Century-old photographs, handwritten letters, baptism records, and other primary documents confirmed what Michael Erin Woody and the rest of the Salinan Tribe of Monterey and San Luis Obispo Counties already knew.
“This is a continuous group of Indians that have been here since before European contact, and we’re still here,” the tribal council member said.
Without formal recognition from the United States government, though, the tribe struggles to make this known to the broader community, Woody said. Native Americans are invisible unless they are part of a federally recognized tribe, he emphasized.
“It’s a dignity issue,” Woody explained. “When you don’t have that federal recognition, the federal government doesn’t have a lot to offer you in terms of assistance when it comes to education, health care, housing, or anything else. We’re basically just out there continuing to hold on by a shoestring and deteriorate, and it does make things pretty difficult for all of us.”
Despite this, the tribe hangs onto the histories and lived experiences of its ancestors. Woody recalled sitting with his grandfather before he passed, listening to stories about the tribe’s life in the early 1900s, some of which included navigating disputes over land rights that eventually led to the loss of tribal land.
Hearing these accounts as an adult reminded Woody that the history of what happened to tribes, especially those in California, is still fresh.
There are more than 570 federally acknowledged tribes in the United States, according to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), and more than 100 of those come from the state of California. This acknowledgment recognizes a tribe’s right of self-governance, or tribal sovereignty, and affords it certain federal benefits and protections.
The Salinan Tribe of Monterey and San Luis Obispo Counties remains one of the approximately 60 unrecognized tribes in California, but in September 2024, the local tribe submitted a petition for federal acknowledgment to the BIA. Recently, its petition moved into the first phase of technical assistance, meaning that people from the Office of Federal Acknowledgment (OFA) are reviewing parts of it to see if changes or additions need to happen.
Created in 1978 by the United States Department of the Interior (DOI) and revised in 1994 and 2015, the federal acknowledgment process requires tribes to meet seven mandatory criteria to be federally recognized. These criteria, according to an email from the Office of Public Affairs for Indian Affairs, are: Indian entity identification, community, political influence or authority, governing document, descent,unique membership, and congressional termination.
Being approved for federal recognition would help the Salinan Tribe of Monterey and San Luis Obispo Counties preserve its culture for future generations and reaffirm to outsiders that tribal members are who they say they are, Woody said.
“It won’t change how we see ourselves, but it will give us the ability to help people understand our history, who we are as a family, who we are to this area, who we are as a group,” he said.
Historic pursuit
Records for Salinan Tribal Law Lead Kenneth Pierce’s grandmother stated that she was born in Livermore, but that didn’t add up with everything else he knew about her.
For three months, Pierce searched for clues about his grandmother’s birthplace. He called records offices in Livermore, Sacramento, and Monterey, but none had documents for Katherine McCormack.
From his knowledge, she grew up in Pleyto near Lake San Antonio, and according to a letter they had found many years ago, she went to school at the San Juan Bautista Mission. With the help of his wife, Pierce reached out to the mission. Weeks later, they received word that a journal had been found in the mission’s museum that contained what they had been searching for.
“It had a page where it showed where my grandmother and her sister were enrolled and enlisted, … and both of the girls were born in Pleyto,” Pierce recalled. “It said right on the thing, so that was a big find for us.”
This breakthrough came after Pierce and Woody took over the tribe’s petition for federal acknowledgement. Together, it took them two and a half years to complete all of the requirements.
The tribe’s initial attempt at the petition in 2018, before Woody and Pierce took it over, wasn’t accepted for consideration because it didn’t meet “any of the requirements.” The pair agreed to tackle the process one step at time, but first they had to understand what exactly the federal government was looking for from each requirement.
“Ken and I got on the phone with the DOI, who have been painfully helpful every step of the way, and then started doing our own reading and research on federal regulations and how this works, reading through applications that have worked and applications that have failed, specifically out of California,” Woody said.
Pierce and Woody both said that the tribe originally misunderstood what was being asked of it for many of the requirements. After working with the OFA directly and asking questions, the pair felt confident enough to move forward with the petition.
The process of federal acknowledgement can be summed up in one word, “continuity,” Woody said.
“What the government is actually asking for is to identify a tribal group of Indians that were in existence before 1900,” he said, “and then identify how that very specific group of Indians has stayed together as a tribal group throughout the 20th century and through today.”
Demonstrating this continuity includes putting together a genealogy report for every active member of the tribe. With 248 active members, Woody and Pierce felt fortunate enough to have already had much of this information gathered from the tribe’s earlier attempt at a petition.
They looked over the previously gathered files to verify the information and noticed that some records needed to be looked into further, including that of Pierce’s grandmother.
Documenting genealogy became particularly hard when records came from before 1900.
“Those can be difficult to obtain,” Woody explained. “And then, you get back to before 1834 for the missions and now all of the records are in Spanish so they needed to be translated.”
As they gathered evidence, Woody’s late-night reading became collections of documents and history books detailing the stories of California tribes. For him, this meant learning more about his ancestors and what they went through.
“I’m not reading history,” he said. “I’m reading about my family, so it becomes a little more relatable. It really is a fascinating story what happened here in California, a story that’s not told all the time.”
The state’s unique tribal history, according to Woody, includes the displacement and secularization of Native Americans as a result of the founding of 21 Spanish missions across California. Being from a tribe of “Mission Indians” influenced the way in which Woody and Pierce compiled evidence, as it required them to work with local dioceses and missions to gather information like baptism records.
Woody also highlighted the 18 unratified treaties of 1851 to 1852, which were negotiated and signed so that about one third of Native Americans could live in peace on their reservations in the state. However, political pressure meant that the treaties were never ratified, leaving California natives impoverished without land or protection.
Sifting through this history was daunting at times, but both Woody and Pierce said they enjoyed discovering more about the history of their tribe and families.
“Some of the stuff I didn’t even know,” Pierce said. “I knew I was Native American, but I was young, and they never discussed who was the Native American, where we got our lineage from.”
In the past, Native Americans sometimes felt the need to hide their true identities as a result of the historical violence against them, Pierce said. Though his grandmother taught him how to make arrowheads, which he definitely thought was “cool” at a young age, he now wishes she had taught him more or that he had asked more questions about their culture.
“Had I known that she could speak the language real fluently, I would have learned it,” he said.
Sovereign stake
The Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians has been federally recognized since 1901, and according to Tribal Chairman Kenneth Kahn, the tribe essentially has a direct relationship with the federal government that allows it to take care of its culture and its people.
“I think the primary element of a federally recognized tribe is the inherent authority that Native American tribes have to govern themselves within the United States,” he said.
As the only federally recognized Chumash tribe in the state, the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash exercises its right to tribal sovereignty on its land by upholding a constitution and maintaining a government made up of elected officials. In doing so, the tribes created government-to-government relationships with both federal entities and local municipalities like Santa Barbara County.
Having sovereignty enabled the tribe to protect its community and persist, Khan said. It’s more than just the right to form a government, he said. It’s also a platform that enables the tribe to continue to build upon itself for generations to come.
For instance, the tribe recently opened the Santa Ynez Chumash Museum and Cultural Center on reservation land that was placed into trust with the federal government in 2014. The cultural center allows the tribe to tell its story—a story that isn’t taught in schools—”so visitors will come away with a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities Chumash ancestors faced living in the Santa Ynez Valley for more than 8,000 years,” Kahn said in 2021.
Despite retaining tribal sovereignty, Kahn told New Times that tribal relationships with the federal government have been rocky since “time immemorial,” adding that with changes in presidential administrations, the tribe’s always looking for opportunities to collaborate.
“Our tribe is dependent on economic development ventures to be able to fund our government,” he explained. “Business is an important component, but equally important for us is protection of the environment, protection of our culture, of our traditional ways, etc., and so we’re always trying to find the balance of how we can work with different administrations.”
A recent example of the tribe exercising its sovereignty, Kahn explained, was the establishment of the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary. The tribe helped make this designation possible by being part of an intergovernmental policy group with the federal government, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), state government, and the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians.
“Tribes are great partners in their communities,” Kahn said. “When we can work from a government-to-government perspective, we can move mountains. We can partner and not only improve the opportunities for the tribal reservation footprints, but also the communities that surround the reservation.”
There are several changes happening with the federal government under the Trump administration, he said, which means it’s especially important for them to ensure that they have tribal representation at some level.
“With this much change, we’re certainly having a challenge keeping up,” Kahn said. “But tribes are bipartisan, so we have a lot of voices on both sides of the aisle, and even with the current administration, we have some partnerships that we’re really focused on to try and make sure that tribes have a voice in D.C.”
The waiting game
The Salinan Tribe’s petition could take two months, two years, or longer to go through the OFA’s process, Woody said.
“This is just a function of staff time,” he said. “There is no timeframe requirement at this point; it literally becomes an issue of when their staff has the time to do this, because they’re so overburdened, overworked back there right now.”
Though Woody and Pierce don’t know when they will find out whether the Salinan Tribe of San Luis Obispo and Monterey Counties has been approved for federal acknowledgement, they’re optimistic, given how much time and effort they put into the petition. Pierce is especially confident about the tribe’s improved petition because they worked so closely with the OFA to gain a deeper understanding of the requirements.
“If we do not get federally recognized—let’s say they come back and say, ‘Well, we just can’t do it,’ I don’t see how any tribe in California can get federally recognized,” Pierce said. “We got everything exactly right, exactly.”
Woody, on the other hand, said he has realistic optimism, given the history of the federal acknowledgement process. Since its inception, nearly 50 years ago, 18 petitions have been approved and 34 denied.
Woody, who recently announced his candidacy for the 2nd District SLO County Board of Supervisors seat, called attention to changes happening at the federal level, mentioning in particular the recent creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). With this new development, sizable cuts have been made to several federal agencies, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Education, and Department of Health and Human Services.
“I mean, you have the OFA, which is already understaffed,” Woody explained. “If you have the federal government that comes in and says, ‘You don’t need all these staff people, and we hate this whole federal acknowledgement process,’ for all I know we’re gonna wake up tomorrow and find out that half their staff got cut. That’s another wild card in all of this at this point.”
According to the BIA website, which shows the status of every petition that’s being processed or has been processed, only one approved petition is for a California tribe. And no tribe has been acknowledged under the new 2015 regulations.
“I call it a moonshot, and we’re realistic about our chances,” Woody said. “But, we feel we have a good presentation to make and a good argument for it, but, like anything, we’ll see what happens on it.”
Before February of this year, tribes that were denied acknowledgement could not submit for re-petition. Now, according to a final ruling from the BIA, “unsuccessful petitioners” can seek reconsideration if they can show that new evidence and/or changes in the regulations address all of the specific criteria they initially failed to meet.
Woody acknowledges that the whole process is extremely complex and time consuming, highlighting that it might be helpful for the DOI to host seminars across the country so that tribes can learn more about the requirements and have the opportunity to ask questions.
“The misunderstanding of the federal process has created the real problem here,” he said. “You’re trying to take a public perception of what an Indian tribe is, and then you’re trying to shove it into a federal acknowledgement process that is completely different than that.
“Therein lies why so many groups are so frustrated with this because they walk into it with a certain perception just to find out when it’s too late that that’s not exactly how this works.” Δ
Reach contributor Emma Montalbano at emontalbano@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Jul 10-20, 2025.
I hope their petition goes through and is accepted. They more than deserve federal recognition.