Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed two bills championed by California’s Native American tribes on Sept. 30, five days after he signed a law formally apologizing to the state’s Native peoples for harms inflicted by state policy.
One bill would have compelled state agencies to address water shortages facing tribes and sent disputes over water projects in a tribe’s ancestral territory to mediation. The other would have barred the state from substantially interfering with tribal religious practices on state land without a compelling reason. Tribal leaders said the vetoes leave them shut out of decisions about their ancestral waters and sacred places, CalMatters and ICT reported.
The water measure, Assembly Bill 2218 by Assemblyman Ash Kalra, a Santa Clara County Democrat, was co-sponsored by the Karuk Tribe and the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians. It would have set a state policy to address water-related inequities, required the State Water Board to consult any tribe whose ancestral territory included a water body at issue in a water-rights investigation, required agencies to offer tribes financial assistance, and created a mediation process run by the Governor’s Office of Tribal Affairs that paused an agency’s action while the two sides talked.
The second, Assembly Bill 1881, known as the California Indian Freedom Act of 2026, was written by Assemblyman James Ramos of San Bernardino, a Democrat and the Legislature’s only Native American member. State agencies could not have meaningfully interfered with religious practices on state land unless they showed a compelling reason and chose the approach that interfered least. Only tribes could sue to enforce it, and agencies would have had to obtain a tribe’s written consent before significantly changing a site they knew to be sacred.
“Tribal members are routinely questioned or harassed for wearing regalia or carrying ceremonial items in public places,” Mr. Ramos, a member of the Serrano/Cahuilla tribe and a former chairman of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in July. “We have the right to assemble and practice our customs and traditions in a state whose ancestral lands are traditional lands of Indian people.” His bill also would have treated restrictions on regalia at state buildings as a burden on religious practice.
Mr. Newsom wrote in his veto message on the water bill that it was “not sufficiently clear about how its new policy will be implemented” and that “adding new sources of uncertainty will delay our urgent fight to secure Californians’ water supplies.” Of Mr. Ramos’s bill, he wrote that he was “sympathetic to the goals of this measure” but that it could have “far-reaching impacts” on state operations and property, adding that “this uncertainty calls for further discussion and review.” His office referred a request for comment to the veto messages.
“Tribes need to be at the table when decisions are being made, not brought in after the important decisions have already been made,” said Russell “Buster” Attebery, chairman of the Karuk Tribe. Malissa Tayaba, vice chair of the Shingle Springs Band, called the water veto a “backhanded betrayal of California tribes and a direct contradiction of his apology and promises of reconciliation.” Her tribe can sue or file formal objections to water projects, she said, but those steps guarantee nothing, and the status quo contributes to “a decimation” of salmon runs.
Business and water interests had fought both measures. The Association of California Water Agencies said the water bill created a “new and poorly defined standard under the Water Code,” and Andrea Abruzzo of the California Municipal Utilities Association, which represents more than 80 public utility agencies, told a Senate committee in July, “We cannot say with certainty how this bill will be implemented and what its impacts will be on water supply.” The California Chamber of Commerce welcomed the vetoes, saying the bills would have erected “serious legal barriers” to water storage and infrastructure.
Neither bill drew a no vote in the Assembly, though 23 members withheld their votes on the water bill and 15 on the sacred-sites measure, many of them Republicans. Not voting counts the same as voting no.
The episode closed a reconciliation arc Mr. Newsom built over years. In June 2019 he signed an executive order apologizing to California Native Americans, who he said “suffered violence, discrimination and exploitation sanctioned by (the) state government,” and created a Truth and Healing Council. On Sept. 25 he signed Assembly Bill 2115, formalizing the apology. On Sept. 30 he declared a Day of Remembrance for Indian Boarding Schools — the state was home to 13 federal boarding schools between 1892 and 1974 that forcibly removed thousands of Native children — and vetoed the two tribal bills the same day. Ms. Tayaba called the timing “ironic.”
Mr. Newsom, who cannot run for re-election, also signed a package of tribal bills making Native American Day a paid state holiday and the Governor’s Office of Tribal Affairs permanent, and his office says the state has returned more than 100,000 acres to tribes. Kasil Willie, policy director of the group Save California Salmon, was unmoved: “Newsom acknowledges the state’s historical violence against California’s Indigenous People, but when given the chance to rectify those harms and finalize the bills … he disappointed us and failed to follow through.”
Ms. Tayaba said tribes would keep pushing for consultation and co-stewardship of their lands and waters. “His apology, what does it really mean?” she said. “Man, did he really hurt us on his way out.”