Governance
Nevada City Rancheria Tribal Council
CHIRP STAFF
CHIRP BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Nevada City Rancheria Tribal Council
RICHARD JOHNSON, Tribal Chairman
Current sitting Tribal Chairman of the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe Richard Johnson was the last male child to be born on the Nevada City Rancheria reservation land. When he was two years old, he and his brother, along with the other Tribal children, were forcibly removed from the Tribal reservation, their families and Culture, and put into foster care. Though Richard was raised away from his Tribal family, he was able to spend time during the summers at the Rancheria with his grandparents, Pete and Margaret Johnson.
Richard is an author of the book History of Us, that details the legacy of injustices perpetrated against his family and the rest of the Tribal membership. Richard came back to the Culture later in life, but embraces the privilege to stand in this leadership position as Tribal Chairman.
VIRGINIA COVERT, Vice Chairperson
Virginia “Ginger” Covert is the first female Tribal Chairperson of the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe. Virginia comes from a long line of leadership and her ancestry stretches back countless generations before the gold rush. Born in1945, Ginger’s generation was devastatingly affected by the boarding school experiences of her parents’ generation: a generation that was terrified to pass on cultural knowledge to their children for fear of persecution, racism and bigotry. Regardless of these fears instilled at the hands of Indian boarding schools, Native people of this generation became pivotal activists in the resurgence of pride in Native Culture and advocacy for the environment, animals and people.
Ginger currently serves as Vice Chairperson on the Nevada City Rancheria Tribal Council and holds a position on CHIRP’s Board of Directors, solely to be occupied by a Tribal Council member of the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe.
SHELLY COVERT, Tribal Spokesperson
Shelly Covert is the Spokesperson for the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe. She sits on the Tribal Council and is Community Outreach Liaison. She is also the Executive Director of the non-profit, CHIRP (the California Heritage: Indigenous Research Project), whose mission is to preserve, protect and perpetuate Nisenan Culture. Nisenan Ancestral Homelands are located in the foothills of Northern California. Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribal members are direct, lineal descendants of the original Nisenan families who were here before gold was "discovered" in their waterways, bringing on the gold rush. All Tribal members remain in their Ancestral Homelands today. The Nevada City Rancheria was terminated through an act of Congress in 1964 and their reservation was sold. The Tribe still awaits the reversal of this termination.
Shelly curates CHIRP’s Visibility Through Art initiative with artist and Art Coordinator Mira Clark. It is through this explorative art initiative that we seek community conversation, depth of understanding and personal relevance in the traumatic history of the gold rush that took place in Nisenan Homelands.
LORENA DAVIS, Council Member
Lorena Davis serves as Treasurer on the Nevada City Rancheria Tribal Council. She was the fourth daughter of seven born to Dutch and Carmel Rose. Lorena lived much of her childhood “outdoors” with her parents as they followed opportunities for Dutch’s employment. Her early childhood experiences paired with her teenage years in the 1960’s brings a truly interesting lens to growing up as a Native girl in modern America. Elvis, the Beatles, poodle skirts, bouffant hairdos - against a backdrop of living in the woods without a house, give her an Elder’s insight that most of us couldn't imagine today. Lorena’s kindness and innate need to help guide her leadership style in the Tribe.
SARAH THOMAS, Council Member
Sarah Thomas is the youngest of Dutch Rose’s daughters. She has six children and like the majority of her Tribal family, remains here in the Homelands of her Nisenan Ancestors. Sarah sits on the Tribal Council of the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe. Through recent art exploration, a true artist has been revealed in Sarah. Her pencil sketch of ‘ustomah, the original Nisenan word for what is now Nevada City, expresses a deep seeded longing for her Culture to be seen. In the sketch, modern day Nevada City sits atop ‘ustomah, depicting the way Nisenan Culture remains hidden underneath our modern American identity. Her brave expression of this longing to be seen is revealed beautifully in her newfound artistic awareness.
SAXON THOMAS, Council Member
Saxon Thomas was elected to the Nevada City Rancheria Tribal Council when he was 18 to represent the Youth voice of the Tribe. Saxon’s warm demeanor and wide scope of interests continues to enhance his skills in Tribal leadership. His curiosity has culminated in his knowledge today around family history, genealogy and the social interactions of many different people during the gold rush. Saxon’s mother, Sarah Thomas is of Nisenan descent and his father, Scott Thomas, is of Cornish descent. The Thomas’ were founders of Nevada City as well as the Champion Mine, giving Saxon a unique perspective on the clash and interactions of cultures during the gold rush. Saxon is a full-time CHIRP employee and continues to gain depth in leadership for his Tribal people.
Tribal Council Photographs courtesy of Sean Leydon
Members of the Nevada City Rancheria Tribal Council (left to right)
Saxon Thomas, Lorena Davis, Richard Johnson (Tribal Chairman), Sarah Thomas, Virginia Covert (Vice Chairperson), Shelly Covert (Tribal Spokesperson)
CHIRP
Staff
Photo by Lori Lachlan
SHELLY COVERT, Executive Director
Shelly is the Spokesperson for the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe. She sits on the Tribal Council and is the Community Outreach Liaison. Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribal members are direct, lineal descendants of the original Indigenous people who were here thousands of years before the gold rush. With the efforts to restore federal recognition to the Nevada City Rancheria, her work has taken on a wider scope that includes social, environmental, and racial justice topics that impact the Tribal community and their wellbeing. Undoing the erasure of Nisenan history has been at the forefront of Tribal efforts and a focus for CHIRP. Raising the visibility of the Nisenan through community outreach, public events, and education has been of great importance as the Tribe struggles with the reintroduction of its Culture and identity. As Tribal liaison, Shelly works closely with the Elders, Tribal Council, and Tribal members, to identify the areas of greatest need, and then guides CHIRP as Executive Director, to develop and implement projects and find funding.
Board of Directors
CHIRP
Photo by Kim Sayre
JULIE BAKER, President
Julie is the CEO of Californians for the Arts and California Arts Advocates (Sacramento). As the CEO of California’s statewide arts advocacy organizations since 2018, Julie has worked to increase the legislative clout and visibility of the arts and culture communities by building coalition across the for and non-profit sectors of California’s creative industries, championing a month-long arts awareness and advocacy campaign every April, and fighting for resources and legislation to serve and protect artists and cultural workers. She has served as the California State Captain to Americans for the Arts’; National Arts Action Summit, the co-chair of the creative economy working group at the CA Economic Summit and as the recent co-chair of the Western Arts Advocacy network for WESTAF. She is the board president of California Heritage: Indigenous Research Project and was elected to the Nevada County school board in November of 2020. She is also an appointed member of the State of California’s 2022 Entrepreneurship & Economic Mobility Task Force (EEMTF). Julie is the recipient of the 2021 Americans for the Arts Alene Valkanas State Arts Advocacy Award that honors an individual at the state level whose arts advocacy efforts have dramatically affected the political landscape.
Over the years, Julie has owned a fine arts gallery for emerging artists, co- founded Flow art fair — a satellite to Art Basel Miami Beach — opened a consulting firm Julie Baker Projects and curated an annual world music series at the Crocker Art Museum. Earlier in her career she was President of her family’s arts marketing firm in New York City and worked at Christie’s Auction house before moving to California in 1998. Julie also served for eight years as the Executive Director of The Center for the Arts, a non-profit performing arts venue and California WorldFest, an annual music and camping festival located in Grass Valley, CA. She is the recipient of the inaugural Peggy Levine Arts & Community Service Award from the Nevada County Arts Council.
NIKILA BADUA, Vice President
Working under the guise of "MamaWisdom1", Nikila is a Cultural Community Artist from the Hawaiian Islands, raised between Oahu and the Bay Area. Self-taught in the multidisciplinary arts as a muralist, designer, performer, and arts educator, she has dedicated her skills to serving cultural, environmental, youth, and social justice projects for over 25 years.
Nikila has painted walls from California to New York, Hawaii to Puerto Rico, including murals for clients such as: Hawaiian Airlines, Pow Wow Hawaii, Worldwide Walls, Covered California, and many California Indigenous Tribes. She is a long time member of Bay Area Arts Collective Audiopharmacy, Hawaii’s Mana Maoli Collective, a long time affiliate of Native Hawaiian organizations Huli and La Hoihoi Ea, and sits on the Board of the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe’s 501c3 - California Heritage: Indigenous Research Project (CHIRP).
VIRGINIA COVERT, Board Director
Virginia “Ginger” Covert is the first female Tribal Chairperson of the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe. Virginia comes from a long line of leadership and her ancestry stretches back countless generations before the gold rush. Born in 1945, Ginger’s generation was devastatingly affected by the boarding school experiences of her parents’ generation: a generation that was terrified to pass on cultural knowledge to their children for fear of persecution, racism and bigotry. Regardless of these fears instilled at the hands of Indian boarding schools, Native people of this generation became pivotal activists in the resurgence of pride in Native Culture and advocacy for the environment, animals and people. Ginger currently serves as Vice Chairperson on the Nevada City Rancheria Tribal Council and holds a position on CHIRP’s Board of Directors, solely to be occupied by a Tribal Council member of the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe.
ELIZABETH SÖDERSTRÖM, Treasurer
Elizabeth is a senior program officer at the Water Foundation. She has spent the last several decades working at the nexus of program strategy and philanthropy delivering resources to address environmental issues in the water sector. Previously, as part of the Strategic Partnerships team at the Water Foundation, Elizabeth helped develop and deliver on fundraising strategies.
Before joining the Water Foundation, Elizabeth was Senior Director of Conservation and Development at American Rivers and launched initiatives on in-stream flows and mountain meadow restoration. Prior to that, she was Director of the Sierra and Africa Rivers Program at the Natural Heritage Institute where she led programs in adaptive management in the context of river restoration and floodplain management.
For four years, she was Science, Engineering and Diplomacy Fellow at USAID’s Regional Center for Southern Africa based in Botswana. There, she worked on transboundary river management with a focus on the Okavango River. Elizabeth serves on the boards of the Consensus Building Institute, Stockholm Environment Institute – US, and TreeSisters. She also sits on the advisory board of the South Yuba Citizens League. She received a BA in English Literature, a BS in Biological Sciences, and an MS in Biological Sciences from Stanford University and a PhD in Wildlands Resource Science and River Science from UC Berkeley. Elizabeth lives with her husband, daughter, several dogs, goats and chickens on a tiny farm in Nevada City, CA.
RICHARD JOHNSON, Board Director
Current sitting Tribal Chairman of the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe, Richard was the last male child to be born on the Nevada City Rancheria reservation land. When he was two years old, he and his brother, along with the other Tribal children, were forcibly removed from the Tribal reservation, their families and Culture, and put into foster care. Though Richard was raised away from his Tribal family, he was able to spend time during the summers at the Rancheria with his grandparents, Pete and Margaret Johnson. Richard is an author of the book History of Us, that details the legacy of injustices perpetrated against his family and the rest of the Tribal membership. Richard came back to the Culture later in life, but embraces the privilege to stand in this leadership position as Tribal Chairman.
Photo by Justin Nunink
MARIE SZOBO, Board Director
Marie was born on the Humboldt coast in Arcata, California. When she was two her family moved to the Sierra Nevada foothills in the Yuba River watershed in Northern California, to pursue their dream of farming and living off the land. She was raised on their small farm whose surrounding lands were originally occupied by the Nisenan people before the cultural and environmental decimation that occurred at the hands of expansionist migrants and settlers during the gold rush, and has come to be known as Nevada City (the Nisenan still survive in tragically small numbers and continue to fight for visibility and Federal recognition).
Marie grew up surrounded and deeply touched by music—going to bluegrass festivals and listening to her father’s bluegrass band—but held no particular personal musical ambitions. However, she taught herself to play the guitar at 18 while volunteering at a school for Mapuche children in Patagonia, Argentina, and wrote her first songs here while taking refuge from the Patagonia winds indoors. She continued finger picking and writing songs and would make two home-recorded albums purely at the urging of friends. In 2007 she released her first studio album, Faces in the Rocks, on which she collaborated with Native American flutist Gentle Thunder and which achieved a dedicated cult following that would propel her career to this day. She began touring Europe as well as North America and has continued ever since.
Photo: Alyssa Rice
JOSIE ANDREWS, Recording Secretary
Josie came into contact with the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe in 2014 while working in her capacity as a librarian for Nevada County. With other County staff, Josie helped spearhead an MLS grant, culminating in: the first Nisenan collection of written materials housed today at the Doris Foley Library in Nevada City, a digital kiosk containing Tribal stories, songs, histories, and a contact timeline, a four part Nisenan speaker series, which highlighted Nisenan Language and Cultural revitalization, and finally, helped to produce the book, ‘Ani’to’o’pe that features Nisenan Tribal Elder Carmel Rose Jackson. Josie works in her current capacity as a librarian at Nevada Joint Union High School and serves on the CHIRP Board as Secretary.