“I can’t really describe it,” Richardson said of that day’s event, which took place along the shores of the Rappahannock River. “Incredible. Surreal. Emotional.”

“I felt like we were surrounded by ancestors who had lived there thousands of years ago. We were standing in their hopes and their dreams for their people.”

Richardson is the chief of the Rappahannock Tribe, and on that Friday afternoon, her tribe took back more than 460 acres of ancestral land along the river that shares her tribe’s name. Last month, her tribe reclaimed another 960 acres of its homeland, too.

It took 350 years. It took survival, after her tribe was forced off of its homeland by English settlers in the 1600s, virtually erased by white supremacists in the 1900s and endured centuries of persecution sanctioned by the U.S. government.

It also took a new kind of partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, as the Biden administration forges ahead with what it hopes will spur a seismic shift in the way the government approaches managing public lands: inviting tribes to be co-stewards of the land their ancestors were forcibly or illegally removed from by the government.

Since President Joe Biden took office, Haaland and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack have signed off on nearly two dozen co-stewardship agreements with tribes. There are another 60 co-stewardship agreements in various stages of review involving 45 tribes. Haaland and Vilsack launched this effort in November 2021 with a joint secretarial order directing relevant agencies to make sure their decisions on public lands fulfilled trust obligations with tribes. In November 2022, the Commerce Department signed onto their order as well.

The Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management have since produced a co-stewardship guidance document, too.

To make sure their mandate trickled down to the practical, day-to-day activities of their tens of thousands of federal employees, Haaland’s and Vilsack’s order specifically requires that co-stewardship efforts be discussed in individual employee performance reviews.

Why is this a BFD? For starters, it likely means the U.S. government’s management of millions of acres of pristine public lands and natural resources will be better with tribal voices engaged. They have extensive and traditional knowledge of how to sustainably care for their land, and that, in turn, can play into efforts to mitigate climate change.

“The history of federal public lands cannot be separated from the history of tribes,” said Monte Mills, a law professor and director of the Native American Law Center at the Washington University School of Law. He wrote a 2020 white paper on tribal co-management possibilities.

“So one core starting point for redefining this relationship is the historic and continuing connections tribes have with these landscapes,” said Mills. “To have tribal folks weighing in on decisions on how lands should be managed benefits landscapes and benefits all of us.”

On a deeper level, tribal co-stewardships are simply a matter of justice.