Co-Stewardship, Co-Management and Land Back: A Plain-Language Guide

In 1908, Congress set aside more than 18,000 acres within the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana as a refuge for bison, and for more than a century the federal government ran it as the National Bison Range. At the end of 2020, Congress passed legislation restoring that land to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. The bison stayed. The managers changed.

That one story touches most of the vocabulary conservation groups now run into when they talk about working with tribal nations: consultation, co-management, co-stewardship, land back. The terms get used loosely and sometimes interchangeably, which can lead to confusion, mismatched expectations and, occasionally, offense. This guide sorts them out, walks through four real examples, and ends with first steps for a land trust or conservation group that wants to do this work well.

A short glossary

Tribal sovereignty. Federally recognized tribes are governments with a nation-to-nation relationship with the United States. Many tribes without federal recognition are still distinct peoples with deep ties to particular places, and some are recognized by their states.

Consultation. A formal process in which federal agencies seek tribal input on actions that may affect tribes, required under several laws and under Executive Order 13175, signed in 2000. Consultation obliges an agency to listen. It does not oblige the agency to agree.

Co-stewardship. A broad umbrella term federal agencies have used for collaborative arrangements with tribes on public lands and waters. It can cover anything from an agreement to share information to a formal arrangement for joint management.

Co-management. A narrower term for arrangements in which tribes and another party share real decision-making authority over land, water or wildlife, usually spelled out in a written agreement.

Land back. A movement and a goal: returning land to Indigenous ownership and control. In practice it ranges from transferring title outright to arrangements that restore meaningful tribal authority without a change in ownership.

Trust land and fee land. Trust land is held by the United States for the benefit of a tribe, with particular federal protections and restrictions. Fee land is owned outright, the way most private land is.

Conservation easement. A legal agreement that permanently limits development or certain uses of land while ownership stays with the landowner. The easement holder, usually a land trust or public agency, monitors and enforces it.

Cultural-use agreement. An arrangement that gives a tribe access to land it does not own for gathering, ceremony, teaching or other cultural practices, often with provisions for privacy and for protecting sensitive sites.

A spectrum, not a switch

It helps to picture these arrangements as points along a line that runs from tribes being heard to tribes being in charge.

At one end sits consultation, where the decision-maker asks for tribal views and weighs them. Next come collaborative agreements: shared projects, shared data, joint monitoring, tribal crews paid to do restoration, with the agency or landowner still holding final authority. Further along is co-management, where the authority to decide is itself shared. At the far end is transfer, where land returns to tribal ownership in fee, in trust or through some combination.

No point on this line is automatically right for every place and every tribe. One tribe may want a strong co-management role on a national forest and have no interest in owning it, given the costs and liabilities that come with ownership. Another may regard anything short of title as a half measure. Conservation groups should not guess where a particular tribe wants to land. They should ask, and then accept the answer.

Four examples worth knowing

The Bison Range, Montana

The National Bison Range was carved out of the Flathead Reservation, the tribes' own reserved homeland, and for decades the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes sought a role in running it. Earlier attempts at shared management with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service broke down. The lasting change came through legislation. The Montana Water Rights Protection Act, passed by Congress as part of a large spending package in December 2020, restored the range to the tribes, with the land held in trust for them by the United States. The tribes now manage it as the Bison Range.

Two lessons stand out. Return written into federal law is far harder to undo than an agency agreement. And the long record of arrangements that didn't work shaped what the tribes and their allies asked for when the opening finally came.

Bears Ears, Utah

Bears Ears National Monument began with a proposal from a coalition of tribes. The monument was designated in 2016, sharply reduced in 2017 and restored in 2021. In 2022, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service signed a cooperative agreement with five tribes (the Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and the Pueblo of Zuni) to manage the monument together, with the tribes participating through the Bears Ears Commission.

This is co-management on federal land with no transfer of ownership. The land stays public, the tribes sit at the table with the agencies in a formal role, and tribal knowledge is meant to inform management. The history of the monument's boundaries is also a reminder of how exposed such arrangements are to politics, since what one administration designates or agrees to, another can revisit.

The 2021 joint secretarial order

In November 2021, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack signed Joint Secretarial Order 3403, on fulfilling the federal trust responsibility to tribes in the stewardship of federal lands and waters. It directed land management agencies within the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture, including the Forest Service, to pursue co-stewardship with tribes. It called for agreements with tribes, for Indigenous knowledge to inform decisions, and for consultation to carry more weight. Agencies signed a wide range of co-stewardship agreements in the years that followed, from data sharing to joint management of particular sites.

The Esselen Tribe and the Little Sur

In 2020, the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County regained about 1,200 acres near Big Sur on the central California coast. Western Rivers Conservancy, a nonprofit that buys land along rivers to protect fish and wildlife habitat, purchased the property and transferred it to the tribe, with funding from a state grant. The land includes a stretch of the Little Sur River and old-growth redwoods. Coverage at the time noted that it was the first land the tribe had held in its homeland in roughly two and a half centuries. The Esselen Tribe is not federally recognized, which meant many federal routes for land return were closed to it.

Land trusts should study this example closely. It shows a conservation nonprofit doing what it already knew how to do, which was buying land with a conservation purpose, and then placing that land with the people who have the deepest relationship to it.

Tools a land trust already has

Most land trusts will never be party to a federal co-management agreement. They do hold land, hold easements and raise money, and each of those can support tribal stewardship.

Easements held for or with tribes

A land trust can transfer land to a tribe and hold a conservation easement on it, or a tribe can hold an easement on land the land trust owns. Some states have amended their conservation easement laws to make clear that tribes can hold easements; California is one example. Federal tax law treats tribal governments like states for certain purposes, including charitable gifts, but the details are technical, and a land trust should work with lawyers who know both easement law and federal Indian law.

Easements on returned land call for a careful conversation. For some tribes, an easement is a welcome way to reassure funders and lock in habitat protection. For others, a permanent restriction held by an outside group on land that has only just come home feels like the opposite of sovereignty. There is no standard answer, only the one the tribe and the land trust reach together.

Cultural-use agreements

On land it keeps, a land trust can grant tribes access for gathering plants, ceremony, teaching and other practices. Good agreements settle practical details: how access is scheduled, whether the public is kept out during ceremonies, how the locations of sensitive sites stay confidential, and how either side can raise a concern. They should be written so they survive staff turnover on both sides.

Transfers

A land trust can buy land intending to transfer it, act as a bridge buyer while a tribe raises funds, or transfer land it already owns. Each route raises questions about donor intent, about who pays for long-term stewardship, and about whether the tribe wants fee ownership or wants to seek trust status, which is a separate federal process. Raising a stewardship endowment alongside the land, instead of handing over property with no money to care for it, is one of the most useful things a land trust can do.

Shared management

Short of transfer, a land trust can share decisions on its own preserves through a joint management committee, paid tribal restoration crews, cultural burning where it is legal and safe, and restored place names on signs and maps.

A note on federal policy

Federal priorities shifted in 2025, and agencies stepped back from many of the commitments and programs of the previous four years. Arrangements created by statute, such as the Bison Range restoration, rest on firmer ground than those created through agency agreements or secretarial orders, which later administrations can revise. For a land trust, that is one more reason to concentrate on what it controls: its own land, its own easements and its relationships with tribes in its region. None of those depend on who runs a federal department.

What to do first

1. Learn whose homeland you work in. Identify the nations with ancestral ties to your service area, including tribes that were removed and now live far away, and tribes without federal recognition.
2. Reach out before you have a project. Contact tribal governments through their designated offices, often a tribal historic preservation officer or a natural resources or cultural department, and ask how they prefer to be approached. Expect this to take time.
3. Pay for people's time. Tribal staff and knowledge holders are constantly asked for unpaid advice. Budget for honoraria and consulting fees from the start.
4. Review what you hold. Look through your properties and easements for places with cultural significance, and consider where access or shared management could begin now, without waiting for a grand plan.
5. Check your documents. Bylaws, easement templates, acquisition policies and state law may all need attention before you can transfer land or share decisions. Find out early.
6. Bring your board and donors along. Explain why this belongs in your mission. Our brief on diversifying conservation offers background, and historians such as Dorceta Taylor, profiled on our people page, have documented how the early American conservation movement was bound up with the removal of Native people from the places it set out to protect.
7. Let the tribe set the pace. Some relationships lead to a transfer within a few years. Others lead to a cultural-use agreement and stay there. Both are legitimate outcomes.
8. Protect confidential knowledge. Do not publish site locations or cultural information without explicit permission, even in a press release celebrating the partnership.

For more on how organizations have structured this kind of work, see our collection of co-stewardship and access initiatives. The bison on the range in Montana did not notice when the managers changed. The people who had waited a century for that change certainly did, and that difference is what all this vocabulary is ultimately about.

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