Amah Mutsun Tribal Band

Background

On August 21, 2026 the Department of the Interior published notice that the group known as the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band of the Mission San Juan Bautista has filed a documented petition for federal acknowledgment with the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs. The Band is not on the current list of federally recognized tribes. The Amah Mutsun Land Trust calls itself an initiative of the Band and the vehicle by which the Amah Mutsun access, protect and steward lands that are integral to their identity and culture, and gives Popeloutchom as its word for Amah Mutsun ancestral lands. On December 30, 2025 the trust acquired a fifty-acre property at the junction of Highways 129 and 101 in San Juan Bautista, which it calls the tribe's first regained full access rights to land in its traditional territory since a forced removal more than 225 years earlier. The property's Mutsun name, tooromakma hinse nii, means bobcats wander here. A second property, the 540-acre Nyland parcel permanently protected on June 23, 2023 through a partnership of regional land trusts, carries the name Awnicmintac, meaning place of the turtle.

Visit and learn

Amah Mutsun Tribal Band's own site

Tribal lands have their own laws. Check the nation's site before you visit.

Parks on its homelands

Pinnacles National Park

Since 2008 the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band has run a cooperative habitat restoration project with Pinnacles National Park, and on April 27, 2013 it signed a memorandum of understanding with the park. NPS gave the band its George B. Hartzog, Jr. group award for outstanding volunteers, which recognized its grassland restoration work and its elders reintroducing burn methods in a deergrass meadow. Source

Programs

• Amah Mutsun Land Trust

  An initiative of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band that buys and holds land in Amah Mutsun ancestral territory. Its lands acquisition page records the fifty-acre San Juan Bautista purchase of December 30, 2025, the 540-acre Nyland parcel protected on June 23, 2023, and the Juristac land at Sargent Ranch, where Peninsula Open Space Trust has purchased and permanently protected 2,284 acres, bringing its holdings there to more than 6,100 conserved acres.

  https://amlt.org/lands-acquisition·land

Affiliations

• Pinnacles National Park

  Members of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band volunteer and take part in eco-cultural restoration projects in the park, and park staff credit them with helping reintroduce indigenous landscape management and restore native plants.

  https://www.nps.gov/pinn/learn/historyculture/native-peoples.htm

Sources

• https://www.nps.gov/pinn/learn/historyculture/native-peoples.htm
• https://amlt.org/lands-acquisition
• https://amlt.org/
• https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-01-30/html/2026-01899.htm
• https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/08/21/2026-17054/receipt-of-documented-petition-for-federal-acknowledgment-as-an-american-indian-tribe

Checked September 2026.

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