Whose circularity,whose land? Yurok forestry,indigenous economies,and the politics of regeneration

Abstract

The circular economy (CE) has emerged as a dominant paradigm of ecological governance, mobilized by corporations, states, and supranational bodies as a corrective to linear models of extraction. While often framed as sustainable, dominant CE discourse remains tethered to growth-oriented, technocratic, and market-rationalist logics that reproduce the very extractive relations they claim to transcend. Nature continues to circulate in its abstract and commodified form while the colonial histories, ongoing land dispossessions, and sovereign territorial claims that make such circulation possible remain analytically invisible. This paper asks: whose circularity is being advanced, and on whose land? Drawing on collaborative, Indigenous-led fieldwork with the Yurok Tribe of northern California, we develop the concept of the Indigenous Circular Economy (IndCE) as a distinct political-economic formation grounded in kin-centric responsibility, sovereign territorial authority, and relational obligations to the more-than-human world. We show that Yurok Good Fire, forest stewardship, food sovereignty, and habitat care constitute an economy of regeneration irreducible to efficiency metrics or lifecycle assessments. Circularity, we argue, is not a technical design problem but a question of political authority, cultural continuity, and epistemic justice. By centering the Yurok IndCE, we deepen existing critiques of CE discourse and chart alternative pathways forward, arguing that CE frameworks must confront the jurisdictional architectures and colonial property regimes that render Indigenous lands available for commodification in the first place, and that resourcing IndCE is not a supplement to just transition but a prerequisite for one.

Introduction

In the twenty-first century, transdisciplinary scholars have developed new analytical frameworks to examine how labor, value, capital, and nature ¹ are entangled within increasingly complex global economies. (i.e., Foster, 2000; Moore, 2015). Indeed, there are more efforts than ever across disciplines to bridge “the modernist divide between natural and social sciences via empirical studies of material flows and metabolism,” (Green, 2024) as reflected in the growing convergence of fields such as ecological economics, energy humanities, critical zone science, industrial ecology, feminist phenomenology of water, and more (Daly, 2014; Green, 2024; McCarthy and Prudham, 2004; Neimanis, 2016; Szeman and Boyer, 2017).

Within this expanding body of scholarship, one discourse that has risen to particular prominence is that of the circular economy, or CE. Emerging largely in response to intensifying critiques of the ecological harms produced by linear economic systems of extraction, consumption, and disposal, CE seeks to redesign production systems by minimizing waste and recirculating materials through reuse, repair, recycling, and transformation (Geissdoerfer et al., 2017; Kirchherr et al., 2017) (SEE Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Linear vs. Circularity Production Model.

In recent years, CE has become a dominant economic framework across national and transnational actors. Many of the largest corporations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), often based in the U.S., have promoted circularity as a central pathway for sustainable development, often invoking CE in corporate sustainability reporting and “responsible” investment regimes (Goodman et al., 2012; Kopnina, 2021). The United Nations (UN) has framed the CE as a key mechanism for advancing SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) and mitigating climate-change (UN Environment Programme and Finance Initiative, 2025). The European Union's (EU's) 2020 Circular Economy Action Plan and forthcoming Circular Economy Act have embedded CE within its industrial, environmental, and climate policies (European Commission, 2026). While the majority of CE discourse is from the Global North and China, recent research in Latin American, African, and Asian countries are also building “circularity” into development plans, urban sustainability initiatives, and environmental policies (Betancourt Morales and Zartha Sossa, 2020; Mohan et al., 2024)

CE discourse across geographies shares a common and distinct epistemology of environmental governance. The “well-intended” aims of multinational corporations and state actors can “manage” nature to some successful end by pricing (i.e., internalizing) environmental externalities, incentivizing supply chain practices to reduce waste, or by recycling products for further profitability (Kirchherr et al., 2017; Scott, 1998). Despite a more biocentric ambition, mainstream CE remains largely tethered to growth-oriented, firm-centered, and technocratic logics, often treating social (i.e., labor, health, culture) and ecological systems (i.e., species health, water quality) as secondary beneficiaries rather than constitutive elements of ecological and economic life (Beamer et al., 2023).

CE is often framed through the language of green state-building (Death, 2017) or free-market environmentalism (McCarthy and Prudham, 2004), which limits its analytical capacity for confronting the deeper ethical, epistemological, and political foundations of extractive economies under neoliberal capitalism. Rather than challenging these foundations, CE risks largely reproducing them (Corvellec et al., 2022), offering inadequate tools for theorizing the complex entanglements of culture, value, ecosystems, and labor with capital. In this sense, CE frequently functions less as a transformative economic alternative than as a rebranding of commodified nature under a veneer of “green capitalism” (Buller, 2022). Indeed, across much CE literature, nature continues to appear in its abstract and commodified form (Marx, 1867) – water is often measured as some “stock” of volumetric units, land in projected yields, soils in mineral rights, and forests in board feet or carbon credits (i.e., Kirchherr et al., 2017; Stahel, 2016). Such an effort continues to reduce complex socio-ecological relations to standardized metrics, rendering nature legible to state and market actors so that it can be more intricately woven into balance sheets or regulatory regimes (Scott, 1998). In doing so, CE reinforces longstanding logics of valuation and control, in which ecological systems are quantified, exchanged, and governed primarily through economic abstractions and financial calculations rather than relational or place-based understandings.

While CE often promises a more sustainable metabolism of materials (measured by the state or market), it has historically ignored the fraught histories of expropriation that today's economies are built on. Dominant CE frameworks tend to focus narrowly on the economy while excluding social dimensions and simplifying environmental consequences (Corvellec et al., 2022). Such a framing risks neo-colonial erasure by sidelining the Global South and the informal economies that sustain it. Indeed, CE typically makes no effort to acknowledge patterns of social inequity, cultural erasure, and a historical disregard of place-based responsibility that peoples have long held to their waters or land (Beamer et al., 2023; Kirchherr et al., 2017). As such, dominant CE discourse risks falling into the trap of environmental “solutionism” (MWC, 2025) that seeks to “solve” deep societal issues like overconsumption or environmental degradation, predominantly by the Global North, without critiquing the underlying epistemic and social forces that have contributed to the economically incentivized expropriation of land and peoples for centuries (MWC, 2025; Yang and He, 2021). As a result, much existing CE literature has sidestepped sustained engagement with the material inequities or historical dispossessions that have shaped contemporary regimes of extraction, resource governance, or environmental economics. Rather than interrogating why nature is rendered available for circulation in the first place, valuation approaches that map nature, capital, and society like CE, tend to focus more on optimization of the measurable than ethics, culture, equity, or justice.

This raises a central question – whose ‘nature’ is being circulated, and to what ends?

Our research begins by centering emerging scholarship that has been first to tackle this question: Indigenous scholarship that foregrounds ecological health, communal care, kin-centric responsibility (Salmon, 2000), cultural continuity, self-determination, and relational ethics as constitutive elements of economic life (Beamer et al., 2023; Bhanage et al., 2025; Shooshtarian, 2025). We identify Indigenous Circular Economies (IndCE) not as isolated “case studies,” but as nodes within a wider constellation of place-based and historically grounded economic systems embedded in specific land relations, governance structures, cultural responsibilities, and histories of colonization. Focusing on the Yurok Tribe within this broader analytic landscape, we demonstrate how IndCE function as distinct political-economic formations that foreground political authority, moral obligation, and ecological responsibility as inherent parts of economic life, rather than external constraints upon it. We present this analytical framework to provide a long overdue critique of CE discourse and adaptation in efforts to become more responsive to the lands, waters, and communities that are in relation with the “natural resources” that have been extracted and appropriated over centuries at the hand of local and global supply chains.

As a collaborative team of Indigenous (Yurok, Hoopa) and non-Indigenous scholars, we synthesize insights from IndCE scholarship and Yurok forest stewardship practices to articulate that economic wellbeing need not be left out of the same conversation as culturally specific and place-based responsibility to the more-than-human. ⁷ In line with Indigenous methodological priorities (i.e., Bartlett et al., 2012 Smith, 2012), we conclude this analysis with actionable pathways for removing institutional and political barriers to Indigenous economic self-determination, arguing that resourcing IndCE is essential for advancing Tribal sovereignty, ecological regeneration, and more just economic futures.

Methods

From the outset, this research was inspired by and grounded in Indigenous methodologies and collaborative knowledge production (Smith, 2012). Rather than treating Indigenous knowledge, Western science, and Yurok-stewarded data as intrinsically separate or hierarchically ordered sources, we sought to “braid” multiple knowledge systems in ways that respect their distinct epistemologies while allowing them to inform one another (Kimmerer, 2013). This approach aligns with traditions of “Two-Eyed Seeing” and Indigenous designed research frameworks that emphasize accountability, reciprocity, and situated knowledge (Bartlett et al., 2012 Haraway, 1988; Smith, 2012). As such, we aim to produce scholarship that is accountable to Indigenous communities and responsive to their struggles for sovereignty, ecological regeneration, and economic self-determination.

The empirical claims in this paper emerge from the convergence of multiple forms of evidence, including oral histories, collaborative field observations, governance documents, ecological data, U.S. federal and state data, and lived experience on the Yurok reservation. Our analysis draws on semi-structured interviews, conversations, field visits to the Yurok ancestral forest, documentary and archival materials, and the experiential knowledge of Indigenous collaborators who have lived and worked within Yurok and Hoopa lands across generations. The research team consisted of Indigenous (Yurok and Hoopa) and non-Indigenous scholars, working in close collaboration with partners in the Yurok Tribe Forestry Department and other Yurok institutions between 2022 and 2025. Our methodology was guided by an ethic of transparency and accountability, ensuring that all information was accurate and approved by the Yurok's Tribal Council. Indigenous collaborators were engaged as co-producers of knowledge whose intellectual, cultural, and political authority shaped the direction of the research.

Indigenous circular economies (IndCE)

We begin by reminding readers that Indigenous Peoples in North America and worldwide have always practiced what the West seeks to (re)discover with the term “Circular Economics”; an approach to natural resource usage that rightfully balances human wellbeing and ecological health. Over centuries and millennia, Indigenous traditions have built up vast repositories of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) regarding their ancestral homelands (Nelson and Shilling, 2018). Though TEK may be the basis for Indigenous “land management” practices, it permeates across multiple cultural elements of Indigenous cultures, starting with spiritual systems and sacred systems of knowledge (Jacobs, 2025; Kawharu, 2019). In the words of Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Porou, Tūhourangi):

The values, attitudes, concepts and language embedded in beliefs about spirituality represent… the clearest contrast and mark of difference between Indigenous peoples and the West. It is one of the few parts of ourselves which the West cannot decipher, cannot understand and cannot control. (2021)

It is necessary to define a separate paradigm of an “Indigenous Circular Economy” (IndCE), not just to acknowledge that Indigenous economies have practiced circularity for much longer than the West, but also to emphasize the ways that Indigenous circularity differs in fundamental ways from Western economies and the growing notion of non-Indigenous “Circular Economics”. Any definition of an IndCE cannot fully encapsulate the nuanced and wide array of ontologies, perspectives, and beliefs of all Indigenous People. Our definition is based on the inclusion of many perspectives, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, and by nature, it will still be limited. What we offer here can never be a full representation of the mosaic of all Indigenous communities across the globe. As such, we identify commonalities that bind and bridge across place and histories in an effort to galvanize systemic efforts against coloniality and oppression.

With that said, we offer four principles of IndCE that constitute an economic ethos that challenges Western norms and assumptions, including both that of a “Linear Economy” and “Circular Economy”, the two backbones of Western capitalism that we discuss in Section 4. We synthesize these both from the emerging literature on Indigenous Circular economies (Beamer et al., 2023; Bhanage et al., 2025; Kawharu, 2019; Shooshtarian, 2025) as well as our following discussion and analysis of the Yurok Circular economy. We again emphasize that these principles are not meant to coalesce around a universal standard that represents a static or monolithic view of Indigenous peoples, but rather summarize commonalities between resilient groups that have maintained their distinct and culturally specific relations with ecologies and production in the face of colonial encounters through time:

Currency, goods, and services flowing directly back to support culture and community. This represents a broader definition of “economic value” that rejects commodification or objectification in the name of profit at the expense of people.

Prioritizing and respecting the interconnectedness between humans and the more-than-human world (what non-Indigenous people may call “nature” or the “environment”).

Acknowledging the spiritual and cultural elements of the more-than-human world through respectful harvest principles that generate livelihood and sustenance.

Centering of a “respectful consumption” ethic and rejecting the notion of “waste” or “byproducts”.

Of course, the Yurok IndCE is not the only Indigenous model to center these principles. Before discussing the Yurok IndCE, we briefly introduce a few important nodes of the IndCE across the world.

In the Pacific Northwest of Turtle Island, ² the Swinomish approach connects community members, sociocultural ceremonies, and environmental life. For example, the Swinomish annual blessing of its fishing fleet and First Salmon Ceremony honor a reciprocal relationship with the more-than-human world before undertaking resource harvesting activities, which in turn feed the community and create abundance for the entire year (Jacobs, 2025). Another example from Turtle Island is Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi)'s Honorable Harvest, an economy that relies on the acknowledgement of consumption and asking for permission before harvest. This promotes a deeper sense of “knowing” and “asking” by learning when to avoid harvesting, leaving enough for others, expressing thanks, and sharing. Kimmerer describes the Ojibwe wild rice harvest as an example that provides enough grain for humans, animals, and rice re-seeding every year (Kimmerer, 2015).

Across the world, there are numerous stories of IndCE, especially from Indigenous Peoples who reside in Oceania. For example, First Nations peoples in Australia have stewarded the land, or “Country”, for tens of thousands of years. Aboriginal Peoples’ concepts of circularity have long existed within spiritual and ethical systems in what is called “Caring for Country” (Shooshtarian, 2025). However, because Aboriginal perspectives differ in legibility, speed, and measurability from Australian State or Federal government approaches to circularity, First Nations are often excluded from CE policymaking despite their essential knowledge of Country (Shooshtarian, 2025). In Aotearoa New Zealand, there is also Mānuka Hēnare's (Ngāti Hauā, Te Aupouri, Te Rarawa, Ngāti Kahu) Economy of Mana. This Māori-led economy prioritizes human wellbeing, reciprocity, and kinship rather than capital and markets (Hēnare, 2014). Practicing within the context of Māori kai (food) sovereignty efforts, the Māori IndCE ensures that enterprises return financial benefits to Māori farming communities, increase kai access for urban Māori communities, widen attention to kai storytelling as part of marketing, and return organic waste to Māori producer communities for compost (Kawharu, 2019). Similar examples of pre- and post-colonization circularity exist in places like the Pacific island of Hawaii and beyond (Beamer et al., 2023).

While Indigenous-led literature is growing more rapidly today, academic literature has historically been lacking in acknowledging and integrating the important roles Indigenous Peoples have served as ecosystem stewards historically. While landscapes across North America were not unmanaged or “wild” as most have been led to believe, but rather highly managed by Indigenous Peoples for hundreds of years for specific flora, fauna and ecological conditions (Anderson, 2005; Pyne, 2016; Turner, 2020). In the context of the American West, where large-scale wildfires now drive immense forest loss and threaten life (Steel et al., 2023), Indigenous Circular Economies offer a salve in balancing community wellbeing, cultural resilience, fair labor, and economic prosperity with ecosystem health. Our paper focuses on the Circular Economy (CE) of the Yurok Tribe, the largest Tribe in California, within this specific historical and geographic grounding. The Yurok Tribe's model exemplifies important lessons for creating economic models (both for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples alike), that sustainably serve both human and more-than-human life in the long term, as well as pathways for reparations for Indigenous land dispossession and genocide.

The Yurok Circular Economy (CE)

The Yurok Tribe has stewarded the lower Klamath River Basin area since time immemorial. Their ancestral lands include rugged forest terrain, rich coastline, the expansive Klamath river, serene estuarine areas, grasslands, and spiritually significant highlands. These more-than-human lands exist with the Yurok in a direct, kin-based relationship. They are relatives, not simply objects or “resources” to “manage”. This is also true for a number of important species including salmon and redwoods, who serve as a symbol of spiritual connectivity of the Tribe (Manning and Reed, 2019) (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Map of current Yurok Tribe reservation, reclaimed ancestral lands, and total ancestral land boundaries (as of January 28, 2025). Source: Courtesy of Yurok Tribe Geospatial Information Technology Program.

While the Yurok Reservation was created in 1855, the present form of Tribal governance is under forty years old. Once a single, combined reservation, the Yurok and Hoopa Valley reservations were split by the Hoopa Yurok Settlement Act in 1988, at which point the Yurok Tribe did not have an organized government on its own. The Tribe's constitution was then ratified in 1993. As a young tribal government, the Yurok Tribe is at a point where a new guard of political figures and influencers is stepping into the roles that the first wave of leaders is now exiting. This is a pivotal time for redefining, or doubling down on, priorities for the future.

The Tribe is allocating many resources towards its economy of Tribal institutions (forestry, education, etc.) that directly benefit its citizens. This economy is the backbone of tribal sovereignty. It is a large part of the Tribe's constitution, which supports ongoing stewardship of the lands with the help of Good Fire (i.e., cultural/prescribed burning), which we will discuss at length in Section 2A. As a river and forest-based people, the Yurok Tribe has developed a circular forestry model rooted in kinship between humans and more-than-humans. This model centers cultural resilience, biodiversity, human physical and emotional wellbeing, as well as economic sovereignty.

However, like most other Tribes in the United States, The Yurok's current footprint is much smaller than it once was due to, in part, violent land dispossession by the federal government and settler colonists. In present day (2025), the Tribe exerts sovereign autonomy of only 13% (65,028 acres) of its ancestral territorial land (488,533 acres), while nearly 40% of Yurok ancestral land is presently owned and managed by California or the U.S. Federal Government (See Figure 3). Another 36% of Yurok ancestral land is owned by non-Tribal private timber companies. ³

Figure 3.

Yurok ancestral land, reservation, and land recovery (2021–2025) ( as of January 01, 2025). Source: Courtesy of Yurok Tribe Geospatial Information Technology Program.

When the Yurok was forcibly removed from its ancestral land, the Tribe not only lost much of its forest. It was also prevented from stewarding the forest in traditional ways by the USDA Forest Service (USFS) and U.S. Federal Government. Native Americans were threatened, barred, and imprisoned as punishment for their Good Fire practices that introduced frequent, low-intensity burns onto the landscape to sustain a more balanced forest that provided food and shelter to humans, birds, deer, and other species (Huntsinger et al., 1994; Norgaard, 2022; Vinyeta, 2022). In fact, fire played a crucial role in the balance of the landscape. This restriction on the Yurok and many other Native groups throughout North America has been a driving contributor towards megafires throughout the West (Vinyeta, 2022). Now, the West pays the price. California has been shaken in recent years by megafires, with 13 of the state's 20 most destructive fires occurring since 2017 (Biswas et al., 2023). As the literature has finally begun to affirm the importance of low-intensity and high-frequency burning in Western landscapes (Miller et al., 2020), land management agencies have now admitted that prescribed burning is necessary to maintain healthy forests and limit the risk of extreme wildfires. Tribes have known this all along. Thus, Tribes like the Yurok must have their rightful agency restored to conduct burns on ancestral lands, without permission from the State, which is not an ultimate authority over tribal sovereignty.

The following section illustrates the Yurok CE, which is centered on forest-based reciprocity. For thousands of years, Yurok fire stewardship has sustained a dynamic relationship with the forest ecosystem. The land provided food, shelter, and medicine. While we occasionally use the term “products” to describe forest-based goods in this paper, we emphasize that this does not reflect Western capitalist notions of commodification. Even when forest goods are sold, Yurok cultural values guide their use: revenues support elders, youth, and Tribal constitutional priorities. The forest is not seen as a resource to exploit, but as a subject and a living relation, not an object of extraction. Within this relational economy, the Yurok harvest, produce, and circulate goods in ways that bolster cultural, environmental, and economic sovereignty. Though capital still plays a role in the Tribal economy, it is mobilized with circular intent to support life, not to maximize profit. Unlike dominant Western models that prioritize shareholder returns and linear growth, Yurok economic practices are embedded within spiritual and ecological frameworks that shape how land is tended, cared for, and lived with. As such, for the Yurok more broadly, wealth accumulation is not seen as a means to an end, but rather plays into greater relational contexts between Tribal spirituality and the shaping of ecosystems on that basis.

The yurok: A circular economy of good fire and forested abundance

Every IndCE centers around Tribe-specific land characteristics and stewardship practices that keep circularity flowing. The mixed evergreen forests of the Yurok dictate the flow of its economy, composed of Coastal Redwoods, Douglas Fir, Sitka Spruce, Western Hemlocks, Port Orford Cedar, and Tanoak. As with other models of the IndCE, the Yurok's CE is rooted in thousands of years of ecological knowledge and the Tribe's continued relationship with the ecosystem. The Yurok's interaction with the landscape is not a mere “land management strategy”. It is a web of culturally-informed ecosystem engineering that relies on cultural burning, or Good Fire. The Yurok Circular Economy depends not only on its forests, but also on the ability for the Tribe to participate in cultural burning to realize the full potential of the IndCE. The use of Good Fire is not just an exercise of Tribal sovereignty – it is the hub of the circular spinning wheel, which allows benefits to branch-out to Tribal members and the ecosystem in a web of mutuality.

To begin with an example, the longstanding tradition of Yurok basket-making relies on forest materials that only can survive in the presence of Good Fire, such as Willow, Hazel, Beargrass, and Fern. These baskets remain a symbol of beauty and prestige for Tribal people. Basketry highlights one of the many facets of circularity that drives the current economy. While Yurok must participate in some parts of the capitalistic economy to survive in a colonized world, the Yurok people remain resilient to assimilation by adhering to the cultural and ecological benefits of symbolic goods. As the high value of basketry has been translated into modern currency, Yurok basket-makers may choose to sell their baskets for thousands of dollars to realize economic gain that reflects the time and cultural knowledge safeguarded for generations to make these baskets. ⁴

Basketmaking is not just an important revenue stream. It is a fundamental part of Yurok livelihood that benefits Tribal members emotionally, socially, and physically. For instance, the physical activity of basket-material gathering puts Yurok people in direct connection with the landscape and provides mental and spiritual fulfillment. Personal satisfaction may be gained by keeping alive longstanding cultural practices that connect generations of Yurok tribal members in learning, sharing, and passing on knowledge that ties directly back to the forested landscape. The exercise from gathering reduces expenses that people put into health issues like diabetes (Burrows et al., 2000).

Yurok baskets are also used by mothers as a meaningful place to rest and connect with their children after giving birth. Infants are afforded special security when placed into their “baby baskets”, which provide comfortable sleeping and a “home away from home” for many tribal babies even as they accompany their mothers for long drives, days of work in the office or in the field, or shopping for food or goods. These baby-baskets are typically kept within a family for a lifetime, even as infants mature into adulthood, creating a life-long connection to their own basket. Security and intergenerational connection are both priceless in ways that we do not feel appropriate to try and measure. These benefits are the kinds of deep social, cultural, and ecological benefits that stem from the IndCE to drive forward the Yurok People.

The following six sections discuss the elements that fully flow together to comprise the Yurok Circular Economy - Good Fire, Timber & Carbon Projects, Non-Timber Forest Products, Food Sovereignty, Habitat, Culture & Community. Through the exercise of fire-centered forest stewardship, the Tribe has access to culturally relevant resources that benefit the Tribe, such as food, medicine, watershed services, and habitat for culturally and spiritually important beings such as the California Condor and Pileated Woodpecker (Gori and Backer, 2005). These diverse forms of value represent what goes unseen in Western economic models, including circular ones.

For instance, Western circular forestry models typically focus on transforming usable forest biomass into the highest value product with less waste or recycling less-than-desirable forest biomass into valuable products (Merklein et al., 2016). However, Western approaches to forest circularity require substantial infrastructure, consistent and repetitive harvesting and reforestation, and largely ignore interconnected systems biodiversity, species habitat, and wider human impact like food and culture. Though still adhering to sustained yield systems, the Yurok Circular Economy also focuses more on building a more balanced and multi-species system for forest management that considers long term human and more-than-human goals beyond profitability and scale, such as food, habitat, belonging, and cultural transmission, which we discuss in depth here.

Good fire

Traditional Yurok food sources and non-timber forest products (i.e., medicine, basket weaving materials) are suited best for growth in fire-managed forest that includes prairies and oak savannas, which allow for berries, roots, nuts, and grasses (Pyne, 2016). Without frequent low-intensity fire at the hand of the Yurok, prairies gave way to dense stands of conifers (Miller et al., 2020). U.S. fire suppression policies have caused conifers to encroach upon the previously abundant fire-landscape of the Tribe. In 1948, Yurok reservation lands contained 4086 acres of rich prairie land. By 2015, there were less than 200 acres (see Figure 4), a drastic decrease of 95%.

Figure 4.

95% prairie loss across Yurok reservation.

What was once a rich and diverse landscape, has now been homogenized at the hand of the American state's fire suppression policies. This suppression of TEK and the resulting ecological homogenization mirrors the similar attempt of cultural erasure and homogenization into American “whiteness” that Native boarding schools and forced assimilation attempted to thrust upon Native Peoples for decades (Adams, 2020). ⁵

When white settlers first arrived in California and found Elk and Deer grazing in lush prairies filled with browse, many assumed that this was the “natural” state of the “wilderness” unaffected by the engagement of Native people; instead, their presumption of fire's evil has led to the dark, unproductive, monospecific conifer forests that dominate California's landscape more with each passing decade (Cronon, 1996; Huntsinger and McCaffrey, 1995). Their assumption could not have been more untrue. All elements of the more-than-human world in California have co-evolved with Native peoples, like the Yurok, as they managed the landscape with fire, selected species to provide food, and balanced holistic ecosystem health.

Now, as the truth of Good Fire has emerged across California, the U.S., and even the world (Steffensen, 2020), non-Tribal agencies and organizations such as Cal-Fire or the USFS finally recognize the ecological and cultural benefits of Good Fire. They even integrate prescribed burns into their own management practices to reduce catastrophic wildfire risk. But, it is not enough for the U.S. Government to simply adopt the practices they once criminalized. Tribes like the Yurok are still prevented from burning according to their cultural norms by State and Federal agencies and deprived of the funding to properly manage forests (IFMAT, 2023). Tribes would like to utilize TEK according to their own goals without the control or influence of outside organizations (Vinyeta, 2022). These endeavors sometimes take multiple eras to carry out, as Tribes develop long term partnerships with NGOs with a greater voice and funding stream. It is an essential notion of Indigenous sovereignty to not only be able to freely burn, but be allocated specific funding to return the knowledge, labor, and efforts as reparation for over a century of suppression.

For instance, the Cultural Fire Management Council (CFMC) works to promote cultural fire practice on the Yurok Reservation. Their mission is to bring fire back onto lands that have needed it for over 100 years. While their early work is seeing much success, they still face many fiscal, bureaucratic, and doctrinal barriers. Training and compensating Yurok fire stewards takes time and money, which other state and federal organizations can more easily accomplish given greater funding and the assumption of liability. The Yurok must spend countless hours applying for grants or jumping through California's bureaucratic hoops to develop their own burning program that has long been ignored by the State. Sovereignty over such a culturally important resource management tool is vital for safety of the communities and the protection and continuance of resources. Further, much of the land surrounding the Yurok Reservation is owned and managed by Green Diamond Resources, one of the largest timber extraction companies in the U.S. (Yurok Tribal Codes 21.25.040, 2004). Green Diamond does not share the same stewardship priorities. For years, Green Diamond sprayed herbicides in Yurok Ancestral forests, which increased cancer risks to Tribal members. It is only through constant pressure from the Yurok that Green Diamond appears willing to reduce pesticide use in Yurok ancestral forests and take fuel reduction seriously, according to internal documents of the firm (Green Diamond Resource Company, 2023).

Additionally, the funding paradigm that currently exists for cultural fire practitioners will often treat a fire department and an Indigenous organization equally in terms of their purposes and effects, which ignores the many key differences between a fire department and an Indigenous cultural burning organization. Fire departments exist for fire suppression and fire safety, and their practices are derived from a militaristic relationship with land and fire (Pyne, 2016). Cultural fire is cultural, relational, and spiritual; it is not only an act of care for the land and for the community proximal to the land, but also the community of practitioners who utilize the forest.

As demonstrated, Good Fire is the foundational element of all Yurok forestry-based economies: lumber, medicine, and culture. These benefits also extend to restoring traditional food systems by creating habitat for non-timber forest species, including plants, animals, and fungi.

Timber and carbon projects

Today, Yurok forestry is working to center and enhance relational and cultural forestry approaches even as the Tribe participates in more western models of forest-based revenue generation. The Yurok and their forests are embedded in a complex fabric of ownership, management and values in what is known today as the north coast of California. Though practices on public lands shifted in the 1970s and 1980s with environmental legislation, large industrial private owners continue to grow and harvest trees in the highly productive sites of coastal California (Marcille et al., 2020). These non-Tribal land owners drive the forest products economies, through timberland management and wood product mill ownership, and are directly adjacent to Yurok lands. Wood biomass harvested on Yurok lands travels off-reservation to facilities in nearby or more distant towns, such as Arcata, CA. When this occurs, the Yurok Tribe loses money on transportation costs and outsources skilled labor and knowledge of sustainable forestry practices that the Tribe could leverage to build out its own capacities.

To strengthen its Indigenous circular economy, the Yurok has endeavored to purchase its own portable sawmill and kiln so that it can produce its own timber products, but it has faced many barriers. A Yurok-owned mill and kiln could significantly reduce freight costs and other value loss, provide construction lumber and other wood products for Tribal use, such as housing for Tribal members and schooling for Yurok youth. Beyond investing in mill infrastructure, the Yurok is seeking to invest further in forestry training and education for Tribal members. Other opportunities may include the establishment of biochar and bioenergy production on Tribal land, which could establish permanent Yurok energy sovereignty so that the Tribe could produce and sustain energy from its own forests, reducing reliance on fossil-fuel based energy from Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E).

The Yurok Tribe is also one of the first Indigenous nations in North America to participate in forest carbon markets (Manning and Reed, 2019). Today, over 25,000 acres of Yurok forestland are enrolled in carbon offset projects, which generate revenue by storing carbon and selling credits through California's cap-and-trade system. These funds have allowed the Tribe to buy back ancestral land stolen by the federal government and then sold to timber companies like Green Diamond Resources (Manning and Reed, 2019). These carbon projects (called Improved Forest Management, or IFM) require the Tribe to maintain or increase carbon storage in their forests for up to 80 years. While these projects help generate income, they also impose certain limitations. The Tribe must follow external rules that can restrict traditional practices like cultural burning or certain forms of timber harvest, activities that are key to maintaining forest health and Indigenous lifeways. Indeed, carbon markets are not an absolute good. They loom in shadows of controversy. Critics argue they can reinforce colonial control over Indigenous lands (De La Fuente and Hajjar, 2013). Even so, for the Yurok in the present day, they’ve provided crucial financial leverage to recover territory and support broader ecological goals, such as watershed restoration and wildlife habitat.

However, to truly support Tribal sovereignty and stewardship, carbon protocols must evolve. They need to account for the value of practices like cultural fire, which may release small amounts of atmospheric carbon in the short term but prevent massive wildfires in the long run. These types of devastating fires release far more carbon, damage ecosystems, and devastate human settlements (French et al., 2011; Larkin et al., 2014; Shiraishi and Hirata, 2021). Although IFM projects now include some fire-based strategies, cultural burning still faces barriers due to the risk of carbon loss (Haya et al., 2023). Recognizing and integrating Indigenous land practices like Good Fire into these frameworks would strengthen both forest resilience and Tribal economies. For the Yurok, carbon markets are just one of many tools to restore land, culture, and long-term ecological health.

As we have shown here, retaining wood products in the local Yurok economy, relying on carbon projects to acquire ancestral land, and exploring emerging technologies for capturing value from forest restoration have already supported the growth of the Yurok IndCE, and will undoubtedly continue to do so as the Tribe grows.

Non-Timber forest products (NTFP)

In addition to timber and carbon, Yurok forests contain a diverse array of non-timber forest products (NTFPs). The Tribe uses hazel and willow for basket weaving and medicines, beargrass and maidenhair fern for weaving, and yew for bows. Grass seeds and other spiritually important plants are also gathered (Huntsinger and McCaffrey, 1995). These NTFPs thrive across inland grasslands, riparian zones, transitional forests, and managed oak/redwood stands, which all require frequent Good Fire (Huntsinger and McCaffrey, 1995; Manning and Reed, 2019). Fire enhances NTFP quality, promoting straight shrub growth for weaving, and managing pathogens, fungi, and invasive species (Kamelamela et al., 2023; Manning and Reed, 2019).

The greatest value of non-food NTFPs in Indigenous economies is cultural. They provide invaluable materials for ceremonies and sustain spiritual and territorial ties. NTFPs are essential for keeping cultural arts alive and passing knowledge across generations. Yet, Yurok basket-weavers have long faced harassment, exposure to herbicides, and fire suppression impacts (Huntsinger and McCaffrey, 1995). They have organized against harmful forestry practices, led by groups like the California Indian Basketweavers Association (CIBA), which works to protect species, prevent chemical use, and preserve traditional techniques (Weigand, 2002). Baskets also provide vital intergenerational learning and income, serving as a pillar of timeless Yurok cultural resilience.

Other circular NTFPs similarly support the Tribal economy. In regions like the Klamath, NTFPs offer opportunities for local income and international trade (Suleiman et al., 2017). They serve as safety nets, supplementing household income (Kamelamela et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2022). Tribal enterprises (i.e., herb harvesting, tea making, basketry) circulate wealth locally while reinforcing cultural identity. Baby baskets, for instance, are high-value cultural goods that contrast with consumerist single-use childcare items. Though costly, they keep capital within the community and symbolize relational, not extractive, economies. In external markets, such artisanal goods also command high prices, drawing outside capital into the Tribe and strengthening cultural and economic sovereignty.

Food sovereignty

Historically, Yurok ancestral lands have been rich in traditional foods. However, colonization and forced assimilation disrupted this, halting access to forests and banning burning practices that supported traditional food systems. These foods grow in several ecotones: forest, river, valley, and coast. Today's persisting forest foods include tanoak acorns, mushrooms, huckleberries, hazelnuts, deer, and elk (Sowerwine et al., 2019). Riverine and coastal species such as chinook, coho, green sturgeon, steelhead, mussels, clams, candlefish, and seaweed also remain essential (Diver, 2016).

Unsurprisingly, Good Fire and active stewardship benefit these species, too. Cultural burns open forest understories, improving mobility, pruning, hunting, and gathering; all key to supporting traditional food access for humans and animals alike. Western forestry's suppression of fire has not only harmed these food systems, but also contributed to Yurok food insecurity. 92% of Tribal households in the Klamath Basin experience food insecurity, with 64% relying on assistance. Furthermore, 84% report diet-related health issues, often linked to lack of access to traditional, healthier Native foods (Sowerwine et al., 2019). These health disparities are rooted in colonial strategies to undermine food sovereignty and erase culture.

A Yurok circular economy recognizes landscape wellbeing and food sovereignty as inseparable from Good Fire. Revitalizing cultural burning supports key food species and preserves the knowledge to sustain them. Yurok nutrition is intimately tied to this ecological balance. Indeed, in a circular system, each food source supports others in the cycle. A healthy oak tree with pounds of acorns might owe its growth to a deer clearing understory, or a cultural burn that reduced competition. In turn, that oak can feed hundreds for generations. The forest is not just a food source. It is a dynamic network of interdependent relationships, sustained through Yurok stewardship.

Habitat for the more-than-human

Many ancestral Yurok forests were clear-cut under BIA management in the 1900s. They were often treated with herbicides to suppress native species like tanoak. Today, they are still avoided by birds, insects, mammals and other wildlife due to their degraded habitat quality (Blake, 2018). In contrast, Yurok Tribal management and stewardship shapes the landscape in such a way that creates small but necessary habitat features that form over hundreds of years. The Northern Mockingbird, for example, is found only within small pockets of Northern California. One of the areas in which it flourishes is within Yurok tribal boundaries (Zeiner et al., 1995). Cavity-dwelling species, like mockingbird, cannot survive in forest habitat shaped by clear cutting and a lack of Good Fire. Based on Yurok traditional knowledge and forester reportings, mockingbirds are far more abundant in traditionally managed Yurok forests, as opposed to Green Diamond clear-cut forests that abut Yurok land.

While the Yurok Tribe now receives grant funding to support the future of endangered species such as the Humboldt Marten, tribal cultural practice and cultural fire have always been key drivers of long-term ecological processes necessary for the survival of these species. This is especially true in a changing world, and in the context of mixed property ownership and management (Slauson et al., 2019). While there is now greater monetary support available for the protection of endangered species, without proper stewardship of their habitats, they still will not survive; fire suppression efforts have removed key features, especially decadent features like snags and fallen logs, that form integral and necessary components of the habitats of Humboldt Martens, Northern Mockingbirds, and many other species under threat.

Culture, community, and intergenerational knowledge

The Yurok Indigenous circular economy provides both emotional and physical nourishment to the Tribe. A thriving food system invites humans onto the land and into water to harvest, hunt, forage, garden and fish, for food, medicine, and weaving materials. Together, this collective effort strengthens sociocultural wellbeing, along with promoting the availability of culturally significant foods like salmon, elk, and acorns. Hunting, fishing, gardening, and processing of traditional foods all require physical movement, which benefits human health and reduces risk of sedentary health conditions, such as diabetes which runs rampant amongst Indigenous communities in North America (Burrows et al., 2000). Reduced dependence on food retailers through strong local food systems also helps households save money. Further, hunting, gathering, and forestry skills are typically passed down from generation to generation. Sharing these skills between Yurok members of all ages promotes intergenerational social connection and transfer of culturally significant knowledge that can contribute to long term sovereignty.

As the traditional Yurok language and skillsets are remembered again after decades of intentional suppression by state actors, new skills are being acquired and shared. In the last 25 years, the Yurok have positioned themselves as a global Indigenous leader in fields of climate science, GIS, Indigenous business, fishery management, LIDAR and Forestry-centered AI, carbon markets, and sustainability (Lombardo et al., 2023; Meyer, 2022; Manning and Reed, 2019). Part of the Yurok IndCE is balancing the Tribe's resilient commitment to its ancestral language and skills while also adapting to meaningfully engage with wider Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities across the world.

A sovereign economy is a sustainable one

As we have demonstrated, the full development of an IndCE is a requisite component of Tribal sovereignty. Many timber companies manage forests for the extreme short term (i.e., 20–40 years), with the primary goal of profit-maximization and shareholder return (Creutzburg et al., 2017). The USFS and other federal agencies work on a slightly longer time scale with a less singularly-focused management strategy. However, under the hand of USFS, forests are still managed within the ebbs and flows of wood-products markets and federal funding cycles. In contrast, Yurok managed forests are conceptualized for generations to come. The Yurok perspective is that trees and forest species operate on a timescale of hundreds of years. Not decades. In the life cycles of the forest, fire is the life blood of constant birth and regeneration. Without fire, the forest stagnates and eventually collapses under its own weight. As we have demonstrated, regular, low-intensity burns have innumerable benefits for the Yurok peoples and their landscape, which even includes atmospheric carbon sequestration to mitigate climate change (Long et al., 2021; Wiedinmyer and Hurteau, 2010). As such, Indigenous sovereignty goes hand-in-hand with long-term ecosystem health and climatic resilience. In the same way that ecosystem health is shifting back into balance through endless efforts by Yurok advocates and allies, we underscore that the Yurok IndCE is not static and locked in time. While the Yurok IndCE may have been more powerful before colonial impediment, it still persists with strength today. It is resilient and in constant evolution.

Discussion – rethinking CE through IndCE

The Yurok IndCE, as we have shown, is not a relic or an exception. It is a functioning, adaptive, and sovereign political economy organized around fundamentally different premises than those CE discourse takes for granted. Understanding why CE cannot see it requires turning the critical lens back on CE itself.

Corvellec et al. (2022) offer the most comprehensive systematic critique of CE to date, outlining its biophysical contradictions, economic blind spots, and political silence. Their analysis demonstrates that dominant CE frameworks exclude social equity, sideline the Global South, and reproduce the very growth logics they claim to transcend. Yet even within this critical literature, a significant gap remains. Existing CE critiques still largely operate from within a neoliberal political economy, leaving intact the epistemological foundations that treat nature as object, communities as policy targets, and alternative economic rationalities as peripheral. No sustained engagement with Indigenous epistemologies or ontologies appears in the CE critical canon. We take up that opening here. Rather than adding onto the limited, but still robust, critical taxonomy that Corvellec et al. (2022) offers, we ask what an empirical encounter with a functioning Indigenous circular economy reveals that critique alone cannot. The Yurok IndCE does not simply expose what CE lacks. It demonstrates what a different set of epistemological premises concerning authority, regeneration, responsibility, and reciprocity makes possible.

First and foremost, the Yurok IndCE demonstrates that circularity is fundamentally a question of political authority, not merely of technical or financial design. Corvellec et al. (2022) note that CE frameworks rarely interrogate their own governance assumptions, positioning firms, markets, and technologies as the default agents of transformation. However, critique does not illustrate what alternative governance looks like in practice. The Yurok IndCE does. Rather than emphasizing supply-chain optimization, technological innovation, or infrastructure development as pathways to a desired “sustainable” end-state, Yurok circularity is organized through a complex web of history, cultures, and relationships, alongside Indigenous governance institutions, treaty right negotiations, and sovereign jurisdictions over land and water. Practices such as cultural burning, forest stewardship, weaving, harvesting, and land recovery are not motivated purely by shareholder return or profit maximization, but are exercised through political authority grounded in longstanding territorial relationships and localized, collective decision-making. Circularity, in this sense, cannot be separated from land tenure regimes and the regulatory demands of the state. Without sustained examination of the jurisdictional powers governing water and land, circularity remains fragile and vulnerable to co-optation. This suggests that CE frameworks must move beyond material-flow analysis to account for the means by which markets and governance continuously reshape the relationships among actors (humans, waters, lands, more-than-human species) through which economic value is generated and sustained.

Second, the Yurok IndCE reframes the notion of economic circularity from a project of waste minimization and profit maximization to one of socio-ecological regeneration and critical reflection on the nature of human-nature relations. Where CE discourse typically defines circularity primarily in terms of closing material loops, reducing landfill waste, and improving resource efficiency through reuse, recycling, and remanufacturing (Kirchherr et al., 2017), the Yurok IndCE understands circularity as the ongoing regeneration of reciprocal relationships among humans, land, species, and future generations. Practices such as Good Fire, basketry material stewardship, habitat restoration, and food sovereignty sustain these relationships rather than optimizing throughput or profit. Regeneration, in this sense, is not merely a question of restoring native species or clearcut forest, but is also ethical and cultural, rooted in obligations of care, reciprocity, and intergenerational responsibility – a moral architecture CE discourse has historically refused to name. This relational orientation cannot be captured by lifecycle assessments, carbon accounting, or efficiency metrics alone. The Yurok model therefore challenges proponents of circularity to clarify what values their frameworks ultimately serve, and whether they operate as genuine alternatives to market rationality or merely mobilize the language of ecological governance most legible – and most attractive – to investors.

Third, the Yurok IndCE challenges the growth-oriented assumptions embedded in much CE discourse. While CE is often presented as a corrective to linear extraction, it frequently remains committed to economic expansion, scalability, and competitiveness, framing circularity as a means to sustain growth through technological innovation and free-market consumerism. The Yurok Tribe is not opposed to technology or market participation (the Tribe deploys LIDAR to measure forest health and is actively seeking to expand timber sales into national and global markets) but it has consistently prioritized cultural continuity and long-term ecological stewardship over profit accumulation. Economic activities are evaluated according to their capacity to sustain cultural practices, ecological balance, and community wellbeing across generations, rather than their contribution to ever-expanding markets or increasing output. Revenue from timber, carbon projects, and non-timber forest products is mobilized to support elders, youth, land recovery, and cultural revitalization, rather than reinvested for continuous expansion. This orientation reflects an economic ethic grounded in obligation and responsibility rather than growth-above-all. CE's structural commitment to growth may be at odds not only with the ethics at the heart of IndCE, but also with any place-based social arrangement that seeks economic organization outside growth-first models.

Finally, the Yurok IndCE exposes the limits of technocratic governance for managing socio-ecological systems and points toward what lies beyond it. Mainstream CE relies heavily on standardized metrics, optimization models, and quantitative performance indicators to govern environmental action, rendering nature “legible” through accounting frameworks and benchmarks that can be scaled and applied to any geography (Kirchherr et al., 2017; Scott, 1998). The Yurok Tribe is indeed building its scientific research departments and expanding its data-driven decision-making capacity, but much of Yurok economic governance also operates through cultural protocols, ethical obligations, and situated judgment informed by history and lived experience. Values such as kinship, respect, care, and reciprocity guide decisions about burning, harvesting, and habitat management alongside (and sometimes above) quantitative indicators. These forms of governance sustain ecological resilience precisely because they are embedded in social relations and moral commitments, not despite of them. Such complex webs of relation have historically been cast aside or branded as “irrational” by colonial land and legal regimes precisely because they have not conformed to the simplicity and legibility desired by state regulatory processes (Coulthard, 2014; Scott, 1998). In this light, we argue that proponents of CE must move beyond technocratic decision-making and instead work alongside, recognize, and respect the situated moral, cultural, and relational commitments of the communities whose lands and waters anchor global supply chains – not as a concession, but as a condition of genuine circularity.

Conclusion: policy & praxis

Having outlined the core components of the Yurok IndCE and demonstrated both its vitality and its theoretical implications for CE discourse, we conclude by examining the structural barriers that constrain its ongoing development. Indeed, its continued flourishing depends on transforming the institutional conditions that currently limit sovereign stewardship. In what follows, we leave readers to consider two interrelated sets of constraints. First, we examine funding and infrastructural barriers that restrict the Tribe's capacity to fully sustain and expand its circular forestry economy. Second, we analyze the legal and policy frameworks that govern land tenure, fire management, and resource extraction, many of which derive from settler-colonial property regimes and continue to fragment Tribal jurisdiction. Although grounded in the Yurok context, these challenges resonate across Indigenous nations within the United States and internationally, where similar struggles over authority, land, and long-term stewardship persist.

Funding: opportunities for collaboration and support

The first obstacle is a systematic lack of funding, education, and resources for the Tribe to re-establish an IndCE. Practices such as Good Fire, forestry, and fishing depend on cultural practitioners who can steward the forest according to customary ways. Before the violent disruption of Tribal boarding schools, which sought to eradicate Indigenous languages, practices, and governance (Adams, 2020), knowledge was transmitted through networks of mentors, coming-of-age ceremonies, and other relational, intergenerational methods. As Tribes reassert sovereignty after years of fragmentation, knowledge transfer must reach increasingly dispersed members. Tribally-led schools and institutions are thus crucial. The Yurok provide youth education on career paths, Tribal responsibility, land restoration, and pathways for belonging and autonomy. Programs also ensure elders have access to education and dignified physical activity (e.g., forest surveying, firewood and medicine gathering, and fire tending). Workforce training, including initiatives like the Yurok Wellness Court's Diversion Program, reduces unemployment and recidivism while transmitting cultural skills.

These programs require sustained labor, staffing, and financial resources. After more than a century of disruption by the American state, rebuilding the Yurok IndCE demands long-term investment. Most state and federal funding is short-term and project-based, misaligned with Indigenous governance, and administratively burdensome, diverting staff from stewardship and cultural revitalization. Long-term funding and capital investment are critical, especially for infrastructure weakened by decades of rural and Tribal disinvestment. Currently, harvested logs travel several hours from Yurok forest to the nearest off-reservation mill over difficult roads. Investments in transportation and tribally owned processing facilities would allow the Tribe to capture greater value while strengthening economic sovereignty.

Large capital assets, such as a tribally owned wood products mill, could reduce hauling distances and support long-term economic vitality, following examples like Menominee Tribal Enterprises (WI) and Makah Sawmill (WA). Additional infrastructure (i.e., biochar kilns that convert forest “waste” into energy) could further advance circular forestry while reinvesting value into Tribal revitalization efforts like energy sovereignty.

While federal and state funds (e.g., Inflation Reduction Act, USFS) are available, accessing them is energetically and financially taxing, subject to political fluctuations, and often insufficient. Philanthropy can help, but coordination also imposes significant burdens. Reliance on external grants alone cannot sustain the Yurok IndCE. More durable pathways lie in strengthening sovereign economic practices rooted in circular forestry. The Tribe's cap-and-trade program has enabled the reacquisition of ancestral forests, and expanding tribally controlled forestry enterprises (including climate-smart timber and NTFP) can grow greater value while reinvesting in cultural, ecological, and community wellbeing.

Law and policy as a lever for change

The second barrier to the IndCE is a collection of antiquated federal and state land management laws or policies that either (a) currently prevent the tribe from exercising full sovereign circular stewardship on the land it currently “owns” under Western land regimes (i.e., reservation land); or (b) still keep the Yurok off of their ancestral land (outside of reservation land) that is now occupied by the state or private actors.

Federal and state policy across Indigenous lands in North America remains deeply contested. Historically, state institutions have facilitated land dispossession, undermined treaty obligations, and contributed to the suppression of Indigenous cultural and governance systems. In this way, legal and policy frameworks have often functioned as instruments through which Indigenous nations were pressured to assimilate into the broader political and economic structures of the United States. While policy reform alone cannot remedy these histories of dispossession, it remains an important mechanism for redressing past harms and an often underrecognized dimension of Tribal–state responsibility.

Many barriers to implementing the Yurok IndCE stem from conflicting priorities among Tribal, federal, state, and private landowners. There are many policy tensions between circular Yurok forestry, state and federal “multiple use” and “sustained yield” policies, and private profit motives. Despite growing recognition of the North Coast's ecological and economic significance (Marcille et al., 2020; USDA, 2020; Wang and Lewis, 2024), federal and state priorities still center on timber sales and wildfire risk reduction for public health, infrastructure, and emissions (Goss et al., 2020; Rosenthal et al., 2021). These aims often conflict with Tribal objectives, leaving the Yurok to navigate a fragmented policy landscape. As such, structural policy shifts are needed to remove these barriers so that the Tribe can steward forests in culturally appropriate ways.

The most immediate policy challenge lies in the complex “red tape” regulations surrounding Good Fire. Land “owners” who choose to conduct prescribed burns on their land carry significant liability risks, often discouraging them from burning (Miller et al., 2020). Although new training and certification programs have improved access, liability concerns and smoke restrictions continue to limit cultural burning (Long et al., 2021). The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) has often been unwilling to assume Tribal liabilities, revealing a federal reluctance to honor trust responsibilities and support sovereign fire practices. To date, some progress has been achieved through AB 642, which established a Cultural Burning Liaison within CAL FIRE and a statewide intertribal training network (Rivas, 2021), but there is still more to be done.

Other legal frameworks also shape Yurok land use and NTFP harvesting. Statutes such as the Endangered Species Act, the Lacey Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) can restrict resource use, even when they contain Tribal exemptions. ⁶ Future co-management or land-into-trust arrangements will need to navigate these overlapping regulations. Ultimately, meaningful policy reform must move beyond symbolic inclusion to enable genuine Tribal sovereignty in land stewardship, ensuring that circular Indigenous economies can thrive on a Tribe's own terms.

Furthermore, state and public landowners must make honest efforts to return Yurok ancestral land. As we illustrated earlier, most ancestral Yurok land is currently used for industrial timber production or as national and state parks. Indeed, the Yurok Tribe can only steward between 20% and 30% of its ancestral forest land through conventional “ownership” and private property laws of the American state. To exercise sovereign forest management, the Tribe must reclaim its ancestral forest to perform fire-based land stewardship beyond its existing reservation landbase. Ideally, this would occur through completely returning ancestral lands, or possibly through co-management with private and public organizations. However, meaningful co-management must allow Tribes to influence and shape the land management plans for sovereign purposes (i.e., fuels reduction, food sovereignty, landscape restoration).

Summary/highlights

• Dominant circular economy (CE) discourse reproduces colonial extractive logics by rendering nature abstract and commodified.

• We introduce Indigenous Circular Economies (IndCE) as distinct political-economic formations grounded in sovereignty and relational obligation.

• Yurok Good Fire, forest stewardship, and food sovereignty constitute an economy of regeneration irreducible to CE metrics.

• Circularity is not a technical design problem but a question of political authority and epistemic justice.

• Resourcing IndCE is a prerequisite for just transition, not a supplement to dominant CE frameworks.