Native American tribes have called the Chesapeake Bay home for thousands of years, so, for tribal members, it’s hard to understand why they don’t have a voice in the long-running campaign to restore the massive estuary.

On Tuesday, top officials of the states and federal agencies in the organized effort to clean-up the bay took a step toward righting that.

For four decades, these government leaders steered the Chesapeake Bay cleanup assuming all the important players were in the conversation, said Reggie Stewart, second assistant chief of the Chickahominy Indian Tribe in Virginia.

“We’ve helped them understand: ‘Well, wait a minute, we don’t have everyone at the table,’” he said.

Stewart is a member of the Indigenous Conservation Council of the Chesapeake Bay, a group formed in 2022 to represent seven federally recognized tribes in Virginia. The tribal coalition has asked for representation on the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Executive Council, formed in 1983 to oversee the effort to restore the bay ecosystem that had been depleted by generations of industrial and farm pollution.

The tribes originally hoped to be signatories on the new Chesapeake watershed pact, approved by governors from across the watershed in a landmark meeting Tuesday at Baltimore’s National Aquarium. That request was rebuffed this summer, though, and the Executive Council members instead approved a six-month study including the tribes, due for completion by July 1.

At Tuesday’s meeting, tribal leaders sat in the front row of the audience while other state heads — governors Wes Moore of Maryland, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, Matt Meyer of Delaware and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, and Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington, D.C. — ratified the new agreement, which maps out the cleanup effort until 2040.

The governors met privately with the tribes ahead of Tuesday’s vote, and Moore, who invited the tribal leaders to attend, acknowledged them in an opening statement.

“We know that the work of this commission would not be complete without the ICC,” Moore said of the tribal coalition, “without your leadership, without your guidance, and without making sure that our tribal lands and our tribal peoples are deeply ingrained with any future vision that we have.”

Frank Adams, chief of the Upper Mattaponi Indian Tribe, said he was disappointed that his coalition didn’t achieve their initial goal to become signatories on this new bay agreement, but they did make progress this year.

“That we have opened the door to have a conversation is a victory for us,” he said.

There are no federally recognized Native American tribes based in Maryland, and the seven Virginia tribes received that recognition relatively recently. The federal government recognized the Pamunkey Indian Tribe’s sovereignty a decade ago, becoming the first tribe in the Chesapeake watershed to achieve this status, while the remaining six were recognized in 2018.

Melissa Ann Ehrenreich, executive director for the Indigenous Conservation Council, said she hopes to see officials move quickly to include the tribes now that the process has begun.

“We really wanted to be honored and respected,” she said. “Not exploited, not extracted, but fully engage the tribes alongside of restoration effort.”

Before European settlers arrived in the mid-Atlantic some 400 years ago, the Chesapeake Bay was a healthier and more vibrant ecosystem, its waters teaming with fish, crabs and oyster reefs, and its banks ringed by lush marshes.

“It’d be nice to get that back,” said Barbara Orf, a councilwoman from the Nansemond Indian Nation. “We just want a seat at the table to help get it there.”

The Virginia tribes’ push comes as the Save the Bay movement faces political headwinds under President Donald Trump and, some advocates fear, flagging public motivation for the multibillion dollar effort.

The new watershed agreement has drawn criticism from bay advocates for lowered ambitions compared with the previous pact from 2014.

Adams said he expects the plan would have looked a little different had the the tribes been at the table.

“All of these years, we’ve been doing the same thing. I think that’s the definition of insanity,” Adams said. “Why not let the tribes in to get a different perspective?”

Anna Killius, director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, which represents state legislatures on the bay Executive Council, declined to comment beyond Tuesday’s decision except to say, “Respectful and inclusive partnership is the keystone of the Chesapeake Bay Program.”

Among their asks, Ehrenreich said, the tribes want to see Indigenous knowledge of the Chesapeake Bay incorporated into the restoration on equal footing with Western science.

Ehrenreich said the tribes have asked to be collectively represented by one new member on the Executive Council, though as sovereign governments, she pointed out, the seven tribes each have a claim to their own seat.

The tribal coalition hopes to inject new energy into the bay movement.

“Remember that the bay agreement is only 40 years old. So if people are getting tired, there’s no better group to look at,” Ehrenreich said, “than Indigenous communities who have been here for thousands of years.”