Should Native Americans climb Morro Rock? SLO County supervisor’s resolution revives debate
A resolution submitted to the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors says that Native Americans should be able to climb Morro Rock for spiritual reasons, reviving a decades-old debate.
Supervisor John Peschong, who represents District 1, proposed the resolution. He then pulled the resolution from the board’s consent agenda during its July 13 meeting and said he will bring the resolution back to a future meeting within 30 days.
If approved in its current form, the resolution would serve as a formal recognition from the Board of Supervisors that the Salinan tribe has a right to ascend Morro Rock “during the summer and winter solstice in order to celebrate their cultural and religious ceremonies.”
California State Parks has jurisdiction over Morro Rock and holds a memorandum of agreement with the Salinan tribe allowing tribal members to climb Morro Rock twice a year for those ceremonies. No one else is permitted to ascend the 576-foot-tall volcanic plug in Morro Bay.
However, the Northern Chumash Tribal Council and yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash tribe don’t want anyone to climb Morro Rock, including Salinan tribal members, for spiritual, safety and environmental reasons.
“I wanted to see if we could get the board to support their rights,” Peschong said of the Salinan tribe. “There’s also a constitutional right to practice your religion in America. And so I wanted to make sure that they knew, the tribe knew, that we supported their efforts.”
Peschong noted that he hoped the resolution could be “bring people together to be able to support the use of the sacred site that’s shared by all these different indigenous folks.”
However, the Northern Chumash Tribal Council and yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash tribe said the resolution completely ignored the cultural and spiritual significance that Morro Rock holds for them.
It also ignored the long-standing debate over the safety and legality of climbing the rock due mainly to the state-protected peregrine falcons that nest on the rock, members of both tribal groups told The Tribune.
Morro Rock is a sacred area for “many tribal communities and individuals,” according to a 2017 determination from the California Native American Heritage Commission. “Therefore, Chumash and Salinan tribal communities and individuals should have continued access to Morro Rock for ceremonial and spiritual observances, but with care and consideration to the natural environment.”
That 2017 determination includes a short report by Wendy Giddens Teeter, a curator of archaeology for the Fowler Museum at UCLA.
When accounting for the environmental concerns associated with climbing Morro Rock, Teeter notes in her report, “it makes sense that people be prevented from climbing the rock for this reason in accordance with federal law as well its great spiritual significance to all these tribes.”
Michael Woody, a member of the Salinan tribe who was instrumental in getting the resolution before supervisors, said getting it passed would be “a nice gesture.”
“Legally, it’s not needed because we’re afforded this right (to ascend Morro Rock) by the state of California,” he said. “We just felt that this would be just another type of recognition. We’re not asking for the county to not recognize anybody else.”
“We’re not here to step on other people’s toes, so to speak, or to say that another group does not exist,” Woody added. “We honestly have just looked at this as just a simple, nice recognition of who we are. That’s it.”
Resolution could overstep Board of Supervisors’ authority
In a letter sent to the county Board of Supervisors before its July 13 meeting, Babak Naficy, an attorney representing the Northern Chumash Tribal Council, said that the county “does not have jurisdiction to grant access to Morro Rock and doing so likely subjects the county to whatever legal liability any unauthorized persons acting under the county’s purported grant of authority may face.”
“Whether intended or not, this resolution creates the appearance that the county is authorizing the Salinan tribe to act in violation of multiple state and federal laws,” Naficy’s letter said.
District 2 Supervisor Bruce Gibson said that the resolution did not properly respect the concerns of all Native Americans in the region.
“There needs to be proper recognition of where the rock sits, whose tribal lands it’s upon and all these other details of context that just weren’t being brought forward in that resolution,” he said. “The resolution reads as a very one-sided thing about the Salinans and it just doesn’t reflect the more complicated realities.”
Gibson noted that the Native American Heritage Commission recognizes that Morro Rock is within the ancestral lands of the Northern Chumash, not the Salinan tribe, although it is sacred to most Native Americans in the region.
The Salinan and Northern Chumash disagree on which tribe historically lived on the lands at Morro Rock.
The Northern Chumash argue that their ancestral lands stretch from Ventura County up to the Ragged Point area.
The Salinan say their ancestral lands, which start in Lucia in Monterey County, reach far enough south to encompass Morro Rock, but that’s contested by the Northern Chumash and the Native American Heritage Commission.
Gibson said this issue seems to be a bit out of the county’s jurisdiction.
“It wasn’t quite clear to me why we, the board of supervisors, were wading into this,” Gibson said.
Gibson’s district, which includes Morro Rock, covers Cambria, Los Osos, Morro Bay and part of San Luis Obispo. Peschong represents areas of Paso Robles, Nacimiento Lake, San Miguel, Shandon and Templeton.
This story was originally published July 13, 2021 at 7:07 AM.
