Science
Indigenous tribes pitted against each other over a state bill to redefine land protection in California
In the last year, the Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians – Kizh Nation has worked to protect its cultural sites from more than 850 land development projects around the Los Angeles Basin, thanks to a 2014 state law that allows tribes to give input during projects’ environmental review processes.
Now, its chief fears that a newly proposed bill could significantly limit how the tribe — and dozens of others still without federal recognition — could participate.
“This is an atrocity,” said Andrew Salas, chairperson of the Kizh Nation. “Let’s not call it a bill. [It’s] an erasure of non-federally recognized tribes in California. They’re taking away our sovereignty. They’re taking away our civil rights. They’re taking away our voice.”
The new bill, AB 52, was proposed by state Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry (D-Winters) and co-sponsored by three federally recognized tribes: the Pechanga Band of Indians, the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and the Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake. Supporters say the amendments would strengthen and reaffirm tribes’ rights to protect their resources, granted by the 2014 law of the same name.
“This bill is about protecting tribal cultural resources and affirming that tribes — both federally and non-federally recognized — are the experts on our own heritage,” Mark Macarro, tribal chairman of the Pechanga Band, said in a statement.
But shortly after the bill was substantively introduced in mid-March, tribes without federal recognition noticed that while federally recognized tribes would hold a right to full government-to-government consultations, their tribes — still sovereign nations — would be considered “additional consulting parties,” a legal term that includes affected organizations, businesses and members of the public.
The original AB 52 is a keystone piece of legislation on California Indigenous rights, representing one of the primary means tribes have to protect their cultural resources — such as cemeteries, sacred spaces and historic villages — from land development within their territories.
The new bill would require that tribes’ ancestral knowledge carry more weight than archaeologists and environmental consultants when it comes to tribes’ cultural resources. It would also explicitly require the state to maintain its lists of tribes — including both federally recognized and non-federally recognized — that many pieces of California Indigenous law rely on.
Yet, Indigenous scholars and leaders within non-federally recognized tribes say the new differences between how tribes with and without federal recognition can participate amount to a violation of their basic rights, including their sovereignty.
“This is an atrocity…. They’re taking away our sovereignty. They’re taking away our civil rights. They’re taking away our voice.”
— Andrew Salas, Chairperson of the Kizh Nation.
They say the language could allow tribes with federal recognition to overstep their territory and consult on neighboring non-federally recognized tribes’ cultural resources.
“I don’t want a tribe who’s 200 miles away from my tribal territory to get engaged in my ancestral lands,” said Rudy Ortega, president of the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians. “We know the ancestral territory, we know the landscape, we know our history.”
The bill’s sponsors say the new amendments aren’t designed to declare who deserves recognition and who doesn’t — and the difference in language is simply a reflection of the reality of which tribes have federal recognition and which don’t.
“Tribal cultural resources and the recognition of tribes as distinct political entities are fundamental pillars of our tribal sovereignty,” the Graton Rancheria and Pechanga Band tribes said in a joint statement. ”It is critical that this bill protect and reaffirm the sovereignty and government-to-government relationship between the State of California and federally recognized tribes.”
In practice, supporters say, there would be little difference between how tribes with and without federal recognition consulted with California government agencies. But for tribes without federal recognition — who argue there’s no reason to apply federal tribal distinctions to state law — that provides little comfort.
“To exclude us is a violation of our human rights.”
— Mona Tucker, chair of the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribe of San Luis Obispo County and Region.
The clash began mid-March when a friend of Salas’ — also a scientist who consults on environmental reviews — noticed the language changing the status of non-federally recognized tribes amid the collections of other amendments to the process.
Salas’ friend alerted him over the phone: “Be aware, I’m telling you — look it up.”
He immediately alerted everyone in the tribe’s office in Covina. When the tribe began reaching out to other governments, it became clear the bill was unanticipated. “Lead agencies didn’t know about it; the city, the county — nobody knew about it,” Salas said.
Word quickly spread through tribal leaders across the state. None of the tribes without federal recognition interviewed by The Times said Aguiar-Curry’s office had reached out to consult them on the new bill before it was published.
“Input from federally and non-federally recognized tribes informed the bill in print,” Aguiar-Curry’s office said in a statement to The Times. “We’ve received feedback, we recognized the bill language started in a place that did not wholly reflect our intent — which is that all tribes … be invited to participate in the consultation process.”
The non-federally recognized tribes quickly began forming coalitions and voicing their opposition. At least 70 tribes, organizations and cities had opposed the amendments by April 25.
The following Monday, Aguiar-Curry announced she would table the bill until the start of 2026, but remained committed to pursuing it.
“The decision to make this a two-year bill is in direct response to the need for more time and space to respectfully engage all well-intended stakeholders,” her office said in a statement. “Come January, we’ll move a bill forward that represents those thoughtful efforts.”
Many tribes without federal recognition still see a long road ahead.
“I don’t have a huge sense of victory,” said Mona Tucker, chair of the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribe of San Luis Obispo County and Region. “Hopefully the Assembly person, Aguiar-Curry, will engage with us, with a group of tribes that do not have federal acknowledgment, so that there can be some compromise here. Because to exclude us is a violation of our human rights.”
Salas would rather see the amendments killed entirely.
“We thank Assemblymember Aguiar-Curry for at least putting it on hold for now; however, this is not the end,” he said. “We are asking that she — completely and urgently and respectfully — withdraw the amendment.”
Government-to-government consultations are often detailed and long-term relationships in which tribes work behind the scenes to share knowledge and work directly with land developers to protect the tribe’s resources.
Last year, the environmental review process helped the Kizh Nation win one of the largest land returns in Southern California history for a tribe without federal recognition.
When a developer in Jurupa Valley proposed a nearly 1,700-house development that threatened nearby significant cultural spaces, the Kizh Nation entered a years-long consultation with the developers behind the scenes. Eventually, the developers agreed to maintain a 510-acre conservation area on the property, to be cared for by the Tribe.
Similarly, it was one of these tribal consultations that reignited the cultural burn practices of the ytt Northern Chumash Tribe. In 2024 — for the first time in the more than 150 years since the state outlawed cultural burning — the Tribe conducted burns along the Central Coast with the support of Cal Fire.
California has 109 federally recognized tribes. But it also has more than 55 tribes without recognition. That’s because federal recognition is often a decades-long and arduous process that requires verifying the Indigenous lineage of each tribal member and documenting the continuous government operations of the tribe since 1900.
And tribes in what is now California — which was colonized not once but three times — have a uniquely complex and shattered history. Since 1978, 81 California tribal groups have sought federal recognition. So far, only one has been successful, and five were denied — more than any other state.
For this reason, AB 52 and other keystone pieces of California Indigenous law — such as those that allow tribes to give input on city planning and take care of ancestral remains — use a list of tribes created by the state that includes tribes both with and without federal recognition.
Leaders of tribes without federal recognition saw the last few weeks’ AB 52 flash point as an opportunity to build momentum for greater protections and rights for all tribes in California.
“What does the world look like Oct. 10, 1492?” said Joey Williams, president of the Coalition of California State Tribes and vice chairman of the Kern Valley Indian Community. “Here in California, there were about 190 autonomous governments of villages and languages and self-determined people — sovereign people that are liberated, that are free.”
Williams helped form the Coalition of California State Tribes in 2022 to fight for that vision.
“We just want that for our tribal people,” he said. “We want them to have access to all that sovereignty, self-determination … and full acknowledgment by the federal government and state government.”
Deep in the labyrinth of the American Museum of Natural History, past the giant suspended blue whale and the first floor’s Alaska brown bears, is an unobtrusive locked door. On it, there is a small sign.
“Bug Colony.”
Behind the door, accessible only to a handful of museum employees, thousands of flesh-eating dermestid beetles toil around the clock handling a task of specimen preparation that even the museum’s best trained specialists cannot.
They eat the meat off animal skeletons, leaving only clean bones behind.
Since many skeletons are too fine to be cleaned by human hands, the museum’s osteological preparation team turns to the six-legged staffers to prepare them for research and display.
The work is carried out in three gray wooden boxes the size of footlockers that house the colony. They are lined with stainless steel and their flip-up tops reveal beetles swarming the earthly remains of various small animals, mostly birds. They feast upon the gobbets of flesh clinging to the carcasses.
The room is pervaded by the soft, crackling sound of gnawing. “It sounds like something frying, or Rice Krispies when you add milk,” said Rob Pascocello, the colony’s tender.
The beetles are tiny enough — just a few millimeters long — to crawl into the recesses of the smallest animals and nibble away without affecting delicate skeletal structures, said Scott Schaefer, who oversees the museum’s collection of more than 30 million specimens and objects.
“They do the fine, detailed work that cannot be done by hand, because it’s so delicate,” Mr. Schaefer said. “It’s gentler than boiling a specimen or soaking it in chemicals or acid.”
Museum officials say the ravenous colony has processed most of the bird collections’ more than 30,000 skeleton specimens over the decades, plus countless other forms of carrion. “They get into the small crevices and, if left unchecked, keep eating until there’s nothing left to eat,” Mr. Schaefer said.
On a recent weekday, Paul Sweet, collection manager for the ornithology department, stood in the Bug Room, and in the interest of scientific precision pointed out that its name was imprecise.
True bugs, known to their fans as the Hemiptera order, have mouthparts that pierce and suck. Beetles — Coleoptera — are typically cylindrical and have mouthparts that chew.
The colony had gone to town with those mouthparts to reduce a once-lustrous pink flamingo to a humble bone bundle. A regal snowy owl was similarly picked clean. Then there was the small skeleton in a canister, with bones tinier than toothpicks.
“That’s a songbird,” said Mr. Pascocello.
Dermestid beetles are scavengers often found in the wild on animal carcasses, and in the nests, webs and burrows of animals.
Museum officials told The New York Times in 1979 that their dermestid colony had remained self-sustaining since being brought over from Africa in the 1930s. Mr. Sweet said the current group has been around for his entire 35 years at the museum, but could not say for sure if they were the original colony’s descendants.
Either way, since a beetle’s life is only about six months, “they’re all kissing cousins,” said Mr. Pascocello. He said that while the museum was closed during the coronavirus pandemic, he “kept a backup colony in my bedroom.”
On this day, Mr. Sweet was looking to skeletonize a northern gannet, a sea bird recovered from Midland Beach on Staten Island. It had been skinned, dried, and trimmed of most of its flesh by researchers before it was handed over to the colony for finishing work.
Within minutes, the carcass was swarmed. The beetles can pick clean a small bird within a couple of days, but may need two weeks for larger skeletons like the gannet.
Mr. Pascocello once served the beetles an orangutan; Mr. Sweet once gave them an emu. But the size of the beetles’ boxes is a factor. Larger specimens must be served piecemeal, like the carcass of a feisty Cuban crocodile known as Fidel, obtained from the Bronx Zoo in 2005.
Before the pristine skeletons are boxed and cataloged, they are soaked in water and frozen for days to kill remaining beetles or eggs.
The beetles are not a threat to humans, but an infestation of the museum’s specimen collection would be disastrous. Keeping the beetles well fed discourages them from wandering away, as does a strip of Vaseline toward the top of their boxes and a sticky floor section across the room’s doorway.
If the supply of specimens should stall, Mr. Pascocello keeps some chicken around as emergency food. Mr. Sweet said he offered the colony pigs’ feet during the pandemic because it was the cheapest bone meat at the supermarket.
The gourmandising of the beetles is a reminder that important science is not always conducted in gleaming, hygienic laboratories. On the door, under the “Bug Colony” sign, is a handwritten addendum:
“Bad odors emanating from behind this door is normal.”
Science
Researchers find drinking water is safe in Eaton, Palisades burn areas as utilities lift last 'do not drink' order
Scientists have released some of the first independent test results confirming that drinking water in fire-affected areas around Altadena and the Pacific Palisades is largely free of harmful contaminants, as an Altadena utility lifted the last “do not drink” notice left in the burn zones.
Researchers with the LA Fire HEALTH Study released results on Friday from 53 homes spread across the burn areas and the more than three miles surrounding them. They found only one with a toxic substance at dangerous levels: at one home, the water contained benzene, a known carcinogen, at concentrations slightly above the state’s allowable level of 1 part per billion.
The findings add to mounting evidence that the affected area’s drinking water is safe. In March, Caltech professor Francois Tissot’s team found no lead levels above the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s limit in the tap water of the 43 homes they tested in Altadena and surrounding communities. Separately, UCLA professor Sanjay Mohanty’s group found no concerning levels of heavy metals or potentially harmful “forever” chemicals in 45 homes tested in the Palisades.
Experts noted that LA Fire HEALTH Study’s elevated benzene level — at 1.6 ppb — remains below the federal limit of 5 ppb and would likely drop below 1 ppb once the homeowner follows the utilities’ recommendation to run all faucets in the entire house for at least five minutes to flush contaminants out of the lines before using the tap water.
The state’s limit of 1 ppb equates to no more than a two-in-one-million chance of a resident developing cancer from a lifetime exposure to the contaminant at that level, according to the State Water Resources Control Board. For higher, short-term exposures to benzene, the U.S. EPA says exposure to over 200 ppb for more than a day could have negative, non-cancer health consequences for children.
“I’m optimistic from these results,” said Chris Olivares, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine, who has led the tap water-testing part of the LA Fire HEALTH Study. “The major takeaway, I think, is the importance of flushing.”
Andrew Whelton — a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Purdue University and a pioneer in the field of post-fire water contamination and remediation — attributes the quick and successful restoration of safe drinking water to the hard work of local utilities and state regulators, which followed a post-fire playbook Whelton and others developed in the wake of the 2017 Tubbs fire in Santa Rosa, 2018 Camp fire in Paradise, and subsequent fires throughout Colorado in 2021 and Hawaii in 2023.
The way dangerous volatile organic compounds, like benzene, could contaminate water supplies after a wildfire wasn’t well known or studied until a Santa Rosa resident reported a strong smell of gasoline — a signature indicator of benzene — when turning on their kitchen faucet for the first time after the 2017 fire.
Scientists and public health officials raced to understand and solve the problem. They found benzene levels as high as 40,000 ppb, and it took a year to restore safe water.
After the Camp fire, scientists found levels over 900 ppb, which took eight months to remediate.
After the L.A. County fires, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power found one instance of benzene at 71.3 ppb. The utility worked around the clock to restore safe water, first by closing roughly 4,800 open connections at fire hydrants and destroyed homes to restore water pressure, then continuously flushing water out of the system to push out contaminants. As they went, they tested and retested until benzene levels dropped to near-zero.
LADWP — with the approval of the State Water Resources Control Board — lifted its “do not drink” notice on March 7, exactly two months after the Palisades fire broke out. Two of the three smaller customer-owned utilities in Altadena, Lincoln Avenue Water Co. and Rubio Cañon Land and Water Assn. — which also detected benzene in their systems after the fires — quickly followed. The third, Las Flores Water Co., lifted the last “do not drink” notice on May 9.
Las Flores had registered the highest benzene levels of all the utilities: 440 ppb from a sample collected on April 10.
The LA Fire HEALTH Study team tested roughly eight homes within each burn area and over a dozen in adjacent communities between February and April while the testing and flushing process was ongoing.
The results are some of the first from the LA Fire HEALTH Study’s broad-ranging, privately funded effort between nearly a dozen academic and medical institutions, to understand the health consequences of the L.A. County fires over the course of 10 years.
Outside the burn areas, no homes the team sampled exceeded the state’s allowable limit for benzene or any of the other two dozen volatile organic compounds for which the group tested. And inside the burn areas, benzene was the only contaminant that exceeded the state’s allowable limits.
Although the utilities have worked for months to flush contaminants out of the labyrinth of pipes shuttling water from reservoirs to private properties, it’s homeowners who are responsible for finishing out the job and flushing the pipes on their own properties.
The researchers stressed that the one benzene exceedance — found in Lincoln Avenue’s service area one week after the utility’s “do not drink” notice was lifted — is a reminder that residents should follow the utilities’ guidance for safe water use once returning home.
“Lincoln Avenue Water Company’s top priority is to provide safe and reliable drinking water to the community. Through extensive testing, we have established that our system is in compliance with all state and federal water quality standards,” said Lincoln Avenue general manager Jennifer Betancourt Torres, in a statement to The Times.
“It’s important to emphasize that samples taken from inside the home are considered a representation of the residential plumbing and not the water being delivered,” she said.
The utilities and water safety experts say residents should first flush all of their lines — every faucet and spigot, both hot and cold, for at least five minutes. They should also run all appliances and fixtures, like dishwashers and washing machines, once with hot water before using. Two batches of ice from a fridge icemaker should be discarded.
Each utility is providing detailed, up-to-date guidance for their customers on their respective websites, including LADWP, Rubio Cañon, Lincoln Avenue and Las Flores.
Staff writer Ian James contributed to this report.
Another long-term concern is pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive disease in which scarring thickens and hardens lung tissue, making it difficult for oxygen to move into the bloodstream. Dr. Elsayegh describes a lung with pulmonary fibrosis as “a stiff balloon from the party store” — your face flushes as you try to force air inside, but it simply refuses to inflate.
As a former Palisades resident intent on returning to the neighborhood, Dr. Elsayegh is also doubling as a trusted confidant, drawing on his personal experience to help his patients face uncertainties and find solutions — or next steps, at least.
“In an ideal world, I would go in there and say, ‘Everyone that lives in the Palisades and in L.A. County, let’s all move. Let’s all go somewhere else and we don’t have to worry about this,’ ” he said. “That’s not reality. I’m trying to find this unbelievably difficult balance of helping us return to normalcy or return to our life, but doing it as safely as possible.”
In early February, Dr. Elsayegh pulled up a chair next to Dana Michels, a cybersecurity lawyer and healthy mother of three who had gone to check the damage at her house and now could not shake a cough.
“Sweetheart, you’re not moving air at all,” Dr. Elsayegh said, listening to her lungs through a stethoscope and quickly ordering a breathing test and a nebulizer, to start. A pulmonary student asked to take a listen, then glanced up at Dr. Elsayegh, looking confused.
“I’m not hearing anything,” the student said. Dr. Elsayegh gave a single nod.
After years of renting, Ms. Michels and her husband got their first mortgage almost four years ago; it was a family milestone. Now, with their Palisades home smoked through, the family is split between two rental apartments in Marina del Rey — one for boys, one for girls — and they are navigating a new school, new insurance paperwork and new prescriptions to manage the wheezing.
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