In 2019, the California public utility Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) announced that once its Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant closed, they would sell the land it sits on—12,000 acres of Central Coast hills rolling with chaparral and oak called the Pecho Coast. That same year, the California Public Utilities Commission adopted a Tribal Lands Transfer Policy mandating that public utilities disposing of lands give tribes the first right of offer to negotiate a land agreement prior to a public sale. When PG&E offered the lands (at market value) to the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribe, or ytt Tribe, they jumped to acquire the lands—or re-acquire them, since they were part of their ancestral homeland. By March 2021, the tribe, along with key partners, had a memorandum of understanding to acquire the entire site.

For the first time since the 1700s, ytt Tribe could reclaim rightful ownership and stewardship of their Pecho Coast homelands. This is one of multiple instances around the United States in which tribes have recognized that large landholdings associated with nuclear power plants, unusually unfragmented and ecologically intact sites, make them strong candidates for restored tribal stewardship. But now, a confluence of murky state policies and settler-colonial values centered around the idea of conservation is complicating the transfer process.

Chumash peoples have lived in what is now California, between Malibu and Ragged Point, since time immemorial. Though often confused for a single tribe, they are not a monolith: There are eight distinct yet related Chumash communities, each with their own material cultures, language dialects, and place-based relationships. ytt Tribe have remained active stewards of their homelands in San Luis Obispo County since the 1700s, even as they endured Spanish missionization, Mexican occupation, and United States settler colonialism—a type of colonial occupation that relies on the theft of Indigenous lands and the belief that Native peoples need to be eliminated and replaced. Their stories and genealogy, relationships, and language, called tiłhini, all bear their continued kinship ties and obligations to these lands.

Built in 1968 in a region dominated by the oil industry, Diablo Canyon generated tense environmental and political debates, leading to protests from organizations such as the Sierra Club, Mothers for Peace, and the Abalone Alliance. For many, nuclear energy posed danger to coastal ecologies and raised alarms about developing power plants on geologic fault lines. For ytt Tribe, nuclear power was just a new wave of the energy colonialism that has and continues to privatize and destroy Indigenous lands.

Over time, however, the nuclear power sites came to be seen as uniquely protected areas. Unlike dams that destructively terraform riverine ecosystems, or oil infrastructure that degrades lands and oceans with leaks and spills, nuclear plants require swaths of undeveloped and therefore somewhat conserved lands around them, creating unlikely possibilities for ytt Tribe to imagine cultivating relationships with these lands for generations to come.

Indigenous leaders see stewarding nuclear sites as their responsibility, even when faced with the realities of nuclear contamination. For example, at the Hanford Site—a decommissioned nuclear production complex in eastern Washington state that is also a Superfund site—the Wanapum tribe, a federally unrecognized tribe like ytt Tribe, maintains that although the site is heavily contaminated, the land remains their kin. Wanapum tribal leader Rex Buck Jr. claims the nuclear realities of Hanford as an unlikely “blessing in disguise,” and has been quoted describing it as a sacred place that invited the nuclear project in order to protect the land from the further invasion and development of the settlers. He adds that Hanford “will heal itself, and the Wanapum will be part of this healing process as caretakers of the land.”

For Indigenous leaders such as Buck, stewarding nuclear sites into the future is an expression of their land-based sovereignty. ytt Tribe shares this kind of vision for the future of the Pecho Coast.

But lately, things have been getting complicated, as the governor’s 30×30 initiative has created complications with the California Public Utilities Commission’s Tribal Land Transfer Policy and endangered ytt Tribe’s reclamation of their homelands. In April 2022, Governor Gavin Newsom proposed to extend Diablo Canyon’s life in order to meet California’s clean energy goals. After the announcement, PG&E put land proposal discussions with ytt Tribe on hold. Five months later, the California State legislature passed Senate Bill 846, permitting Diablo Canyon to operate for an additional five years.

SB 846 included state funds for a Land Conservation and Economic Development Plan for after the plant closed, to be overseen by the California Natural Resources Agency (CNRA). This plan was designed to support “environmental enhancements and access of Diablo Canyon powerplant lands” precisely because of their “pristine” state.

The bill conflicted with the California Public Utility Commission’s policy of giving tribes first right of offer and added new bureaucratic layers to the site’s future. By moving the question of what happens to Diablo Canyon out of the utility commission’s jurisdiction and into the state legislature’s, the bill allowed the legislature to bypass the tribe’s priority access to those lands, creating a loophole to redirect the land back into settler state hands. Instead of Indigenous sovereignty, a rubric of “conservation” and “economic development” (contemporary synonyms of settler colonialism) were now the guiding ideas.

While the tribe experienced this shift in planning as a challenge, they pivoted to operate within the bill’s new rubric. In collaboration with the Land Conservancy of San Luis Obispo, California State Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, and the local economic development group Regional Economic Action Coalition, the tribe created a conservation and economic development plan that aligned with SB 846’s requirements. Members of the CNRA visited San Luis Obispo in March 2023 to hear a presentation of the plan and to hold a public listening session. During this public comment period, returning land to ytt stewardship emerged as the public’s number one priority for the site.

But when the California legislature approved its budget in June 2023, it accepted a plan for SB 846 that did not specify ytt tribal partnership. Though it earmarked funds for collaboration with tribes to develop a conservation plan, it only gestured to a general partnership with “California Native American tribe or tribes.”

Why the sudden erasure of ytt Tribe?

Some community members and tribal representatives have suggested that the state is backpedaling out of caution about naming the “right” tribal partner. Though at the time of PG&E’s initial land offering only ytt Tribe stepped forward to purchase Diablo Canyon, since then numerous other tribes have made claims to the site.

To determine tribal land claims, the state relies on the California Native American Heritage Commission’s “Most Likely Descendants” list, which uses genealogy and documents to provide hypotheses regarding tribes’ ancestral lands. Though numerous tribes could make claims to the Pecho Coast based on some requirements of the list, ytt Tribe are the only tribe that can document a presence in the region prior to Spanish colonization—a claim that has been investigated and affirmed through genealogy records both by scholars and by PG&E.

Omitting ytt Tribe from this iteration of Diablo Canyon’s future illustrates what academics mean when we talk about settler colonialism as an ongoing structure rather than a one-time event: Native Californians didn’t have their land stolen just once; decision after decision in settler society undermines Indigenous sovereignty.

On the Pecho Coast, California has an opportunity not only to advance its state sustainability initiatives, but to finally honor its commitment to repairing relations with California tribes. As plans for Diablo Canyon unfold, many of us are watching with hope and anticipation to see if California can give meaning to “land back.”