The Redding-based Native Roots Network wants to create a resource for the mostly rural Bella Vista community when wildfire and other emergencies hit and become a place where the group’s members can hold Native American-focused cultural events.
Thanks to two recent rounds of grant funding Native Roots collected recently, there are plans to create a community center that’s equipped with solar and battery backup power in case of electricity outages.
The center would also have a good air filtration for smoky days and climate control systems to handle the region’s hot weather, said Jonathon Freeman, director of strategy and innovation at Native Roots, an Indigenous-led grassroots advocacy nonprofit.
This aging structure is located on land in Bella Vista owned by Shasta County nonprofit Native Roots Network. A Community Resiliance Center is planned for the 4.5-acre site.
In times of extreme heat, heavy smoke or wildfire evacuations, he said, “people would have a place to go inside” to access “fire information sytems, access Wi-Fi, all of those different types of things that we need.”
Explained Freeman: “For us, our primary intention is going to be a Native-focused community center, but we’re going to be working beyond that.”
Vision for ‘The Granary’
The nonprofit is continuing to solidify its plans for the 4.5-acre site that now contains a “beat up old shop” building that is in need of significant upgrades, he said.
Members of the Native Roots Network nonprofit on site at Əl Kulus in October, discussing the kinds of programs they’d like to see at the upcoming Community Relience Center in Bella Visa, CA.
In February, the nonprofit received a grant for $470,813.69 — the maxiumum amount — from the California Strategic Growth Council.
The CSGC funds are part of a total of $5 million in grants California provided to support communities as they “build resilience to climate change,” according to the state’s press release.
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Freeman, who said the two-year planning grant collected by Native Roots “will support us in mapping out all that needs to be done for our next big steps” in conjunction with recommendations from Shasta County regarding zoning.
Members of the Native Roots Network nonprofit gathered in October 2024 to prep garden beds for the planting of Swiss chard in spring 2025 at what will become the nonprofit’s Əl Kulus Community Relience Center in Bella Vista, California.
After that, Native Roots will be seeking additional grant funding to develop and implement the center, he said. Construction could start in about three years, he said.
The group is now working with an architectural firm conducting soil and tree studies and investigating opportunities to build an energy-efficient space.
Under its current zoning, a small commercial venture, such as cabinet making, could take place on the property.
He called the group “really conscious of keeping Bella Vista, the sense of its rural nature, rural. We appreciate being a good neighbor and so we don’t have any intention of doing something that’s going to be out of character of the area.”
Community Resilience Center ‘on our terms’
The group will also be looking to develop the center “on our terms,” he said, “not just putting Native identity on top of a standard Western way of doing business. Whatever we do is going to be grounded in that value system.”
For instance, he pointed to the way that job training might be included at the site for young people aged 18 to 22.
That effort could include land restoration teams that reduce overgrowth in the area that could feed wildfires, but that also advance “traditional ecological knowledge around the caretaking of different traditional foods and traditional fibers and different things that were used in the past,” said Freeman.
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Small-scale housing for people in its job training programs are being considered for the site.
“Part of that is based on our understanding that we’ve learned from our elders that our role is supposed to be gardener, caretaker of the Earth. And when we take care of the Earth, then it’s like a reciprocal relationship that we we’re reestablishing in that the Earth will take care of us.”
The group’s proposed resilience center has been given the Wintu name “Əl Kulus,” which translates into English as “the Granary.”
That name has traditional cultural significance, Freeman said, as the Əl Kulus property is home to oak trees:
“The oaks produce acorns once a year and then traditionally the people would gather all the acorns (to) process and then store them in granaries that would then allow them to eat acorn year round. So that in a way is a metaphor of the place — that we could resource people year-round.”
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Michele Chandler covers dining, food, public safety and whatever else comes up for the Redding Record Searchlight/USA Today Network. Accepts story tips at 530-338-7753 and at [email protected]. Please support our entire newsroom’s commitment to public service journalism by subscribing today.
This article originally appeared on Redding Record Searchlight: Native American-led group eyes ‘resilience center’ in Shasta County
