Hillary Renick hikes down scree and rocks worn smooth by waves to reach the sandy beach below. The morning fog has receded, but the sky is still gray along the Mendocino County coastline as Renick scrambles up, down, and around Pomo village and nearby sites, where her people harvest traditional foods and collect materials for regalia, such as shells. “The rocky inlets are where the abalone hang out,” says Renick. Renick, a citizen of the Sherwood Valley Band of Pomo Indians, and her group of self-described “guerilla gatherers,” are scouting Glass Beach in Fort Bragg for abalone, seaweed and shells they use for food, regalia and ceremonies. “We like to say we’re badass Indian women gathering under cover of darkness, crawling under fences, over rocks, around no trespassing signs, and through the mud to provide for funerals, feasts and celebrations,” Renick says—although men are also part of the group.1. Hillary Renick searches for harvestable seaweed, known in Pomo dialect as “tono,” on a beach in Mendocino County, California. 2. Hillary Renick (blue jacket) and other Indigenous gatherers skirt the fencing around a restricted area of the Noyo Headlands in Fort Bragg, California. For millennia, tribes have sustainably harvested mollusks, surf fish, seaweed and shells in areas from which they are now barred. Renick and her friends and family routinely defy California laws and natural-resource management regulations they say obstruct their right to maintain these traditional practices. The stakes are high: Indigenous peoples risk jail time, tens of thousands of dollars in fines and the lifetime loss of state hunting and fishing privileges for doing what they’ve always done in this area. But they say the possibility of losing this connection to the land outweighs the legal risks. In June 2019, California governor Gavin Newsom issued an apology to the more than 155 Indigenous tribes in the state for decades of genocide, oppression, neglect—wrongs that included suppression of traditional subsistence rights. But the state still regulates fishing, hunting and gathering. Decade after decade, tribes in California have had to find ways to maintain their traditional ways of life in a state that has made this challenging—or even illegal. For millennia, Pomo, Coast Yuki, Sinkyone, Yurok and other Northern California tribes have sustainably harvested mollusks, surf fish, seaweed, shells and medicines in the summer, as well as acorns and other inland foods, Renick says. She explains that each summer, after her Pomo band gathered their first harvest, neighboring tribes, and even tribes as far away as Pit River—on the east side of the Sacramento Valley—were invited to harvest. “When they were done, we sent runners [to] Pit River and invited them to gather,” says Renick. In 1851, after California became a state, Governor Peter Burnett declared in an address to the state legislature “That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected.” According to historian Benjamin Madley, from 1846 and 1873 between 9,492 and 16,094 Indigenous people in California were killed, many in massacres conducted by state and local militias. Thousands more starved or were worked to death by forced labor, and historians estimate that around 80% of California Indians died between statehood and 1880. In addition,18 treaties that the U.S. negotiated with California tribes were never ratified by Congress, which has made the tribes’ contemporary situation more challenging. “The fact that they don’t have those treaties has had a long-term effect on California tribes,” says Brendan Lindsay, author of the book Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846-1873 and an assistant professor at California State University, Sacramento. “The lack of treaties makes advocating for land, subsistence and other rights much harder.” Tribal nations that have federal treaties or legal protections tend to have stronger legal footing for defending subsistence hunting and gathering. For example, in the 1990s Ahtna elder Katie John won subsistence fishery rights for Alaska Natives in federal court. And in June 2018, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court ruling in favor of tribal fishing rights, due to 19th century treaties negotiated with the federal government. But California tribes have no such recourse. Nearly 100 years after California’s statehood, the U.S. enacted Public Law 280, giving several states, including California, the authority to police tribal lands. The 1958 California Rancheria Termination Act ended federal recognition of—and annulled rights for—41 tribes, and other tribes were terminated in related legislation. Roughly 30 tribes have had federal recognition restored, often through litigation. For Hillary Renick’s family, grim relations with settlers have been a constant theme. In 1856, the 25,000-acre Mendocino Indian Reservation was established in what is now Fort Bragg and the surrounding area. In 1868, the land was taken from Renick’s family and sold by the federal government to what Renick says were primarily soldiers and loggers. “My family managed to hold on to a bit of the Noyo Headlands, even though Fort Bragg and the lumber company kept trying to push us out,” says Renick.