Tribes and Tribal Management

Multiagency Effort Spawns Giant Forest, Recreation Project in Pend Oreille County

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From the Spokesman-Review here via the Forestry Source. Note: “This is the first time that a tribe is doing environmental analysis for the forest service using state funds.”

Twenty years ago, the proposal being presented at public meetings in January for forest restoration and recreation projects on 90,700 acres in Pend Oreille County would only have been a pipe dream.

That was at the height of the “timber wars,” pitting pro-logging interests against environmentalists and bringing logging to a halt.

The project area north of Newport and east of the Pend Oreille River is a patchwork of tribal, state, federal and private lands. This is the first time that a tribe is doing environmental analysis for the forest service using state funds. When complete, it should vastly improve forest and watershed health for all land owners with a bonus of increased recreation opportunities.

Project area land owners are: Colville National Forest, 41,600 acres; Kalispel Tribe of Indians, 3,700 acres; Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR), 8,200 acres; private, 37,000 acres; and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, 200 acres.

All the actual work in the project will be done on forest service land, but the partners hope others will follow, especially private timber land owners. The DNR and Kalispel Tribe have been working on forest health and watershed improvements on their land already.

This project is the culmination of years of increasing forest fire danger caused by poor forest management and a new spirit of collaboration between forest managers and some environmentalists. It is also a milestone for this new-age management, because it is the first project in the nation with so many partners working on this large of an area.

But it isn’t without challenges.

“Get past the feel-good part and reality is, it is hard to get agreements,” said Gloria Flora, project coordinator for the Sxwuytn-Kaniksu Connections Trail Project. “We proceed with caution.”

The Kalispel Tribe refers to the project as Sxwuytn (s-who-ee-tin), a Kalispel Salish word that roughly translates to connection or trail. This planning effort is also referred to as Kaniksu Connections to acknowledge the building and strengthening of connections and relationships across landscapes and boundaries.

Flora said that everyone won’t agree with what the group proposes and challenges in court are possible. But she said she feels that “old-school protests” need to change.

She points to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals statements last year in the ruling in favor of the Colville National Forest and its large A to Z forest restoration project in Stevens County. The court said the environmentalists objecting had a chance to be at the table in the planning process and should have been involved but weren’t.

Flora has been at the table for forest planning projects for many years. She has worked 23 years in forest management around the country with the past seven in this region.

She founded and directs Sustainable Obtainable Solutions, a nonprofit organization that works to ensure the sustainability of public lands. Her former forest service career included serving as forest supervisor on two national forests.

Given the scale of forest health problems in Eastern Washington, the DNR, federal agencies and other partners agree that to meaningfully reduce wildfire and forest health risks, it will take coordinated actions across land ownership boundaries at a watershed scale. The forest land owners can’t just work their patches independently or not at all.

Australians and US Wildfire, Similarities and Differences: I. Knowledge of Traditional Burning Practices

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Hot fires such as this over large stretches of country can have detrimental effects on all sections of the forest depleting the seed stock and promoting germination that is too intense, destroying ground cover, and destroying canopy and the fauna that is associated with it.(from the Kelly paper)
Photo – Jiri Lochman

As the world’s attention has turned to the tragedies of the recent and ongoing Australian bushfires, it has been an opportunity for some of us to learn about bushfires, their history, and how Australians have handled them and perhaps compare their history and solutions to our own.

One theme that has been reoccurring on The Smokey Wire recently is that of looking at the written and oral histories of Native land use practices and land uses by non-Native settlers in the 19th and early 20th century. For me, it’s not about replicating the past, so much as understanding how and why Native peoples managed it and how the forests we see today were established.

I recently ran across this interesting piece by a Nyungar man named Glen Kelly in Landscope, a publication of Western Australia Department of Biodiversity, Landscape Conservation and Attractions. I couldn’t find the year it was published. In the paper is this quote from 1830:

While travelling from the Albany District to Perth in November 1830, John Lort Stokes wrote that:

“On our way we met a party of natives engaged in burning the bush, which they do in sections each year. The dexterity with which they manage so proverbially a dangerous agent as fire is indeed astonishing. Those to whom this duty is especially entrusted, and who guide or stop the running flames, are armed with large green boughs, with which, if it moves in a wrong direction, they beat it out … I can conceive no finer subject for a picture than a party of these swarthy beings engaged in kindling, moderating and directing the destructive element, which under their care seems almost to change its nature, acquiring as it were, complete docility, instead of the ungovernable fury we are accustomed to ascribe to it. Dashing through the thick underwood, amidst volumes of smoke-their dark active limbs and excited features burnished by the fierce glow of the fire-they present a spectacle which rarely falls to our lot to behold, and of which it is impossible to convey any adequate idea with words.”

Through the fog of racial bias, you can detect the author’s awe at the native peoples’ fire and land management skills.

But changes in land management have also occurred post-settlement, in fact, somewhat recently.

“that upon the cessation of Nyungar land management practices, dramatic changes occur to the land. Up until 20 or 30 years ago, Nyungar land management practices, which involved frequent cool fires over much of the country, were maintained to a large extent by the cattlemen of the south coast. They used the skills shared with them at the time of settlement, when a major part of the rural work force was Nyungar people. In the last few decades, however, we have witnessed some parts of our coastal land move from productive and vital areas to what we consider sick (mindytch) or dead country (noinch boodja). ”

Again, I don’t know the date of this piece, but Kelly was not finger pointing, but simply calling for:

We believe that the experimental non-use of fire and inappropriate use of fire that has been applied on the south­west coastal lands for the past few decades has been detrimental to the land of our origin. The fault for this does not lie at the feet of any one group or agency, but is a collective responsibility that needs to be recognised and rectified, quickly.

The whole paper is interesting as it places fire in the Nyungar cultural context.

If I had to guess, I would think that in the US, traditional burning knowledge and practices have been passed down in some places and not in others, due to the uprooting of Native people from their land and other factors. It would also be interesting to scan documents and journals from the 17 and 1800s for mention of then-current burning knowledge and practices. I wonder whether anyone has done that?

Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day! Does Environmental Justice Include Federal Land Transfer?

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I don’t know if you have been following the 1619 Project. It is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” The terms “original sin” have been used. But to my mind, there is one more fundamental underlying sin that pre-dates slavery. If one has to be “original,” this one would be it. That is the theft of land and mistreatment of Native peoples.

What can we do about this history? One idea is to return some current public lands, usually Forest Service or BLM, to the original owners. In my view, this idea is compelling from a justice perspective. Certainly there are a host of details that could be puzzled over, debated, and negotiated. Some might include ideas about 1) how much, 2) where, 3) who decides, 4) what commitments to current uses and access, 5) should lands be selected based on treaty status or other criteria (sacred sites or ?), 6) what kind of a transition period. In the same way that companies and states can commit to zero carbon by 2050, which will require a major social and technological transformation with environmental goals, could we perhaps set the same target for repatriation of public lands for justice goals? Say “Repatriate by (20)38”? There is an argument to be made that under our current non-Native management, the private sector spends much money on debating, communicating and litigating with others about public lands management, and those same funds could potentially instead be spent on purchases, easement and incentives on private land. Each group could then determine exactly which uses or protections it wanted. Perhaps less fighting over conservation, and more conservation.

Here’s an article in High Country News from August of this year It tells the story of some Oregon Tribes’ efforts to get public land returned (including trying to buy the Elliott State Forest).

Conservation groups, critical of Lone Creek’s forestry practices, staunchly opposed its involvement and accused the partnership of wanting to privatize the forest. Conservationists in turn were called out for their failure to work with tribal nations: “Your organization has mobilized opposition to the sale, with little to no engagement with the Tribes who would have, once again, become the stewards of this land,” a consortium of racial justice groups, including NAACP Portland, wrote in an open letter to the Sierra Club, Cascadia Wildlands and four other conservation organizations. “We also note the many ways in which environmental groups in Oregon remain predominantly white, and work from a place of white privilege; this situation is a very clear example of the lack of racial justice analysis applied to what is a complicated situation.” Then-Sierra Club Oregon Chapter Director Erica Stock responded, “As an environmental conservation community, we must do more to proactively reach out to Tribal Nations and rebuild trust.”

Ultimately, the sale was dropped by the state after intense public outcry, but tensions between conservation groups and tribes remain.

“The conservation movement began as a way for settlers to justify the seizure of Indigenous lands under the pretext that Native peoples didn’t know how to manage them,” says Shawn Fleek, Northern Arapaho, who is director of narrative strategy for OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon. “If modern conservation groups don’t begin their analysis in this history and struggle to address these harms, it becomes more likely they will repeat them.”

Meanwhile Andy Kerr, who worked for two decades at Oregon Natural Resource Council (now Oregon Wild), still objects to public lands becoming tribal lands. “The Democrats who supported this legislation came down on the side of Native Americans and, in this case, against nature,” Kerr wrote in a December 2018 post on his website.

While “Native Americans” should get some form of compensation, Kerr argued that “such compensation should not come at the cost of losing federal public lands of benefit to all Americans.” Both Runte and Kerr see money as an adequate substitute despite treaty law, since “in the society that won out in that struggle for a continent, the most common way to right wrongs is by money being transferred to the aggrieved parties from the parties that unjustly benefited.” Kerr continues: “The currency of compensation by the United States to Native American tribes ought to be the currency of dollars, not that of the irreplaceable and precious public lands that belong to all of us.”

But it’s not a matter of money, says Cris Stainbrook, Oglala Lakota, of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation. “It’s ironic they don’t recognize they’ve had the public benefit of lands for on the order of 165 years of using someone’s land that was guaranteed to them, and used those lands to their own benefit. It’s about time, after 165 years, that they live up to the treaty.”

For folks interested in Alaska, here is an HCN WaPo op-ed critique on the Natural Resources Management Act of 2019 with the tagline “A nation of laws cannot exist on stolen land.”