CIERP Alumni Perspectives: A Conversation with Javier Kinney

By Seth Owusu-Mante

Javier Kinney

On August 3, 1990, the month of November was recognized by President George H. W. Bush as Native American Heritage Month (NAHM) and recently instituted by President Joseph Biden in November 2021. November thus provides the opportunity to celebrate the rich and diverse cultures, traditions, history, and sovereignty of the native people who resided before America became the modern United States. This month, CIERP joins the Tufts community in the acknowledgement of Native American Heritage Month by talking with Fletcher alum Javier Kinney (F’00), a Yurok Tribe citizen and Carbon Project Manager in the Natural Resources Division of the Yurok Tribe.

The Yurok Tribe has inhabited and managed the forests, rivers, and coastal areas along the northern coast of California since time immemorial. The tribe currently has approximately 6,700 tribal citizens that are indigenous to northern California. The Yurok Tribal Council was formally organized in 1988 and the Yurok Constitution was ratified in 1993. In that same year, the Yurok Constitution was drafted, codifying Yurok’s commitment to effective and culturally based natural resource protection.

As Carbon Project Manager of the Yurok Tribe, Javier works to enable his tribe to meet one of its constitutional principles of reacquiring ancestral territories spanning across 1.5 million acres. I caught up with Javier for a chat before he traveled to Glasgow for COP 26 as part of the delegation from the Yurok Tribe. Below is an excerpt of our conversation.

What were some of the highpoints and life-changing moments during your Fletcher education?

The mentor/mentee relationship I had with Dean Galvin has been a life changing experience. Dean Galvin was pivotal in my decision to attend Fletcher. His experience, leadership, and vision for Fletcher at the time, taking me on as a mentee, providing me with the skill set of how to make quantifiable and qualitative decisions, and exposing me to the importance of leadership and negotiation skills in both military and non-military arenas guided my path in my personal and professional journey.

Another aspect of Fletcher that was not only inspirational but motivational for me was the school’s interdisciplinary approach and flexibility to study various areas of interest such as history, native American studies, economics, and negotiations. The cultural exposure and opportunity to work with other students from different countries and diverse backgrounds opened me up to different perspectives and provided an exponential growth for me.

 Can you tell us about your work as the Carbon Project Manager?

I am fortunate to work with our Tribal leadership and Tribal Council to oversee and manage our carbon project which involves the active sustainable management of about 25,000 acres of forested lands. Our carbon project is one part of our broader natural resource management portfolio continuing the balance between traditional ecological knowledges and scientific approaches to managing our natural resources and cultural lifeways. We live in a catastrophic area that has a lot of earthquakes, tsunamis, flooding, and fires, so the impact of climate change poses a critical threat to the ecosystem upon which we depend. Harnessing our long standing traditional and ecological natural based solutions, our carbon project involves carbon sequestration with our forests filled with native trees that serve as carbon sinks, absorbing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere to mitigate the dire consequences of climate change.

Through our carbon sequestration project, Yurok Tribe became the first Native American tribe to participate in California’s Cap-and-Trade Program. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) provides the framework and strict protocols and programs that issues offset credits for every metric ton of CO2 equivalent that we remove from the atmosphere. We then are provided the opportunity to sell the offset credits to other compliance buyer entities. So, the successful carbon projects is one of our innovative market-based strategies that generates the financial resources needed to acquire the 1.5 million- acre ancestral territories we hope to regain.

The Yurok Tribe has emerged as an internationally respected indigenous leader in carbon sequestration, aquatic resource conservation, nation building, governance, and forest management, what lessons can the world learn from the Yurok Tribe and other indigenous people?

The first lesson we should all learn from the success of indigenous tribes is that when lands are in indigenous hands or under the ownership of indigenous people, natural resource management is assured. Therefore, lands and ancestral territories must be given back to the tribes. The sustainable management of these lands not only provides opportunities for economic growth and increased tribal sovereignty, but they reflect the tribe’s identity, cultural lifeways, and livelihood, which are fundamentally entwined with the land.

Second, there should be opportunities for indigenous people to share their cultural lifeway stories from their own perspective and narratives rather than others telling their stories for them. This will be very beneficial for the world to learn and recognize that tribes must be incorporated in the financial and decision-making processes that affects our daily livelihood by both state and federal governments, international organizations, businesses, and NGOs.

What does Native American Heritage Month (NAHM) mean to you?

NAHM is what we live every day, and we thank not only our ancestors but all those who came before us to ensure that Yuroks are still here. Our language, traditional lifeways, fishing rights, cultural heritage, and education still exist because of them.

We give thanks, honor, and praise every day for the ability to do what we do and to be able to share with the world our indigenous knowledge on natural resource management. As a Fletcher alum, it’s always my honor to leverage my Fletcher experience to give back to my tribe to keep our tradition going.  Indigenous people will always be with us and NAHM should reflect the opportunity for tribes and indigenous people to be part of the thought leadership that creates solutions for the global challenges of our time.

Any advice or suggestions for current Fletcher students with interest in jobs in international environment and resource policy?

You must trust the skill set, education, and experience you gain from Fletcher. It may not seem evident right at the time of graduation, but at Fletcher, you are trained, mentored, and provided with the right leadership skill set not only to lead but also follow, and so over time, these skills will come to play to help you make the world a better place.

But importantly, students must understand that wherever your career path leads you, there are indigenous people in that area. We must provide them with the respect we are taught at Fletcher to include them in the decisions we make in the line of our work, be it with corporate entities, businesses, governments, start-ups, IGOs, NGOs, etc. There may not be any climate solutions without the full participation and inclusion of indigenous peoples and lands. ∎

Seth Owusu-Mante is a junior fellow at The Fletcher School, Tufts University.