 The mission of the Karuk Tribal Council is to promote the general welfare of all Karuk people, to establish equality and justice for our tribe, to restore and preserve Tribal traditions, customs, language and ancestral rights, and to secure to ourselves and our descendants the power to exercise the inherent rights of self governance. http://karuk.us/
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 (From FORESTS, TREES AND PEOPLE Newsletter # 34, 1997)
Natural/cultural processes.
The Karuk tribe inhabits some 1.4 million acres of ancestral homeland in northern California. This forested, steeply mountainous country through which the Klamath and Salmon Rivers flow, has been the home of Karuk people for thousands of years. Over this immense span of time the Karuk people developed land management to a fine science. These traditional management skills have never been fully recognized by Forest Service land managers and pre-contact land management was thought to have been purely a matter of natural processes. The systematic destruction of indigenous peoples without acknowledging the validity of their land management skills has been a world-wide effect of colonialism, extinguishing finely-developed, well-tuned techniques for sustainable management of ecosystems. These systems of management were maintained from the grass roots level and not by a powerful command structure imposing its will on the land. View Article
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