This Northern California Tribe Is Reclaiming Mendocino Forest for Future Generations

On a sunny November day last year, a crowd of Mendocino County locals began to gather in a clearing amid a thick forest of redwood, tanoak, fir and pine trees, just south of Fort Bragg.

For many, it was their very first time stepping onto this property.

This land had recently passed into the stewardship of the Potter Valley Tribe, a band of the Pomo Indians, becoming the first “community forest” owned by a tribe in the entire state.

“It’s setting the foundation for generations to come — the next generation, for the youth to be able to learn more about the land, the native plants, creeks, the rivers, the seasons,” said Salvador Rosales, the Potter Valley Tribe’s chairman.

And today, the assembled group — made up of adults, children and members of neighboring tribes and allies — was here to hunt for mushrooms.

A bountiful forest

As dedicated foragers know, safety when foraging for mushrooms is a serious business. Before Corine Pearce, a member of the nearby Redwood Valley Tribe, kicked off the event with a blessing and song, organizers reminded attendees not to eat anything they might gather before they’d brought it back to consult with the experts.

(In December 2025, after this story was reported, the California Department of Public Health issued advice to state residents to avoid eating foraged wild mushrooms during what they called a “high-risk season” — after a number of deaths and severe illnesses caused by people mistakenly ingesting toxic “death cap” mushrooms. On April 1, the agency confirmed that their alert is still in effect.)

Pearce, who works with kids from all over Mendocino as a native studies education coordinator, said that after a lifetime of avoiding foraging mushrooms for fear of illness, she realized the time had come after she moved to an area whose traditional name means “mushroom mountain.”

“I was like, ‘Okay, well if they’re literally growing outside in my backyard, I should probably learn them and not ignore them anymore,’” she said.

Pearce is also a community basket weaver, and it’s her baskets that were handed out to participants as they set off.

The group dispersed out of the clearing and into the dense, cool forest. Nate Rich, the Potter Valley Tribe’s environmental program manager, invited a few interested foragers on a crash course on mushroom hunting.

For him, Rich told the group, the best moments on the hunt are the serendipitous ones, like finding a cluster of highly prized golden chanterelles.

But his approach is also a meditative one. For the most success, Rich said he tries to dispel any notion of going in for “the kill” when it comes to spotting mushrooms — and instead, he’ll “lay on the ground for like 10 minutes and not do anything and calm down.”

“And then usually, I’ll turn my head, and it’ll be right there,” he said.

Rich told his mushroom-hunters-in-training how he likes to look up through the forest canopy for spots where the sun might warm up the ground, allowing certain light-seeking fungi to grow And how he’ll look down to see where water flows, fueling the mushrooms’ growth — or watch out for where “duff,” that thick, decaying vegetation that layers the forest floor, has built up on the ground.

“When my feet start to squish, I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m in an area where there might be some mushrooms,’” he said.

With so much potential for wandering, Potter Valley chairman Rosales said, always make sure someone knows their rough whereabouts while foraging, in case they get lost. And “don’t be afraid to touch mushrooms,” he said. “As long as you don’t ingest them.”

Recovering the tribe’s land

The Potter Valley Tribe is the first tribe in California to be awarded this grant to create a community forest by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But for Rosales, the road here — to actually owning this 48-acre property that the mushroom hunters are exploring — has been a long one.

This land has been home to Pomo people for thousands of years. When colonizers started arriving in the early 1800s, they began to chip away at it, killing, removing and enslaving the Pomo people — decimating their population numbers and relegating them to reservations to make way for European homesteads.

In 1958, Congress passed a series of laws and practices ending the federal government’s recognition of tribal sovereignty and lands. The move dismantled Pomo reservations, like the Potter Valley Rancheria, revoked their federal status and left these tribes landless.

That was, until the 1980s, when Tillie Hardwick, a Pomo Indian woman, sued the federal government in a class action lawsuit and won, immediately restoring 17 California tribes’ federal status and creating precedent for more in the future.

The Potter Valley Tribe — and many others included in the suit — would nonetheless remain mostly landless until the early 2000s. But when Rosales became chairman in 2003, he said he saw it as his mission to slowly but surely buy back the tribe’s ancestral lands.

The quest began with a federal grant to buy a 4-acre parcel in Redwood Valley for housing for tribe members. And since then, via grants, land donations and money earned from the gaming industry, the tribe has purchased a checkerboard totaling more than 1,000 acres — the majority of it undeveloped forest — across Mendocino County.

“It’s unbelievable,” Rosales said, of the tribe’s progress in reacquiring their land. When family and friends ask him about the tribal council’s continual investments in land, he said he tells them that there’s “never been an opportunity like this” in previous years.

Rosales and the tribe worked with the nonprofit Trust for Public Land, which has now helped establish 45 community forests nationwide, protecting 43,000 acres through this grant alone.

The trust’s North Coast Project Manager Jeff Conti said the agency’s primary role is to help tribes navigate the sometimes long and convoluted processes to get land back in the hands of those working to conserve it.

“However we can plug in, whether it’s providing technical assistance, whether it’s helping fundraise, or just doing the whole transaction, we can help,” he said.

Even after the tribe won the grant, it took six years before they found themselves in the right place and time with this particular property — and for this forest to be returned to its ancestral caretakers.

“In the end,” Rosales said, “it paid off to be patient.”

Keeping history and tradition alive

Being effectively landless has affected the Pomo people in deep, lasting ways, Rosales said.

Most of his ancestors were farm ranch hands, chasing seasonal work throughout the Potter and Ukiah valleys to make ends meet, he said. But as there’s been very little written or shared from elders, Rosales doesn’t know a lot beyond that — as he said, it became especially apparent when he was invited to speak to students in Potter Valley about the tribe’s history.

And without land to gather on, they have even fewer traditions to uphold.

“Ceremony — any kind of gatherings, we don’t really have a history of that simply because of the past history of settlers and indigenous people,” he said.

As part of the community forest grant, the tribe is developing a land management and public access plan, which tribal leaders said will focus on environmental education, from foraging to reintroducing traditional ecological practices like forest thinning, to promote the resilience of the forest.

Rich, the tribe’s environmental program manager, said he’s excited to have a space where practicing — and sharing — these traditions is the focus.

“I think we’re at the beginning,” he said. “Now the tribe has a resource to work with the community on.

“We need these spaces together,” he said.

For her part, Pearce said she plans to help teach foraging here during the tribe’s annual environmental youth campout and other events — and she can already see how they could harvest wild onions growing here and use elder trees to make musical instruments.

This is work that can only be done when the tribe owns the land to do it on, she said.

“There are laws in place that stop indigenous people from caretaking on their own tribal land,” she said. “So the only answer is private land because private landowners have more rights than indigenous people.”

But with so many tribes in the area still without land, not everyone has the same opportunity to learn what has been lost.

“In California, only half the tribes were reinstated after the Tillie Hardwick case,” she said. “So there are tribes that aren’t even recognized that have no access to anything.”

Pearce teaches her students that food sovereignty is important to everyone, not just native people on native lands.

“When someone has control of your food, and you can’t feed yourself, that is their power,” she said. “That’s their power move, to take your food away, and you have to do what they say.”

“But if you can feed yourself for free where you live, then that’s food sovereignty,” Pearce said.

The next generation

Pearce said she’s particularly encouraged by the willingness of her Gen Z students and community members to “look at hard things and call them by the right name.”

“And all we can do is give them the education and support to do that, and that’s what we’re doing,” she said.

High school student Elizabeth Dodge, from Willits, attended the mushroom hunting event thanks to an invite from Pearce herself — to whom Dodge reached out for help identifying mushrooms she’d spotted in her family’s backyard.

While Dodge isn’t a big fan of eating mushrooms, she’s really into identifying birds — a skill she learned from her grandmother. She said she now planned to make a presentation to her class on everything she found.

“I’ve seen at least 17 kinds or something like that, so I’m really excited,” Dodge said.

Back at the entrance to the property, a table was blanketed in mushrooms of every size, shape and color, gathered by the day’s participants in Pearce’s handwoven baskets. People milled about, munching on freshly caught and cooked salmon.

Meanwhile, a massive pan of foraged mushrooms — identified by the expert foragers present as safe to eat — sizzled next to a vat of alfredo sauce, as fettuccine vigorously boiled on the stovetop.

For Chairman Rosales, a noted expert on fungi, this event was ultimately a true family affair. That morning, Rosales’ son Boo had made donuts with glaze from candy cap mushrooms while his daughter Mariah was manning the stove.

“We’re just gonna season them a little bit,” Mariah said. “You don’t really have to because mushrooms have their own seasoning, but just to be a little extra.”

Once the mushrooms were cooked, Mariah took command of the final steps of the process: pouring the sauce carefully onto the noodles, layering the delicate mushrooms on top and finishing with a sprinkling of herbs and plenty of parmesan cheese.

With the tantalizing smell of the mushrooms filling the air, a line started to form, as everyone wanted a plate, and Mariah proudly served them.

“Let the elders get their plate first,” she said.

For Chairman Rosales, who stood watching the group with a beaming smile, this event was exactly the type of new story — a new piece of history — he can now tell, when younger people ask about his tribe.

“That sense of freedom,” he said, “is a powerful, positive energy for us.”