Initiatives
The NLC collaborates on a range of projects that directly advance our mission to rescue land and support indigenous culture.
Land of the First Light Fellowship
With support from the NorthLight Foundation and NOAA, we host an annual paid summer fellowship program for rising Native American conservationist ages 18-25. With mentors from Mass Audubon, Fellows develop individual projects with topics of their interest that build career skills and advance the NLC’s work. Fellows also enjoy a wide range of field excursions from restoration site tours to bird banding. The intent is to open up career pathways that invite Fellows to bring their full selves to their work.
MA Conservation Restriction model
We celebrate the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for including new language in its template for conservation restrictions. Indigenous cultural landscapes are now recognized as a conservation value to protect. Indigenous cultural practices may also be included within land uses. These inclusions prompt landowners to consider providing cultural access to their land. When the NLC stewards these restrictions we are able to advocate for this recognition. If you are interested in learning more conservation restrictions contact us at info@nativelandconservancy.org.
Native Landowner Toolkit
For Native American landowners living in ancestral homelands family and tribal history is imbued in every acre. Protecting land is uniquely challenging for Native people who are historically connected and also have an obligation to preserve it for future generations. NLC is experienced in working with indigenous families to preserve family and tribal rights when land is put into conservation or donated. With our partners at U Mass Amherst, we are developing resources to decode options for protecting land.
Climate Change Planning
Addressing the complex challenges of climate change will benefit both science and traditional ecological knowledge. Indigenous perspectives bring to light the ways of knowing that have guided the original caretakers of Mother Earth for millennia. We are developing an educational video to impart some of these ideals.
EDUCATION
NLC is enriched by outreach and collaboration with higher education institutions including University of Massachusetts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard. These collaborations afford us the opportunity to inform the next generations of conservationists of our work. Often our partnership will go beyond the classroom and lead to land care work days or new initiatives, like the Native Landowner Toolkit we are developing with UMass Amherst.
Sustainable Harvest
Sustainable harvest is foraging conducted by Indigenous people using customary and traditional knowledge and practices for plants important to the continuation of that tribe’s distinct culture. Traditional foraging is conducted in a way that uses hand tools and ensures plant replacement and abundance by using specific harvest criteria, gathering and cultivation strategies that preserve the host resources. The NLC is developing guidelines to expand access to cultural plant harvest.