, mostly the sheriff.
There are times that the sheriff can absolutely get engaged in the reservation and I think it's when there's criminal activity versus civil. But I've never really quite fully understood the whole thing. All I know is it gets thrown in my face every time I say, why aren't we doing more?
I think the issue was conveniently hidden and the media never really wanted to grab onto it.
I mean, we're only 70 years past when the last boarding schools closed. Right. So for your parents, your grandparents, that's very real.
That's not like some ancient history.
And I would just say it's just. It's horrible that it's that way. And I don't know quite how to fix it.
I do think what the tribes are doing to raise the recognition around all this is really great.
The county pat we can pass resolutions supporting it. We did just a couple weeks ago.
We had some nice presentations. But still, that's a drop in the bucket for what has to happen.
And then I hear really, really weird stories about the last person that was with Emily happened to be a county deputy sheriff and dropped her off. And after quite a bout that she had over at the cemetery and other things that went on.
And I don't know what to believe, but I don't believe what I hear from the police most of the time. And I think that's kind of a bad situation to be in where you can't trust your own law enforcement. Right.
[00:13:02] Speaker D: All right, the last question, and I think that was a good segue.
[00:13:06] Speaker C: All right. So a New York Times report shows police killings have actually increased since George Floyd's murder and native people are killed at a much higher rate. Should the Humboldt county sheriff office implement a more proactive training to address this? And what does restorative justice mean to you and how is that appropriate reflected in county law enforcement?
[00:13:29] Speaker B: Yes, I think that there's a lot more that needs to be done. And I don't. I believe that those stats that you just shared, you know that it's a lot higher for missing and murdered, and yet the attention is still barely growing.
I don't think it's okay to kill anybody for any reason, frankly. I mean, I don't like guns because all they can do is pretty much kill people. They can kill animals, but that's rarely the case.
Some tools are used for hunting and survival and food, but mostly they're used to harm and kill people. You know, it's just in this country, this state, it's so out of control. You look at the stats with the rest of the world, it's like, you know, nobody's even close to us in terms of all the horrible stuff that happens with guns and weapons all the time.
So, yeah, we do have to do a whole lot better.
One of the results since Floyd and other things is that more and more people don't want to get into law enforcement. It's kind of like the Vietnam vets when they came home from the war and they were treated like scum, you know, whatever. And it was a bad war. We've had a lot of really bad wars.
Not that any war is a good thing, frankly, but it's kind of like that. You know, law enforcement are, by many people, considered scum until they need them.
Guess who's the first person to call when they need them because somebody broke into their house or is threatening their family? They're going to call law enforcement.
But we could do a lot better. You know, the amount of training that's required is pretty minimal, although it's significant.
And if a police officer really screws up, it's really hard to let them go because of the unions and the coat of blue and all these things that make it almost impossible to let go a police officer unless you can prove that they were outright lying or doing certain types of things. And frankly, we get sued all the time. Millions of dollars go out in lawsuits because of our escalation techniques.
[00:15:29] Speaker A: Before we wrap up, is there anything that we did not ask you that you want to share with us or the community?
[00:15:37] Speaker B: I will say that I have thoroughly enjoyed representing the fifth district.
It's been a real honor.
I feel like I've been able to get a lot done by working with people, tribal people. I mean, the fifth district has eight out of nine of the tribes in the fifth district.
So tribes are huge in this area in particular.
I'm not running again for office. I have about one year, seven months, two days and 10 hours left, but who's counting, right?
And so it's going to be hard to let go. But I'M going to be 74, and I feel like I spent 50 years doing work for the community, and I'm proud of that work. Very engaged with the tribe wherever we can, and we're welcome.
I was even invited to a couple of dances, which was a real honor just to be there and watch that process.
And often when I'm sitting with the Tribal Council and they're having trouble with coming to agreement, I will say, you know, wouldn't it be neat, not just in tribal culture, but in white culture, whatever, if we took our practices from the dances or from Sunday mass or whatever and we actually carried that forward every day in our lives? You know, not that we're going to succeed. Right. Because we all have our issues. But if we really went forward every week with that intent of wanting to carry those prayers and lessons that we learn at dances and other cultures, whatever their belief system is. So that'll be my closing.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: Great. Thank you so much for your time today and for speaking with the Hupai media team.
[00:17:15] Speaker B: You're welcome. And you well represented. Good job.
[00:17:17] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:17:18] Speaker D: Bravo.
