Despite establishing the Central Coast as home long before any settlers, modern-day members of YTT Northern Chumash Tribe don’t have any land to call their own.
But thanks to a California state effort to return ancestral land to natives, the tribe now has a shot at obtaining a 350-acre plot in Cayucos that can provide space for its members and where it can practice environmental stewardship.
Tribal member and Executive Director of YTT Northern Chumash Nonprofit Becca Lucas Thomas said it’s been a long process.
“We have been working for years and years on trying to get land back for our people. We don’t have any land. We kind of understand ourselves to be landless land stewards at this point, which is a really heartbreaking place to be in,” Lucas Thomas said.
The YTT Northern Chumash Tribe is not federally recognized. In the tribe’s case, this means it lacks specific government protections. But being a nonprofit, Lucas Thomas said, allows the tribe to do some important things: Be awarded contracts, to apply for grant funding, and to go into escrow.
So, when the land at 5010 Cabrillo Highway between Cayucos and the small community of Harmony went on the market a few years back, Lucas Thomas said the tribe jumped at the opportunity to buy it.
The plot itself is 357 acres, including about 1 mile of coastline. Locally, it’s known as the Cayucos Abalone Farm, where in the 1950s John Alexander built a 19-acre aquaculture facility out of concrete that allowed the small, and now endangered, invertebrates to thrive and be farmed. It eventually closed in 2020.
“It is one of the largest facilities in the entire United States, and when it’s at peak production, it can provide a significant amount because aquaculture—especially with smaller invertebrates and species like abalone, seaweed, kelp, oysters—it can produce a lot on a very small amount of land,” she said.
And to YTT Northern Chumash, abalone is considered a “relative,” Lucas Thomas said.
“This is one of our staple food sources, it is something that we’ve used in regalia and other cultural items for thousands of years,” she said.
Not only would obtaining this parcel of land allow the tribe members to gather themselves freely, but Lucas Thomas said it’s an opportunity to revitalize the natural land—at the cost of $18.2 million, according to the abalone farm’s real estate listing.
A purchase of this scale is possible thanks to an effort from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office in 2024 that promised to support the return of ancestral tribal lands, allowing tribes to apply for $33 million in grants to be used for ancestral land return, habitat restoration, and climate and wildfire resilience projects.
“These awards are an acknowledgment of past sins, a promise of accountability, and a commitment to a better future—for the land and all its people, especially its original stewards,” Newsom said in the statement.
Similarly, another Native tribe that is not federally recognized in Monterey County bought ancestral land at the Rana Creek Preserve in 2023.
According to The Wildlands Conservancy, the Esselen Tribe purchased the 1,730 acre preserve for $8.6 million—$6.6 million from the Conservancy and $2 million from the state.
Lucas Thomas told New Times the YTT Northern Chumash Nonprofit has a multi-pronged strategy to meet its $18 million goal, which includes using the state ancestral land grant programs, alongside working with the trustees of the old abalone facility.
“We are in escrow, so we are in a purchase agreement with the trustee of the estate, and so they are working with us,” she said. “John Alexander really made it known to not only the longtime caretaker, but the trustees in managing the estate that he wanted this land to go back to the original people. So, they’ve been working with us to try to give us a purchase window so that we can work on raising this $18 million.”
That window is open until October 2026.
Lucas Thomas said the tribe has raised millions but still has more to go, and it’s relying on grant funding available through the state.
Through entities like the California Department of Conservation, the Wildlife Conservation Board, and State Coastal Conservancy, which provide funding for conservation projects, including those specific to tribes, the YTT Northern Chumash Tribe has its fingers crossed it will be awarded dollars as soon as October.
But Lucas Thomas told New Times that the grant process has presented many obstacles.
“They have named the priority of the state to returning particular coastal land to tribes, and despite all of these different well-meaning and well-intentioned state priorities, there is still a big disconnect,” she said. “You know, $18 million for 350 acres for … a pretty undeveloped area. It’s not cheap, and it is really, really hard to pull together the different levers of funding from the different agencies to try to make that happen.
“It’s a jigsaw puzzle with a significant amount of state policy hurdles.”
Janice Mackey, from the communications department for the California Department of Conservation, told New Times via email that YTT Northern Chumash has applied for a $5 million grant through its Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation program that helps fund the purchase of lands to support the cultivation of culturally important foods, medicines, fibers, and dyes, as well as lands used for grazing and conventional agricultural cultivation.
“Since the inception of the program, [Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation] staff have worked to improve its processes for all applicants. We are currently reviewing whether to shift to a rolling pre-proposal process to provide additional flexibility to applicants, including tribes, on the timing of initial project reviews,” Mackey said.
YTT Northern Chumash also applied for funding from the California State Coastal Conservancy.
The conservancy’s communications director, Taylor Samuelson, told New Times via email that tribes submit the same application as any other organization.
“We have made some substantive changes to our grant program in recent years to make it more accessible to applicants,” Samuelson said, “but that was a broad effort to make our funding more equitable, not for tribes specifically.”
Lucas Thomas said she hopes the YTT Northern Chumash’s current endeavor for $18 million is a good test for the state to learn to put the puzzle pieces together.
“It’s a complicated puzzle,” she said. “I think the state does a lot of good, and there’s a lot of good policy and programming. You know, there is the infrastructure there, … it’s just being able to bring all the different pieces together to be able to actually get it across.”
In the end, Lucas Thomas said, this whole process is for people who have had their land stolen from them.
“We have cared for this land for a really long time, and we have to ask for permission not only for land tending and caring practices like cultural burns, but also having access for gathering our people … sharing space with our family members and tribal members,” she said.
“We [could] just decide what we want to do with our own space and not have to ask for permission.” ∆
Reach Staff Writer Libbey Hanson at lhanson@newtimesslo.com.
Clarification, September 18, 2025 9:21 am: This story was updated to reflect how a lack of federal recognition affects YTT Northern Chumash Tribe.
This article appears in Sept 18-28, 2025.
