The Coyote Valley tribe descends from the Shodakai Pomo, one of the many bands of the Pomo people who inhabited the valleys, lakeshores, and coastal areas of what is now Mendocino and Lake Counties for thousands of years before European contact. The Pomo were not a single nation but a constellation of communities linked by language, trade, and kinship, each adapted to the particular landscape they called home. The Shodakai Pomo's home was Coyote Valley, a fertile stretch of land southeast of present-day Redwood Valley. When the federal government established a rancheria there, it seemed like a rare acknowledgment of indigenous land rights. Then the engineers came with their plans for flood control, and the valley floor disappeared under rising water.

The current Coyote Valley Reservation sits along the eastern edge of Redwood Valley, a small community about seven miles north of Ukiah. At 70 acres, it is not large -- you could walk its perimeter in under an hour. The tribe operates the Coyote Valley Shodakai Casino on the reservation, which provides economic self-sufficiency in a region where jobs are scarce and options for tribal enterprise are limited. The casino is modest by industry standards, but for a community of 170 members, it represents something more fundamental than revenue. It represents autonomy -- the ability to fund tribal governance, social services, and cultural programs without depending entirely on federal allocations that have a long history of arriving late, arriving reduced, or not arriving at all.

The Coyote Valley Band is a member of the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council, a consortium of ten federally recognized tribes in Mendocino and Lake Counties that has worked since 1986 to protect lands of cultural importance along California's North Coast. The council operates within the traditional territory of the Sinkyone people, and its mission weaves together environmental preservation and cultural reclamation in ways that Western conservation frameworks are only beginning to understand. In January 2022, the effort bore remarkable fruit when a group of Northern California tribes reclaimed more than 500 acres of old-growth redwood forest -- land that had been logged, sold, and traded for over a century. The California Natural Resources Agency has also discussed co-management of Jackson Demonstration State Forest with the tribe, a 48,000-acre state forest that falls within Coyote Valley's ancestral territory. Co-management would represent something nearly unprecedented: the state formally recognizing that the people who lived on this land for millennia might know something about how to care for it.

Lake Mendocino is a popular recreation spot today. Boaters and fishers enjoy its waters without much thought for what lies beneath. But for the Coyote Valley Pomo, the lake is a reminder of how easily a homeland can be erased by policy -- and how tenaciously a people can refuse to let that erasure be the end of their story. The tribe's formal name used to be the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians of California. They are now simply the Coyote Valley Band, a federally recognized tribe with their own governance, their own enterprises, and their own plans for the future. Other Pomo communities thrive nearby: the Redwood Valley Rancheria, the Round Valley Indian Tribes. Together, they form a network of indigenous presence in Mendocino County that predates every other institution in the region by thousands of years and shows no sign of fading.