Chilula

A people

Old-growth coast redwoods in the Lady Bird Johnson Grove, with mist among the trunks along the loop trail.
Tony Webster, Wikimedia Commons / Flickr · CC BY-SA 2.0

Background

Redwood National and State Parks describes its shared stewardship of coast redwood forests, waterways and coastline as covering the homeland of the Yurok, Chilula and Tolowa peoples. The park's area history says assorted groups of the North Coast region made the redwood forests and their ecosystems their home since time immemorial, spoke many different languages, and held numerous and distinct identities, with no one tribe dominant. It names four of those languages as still living, Tolowa, Yurok, Hupa and Karuk, spoken by a handful of cherished elders, and it says the descendants of those people live on and off reservations across the redwood region today. The Bureau of Indian Affairs list published on January 30, 2026 carries no entry for the Chilula.

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Parks on its homelands

Old-growth coast redwoods in the Lady Bird Johnson Grove, with mist among the trunks along the loop trail.Redwood National and State Parks

The Chilula and the Yurok regularly burned the Bald Hills prairies, and NPS credits that fire with the tanoak acorn harvest, the grass seed production and the deer and elk hunting the area supports. Riverbank lupine bloomed on Childs Hill and Williams Ridge in 1999, two years after a prescribed burn there, and again in 2009 after the 2007 burn. Source

Sources

Checked September 2026.

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