An Indigenous Biocultural Heritage Oasis

Heron Shadow is a Native place of refuge and learning for community engagement, connection to the land, growing Indigenous foods, and nourishing Indigenous and intercultural relations.

After 37 years of growing our organization and implementing our mission to protect and revitalize the sacred relationship Native peoples have with ancestral lands, we now have purchased 7.6 acres of land in Sonoma County, on the ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo Peoples of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. We were able to become stewards of this land and make this purchase thanks to the discount offered by the former owner, the generous support of key funders, and with the permission of Graton Rancheria.

Heron Shadow: An Indigenous Biocultural Heritage Oasis is a home for the dreaming, building, growing, and transmission of The Cultural Conservancy’s mission and work. We are transforming this gift of land into an innovative haven that will focus on the conservation and regeneration of Indigenous agriculture, Native Sciences, and healthy lifeways.

We invite you to connect with this land, engage in the dream, and experience the potential of Heron Shadow.

Videography and Editing: Mateo Hinojosa, Alexandru Salceanu
Music: Ayapish Slow, Colin Farish + Capomo

Fallow land hungers for creative hands
Indigenous memories rise as the land
Helps us remember to remember

A white woman offers restitution
Our intertribal organization
—The Cultural Conservancy—
is offered an opportunity

We acknowledge the ancestral lands
of the Pomo and Coast Miwok
and seek permission and consent to proceed
We are given tribal sovereign blessings
Legal and financial tangles are resolved
Land is received

 We exchange gifts from the Four Directions
Seeds, salt, gourds, song, corn, blankets, mana

We cultivate the knowing of ancestral guardianship
The spirit of private property is extinguished
An exhale of kinship and obligation is released

 Large, dark wings unfurl in midday
Moving on the ground and through my mind 
A mirror of Earth and Sky
We are all elevated
In Heron Shadow uplift

poem by Melissa K. Nelson