Sydney Gleason
Washington State Standard
Tribal lands in the Pacific Northwest are earning national recognition for something the U.S. Forest Service has struggled to achieve: healthy, resilient forests.
Despite receiving less than 40 cents for every federal dollar spent on national forests, tribes are restoring forest health and reducing tree mortality. Their success is rooted in thousands of years of stewardship and a willingness to act where federal policy too often stalls.
Long before European colonization, Indigenous people actively managed forests through cultural burning and selective thinning to clear underbrush, promote desired species, and prevent catastrophic wildfires.
“In my neck of the woods, there was a five to 15 year fire return interval that was clearly from tribal management,” said Cody Desautel, executive director of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, which extends across Washington and into British Columbia, Oregon, and Idaho.
Upon settlement, tribes were forced onto reservations, and their territories were tied up in trusts. Contrary to a millennium of Indigenous wisdom, subsequent government policy excluded fire from the landscape and opted for a “hands-off” approach that scaled back active stewardship.
“When you’re not managing these forest types like they were previously managed, Mother Nature is going to have a course correction and reset the clock,” said Steve Rigdon, tribal partnership stewardship and resource manager at Sustainable Northwest, and a member of the Yakama Nation.
That course correction has arrived. Western forests are now a matchbox: overly dense and ripe for wildfire. Over the past three decades, 216 million acres of wildland have burned across the country.
Tribes have long recognized that the forests are out of balance.
“Indigenous people have been tied to these landscapes for thousands and thousands of years,” Rigdon said. “We know they need disturbance. They need the prescribed fire. They need the fuel reductions.”
But, for much of the 20th century, tribes relied on timber sale revenue and prioritized production over restoration. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, the agency responsible for fulfilling the government’s trust responsibility to tribes, also formerly assumed a more paternalistic role and dictated extractive logging policies on tribal lands.
That changed with a series of policy shifts.
First, in the 1970s, Congress enacted self-determination laws that offered tribes more autonomy to govern their lands according to their cultural values. Then, in the 1980s, tribes began receiving revenue from casinos and tax compacts with states, which displaced timber revenues.
These changes facilitated tribes’ movement away from production-focused forestry towards traditional silvicultural practices. In 1983, 80 percent of the Colville Confederated Tribe’s revenue came from timber. Today, timber accounts for just 20 percent.
Tribes now prioritize a suite of ecosystem services from clean water, to cultural plants and big game. Rooted in ancient beliefs, “We feel a deep recognition and obligation to improve the conditions for those things that provide for us,” Desautel said. “Logs and revenues are a byproduct of what we’re actually trying to accomplish, not the goal.”
Tribes leave the healthiest overstory trees on the landscape to promote resilience from disturbances like insects, disease, and fire. Then, they apply prescribed burning, salvage logging, selective thinning, and other treatments aimed to mimic the conditions their ancestors promoted.
Jerry Franklin, one of America’s foremost forest ecologists and an architect of the Northwest Forest Plan, endorses Indigenous forestry practices. Franklin recommends aggressive restoration, especially in dry, fire-prone forests. “You have to save the old trees, then go to work on the rest of the forest,” Franklin said.
The data affirms Indigenous approaches. Tribal forests are among the healthiest in the country, even as they bear the consequences of centuries of federal mismanagement. Since 2015, 800,000 of the Colville Tribe’s 1.4 million-acre reservation has burned in fires. The Yakama Nation has suffered a similar fate.
Other landowners are worse off. Mortality rates on tribal forests are 39 percent to 113 percent lower than those on comparable National Forests, which often lack sustainable management.
On the heels of their success, tribes are finally gaining a voice in federal forest policy.
“When I look at where we’ve been for the last 10 years, there seems to be a recognition in Congress at least, that tribes are more effective than other federal land managers,” Desautel said. Recently, Congress has granted several authorities. Most notably, the 2018 Farm Bill and the expansion of Good Neighbor Authority, which offer pathways for increased self-governance and more tribal control over forests.
Last year, over 60 co-stewardship agreements were signed between tribes and national forests. In November, the Forest Service published a draft amendment to the Northwest Forest Plan, which manages 24.5 million acres across California, Oregon, and Washington. Over half of the amendment involved tribal stewardship, a landmark policy prescription, considering the 1994 plan failed to consult tribes entirely.
“We hope to correct that and make sure Indigenous voices are not just engaged, but actively involved in management,” said Travis Joseph, co-president of the Northwest Forest Plan Advisory Committee.
As the national tide turns, environmental organizations are also emphasizing Indigenous forestry. “Twenty years ago, we used to fight with the environmental NGOs like cats and dogs… now there seems to be a lot of alignment,” Desautel said.
Conservation groups like Sustainable Northwest are educating federal agencies on treaty rights and mimicking tribal prescriptions for land management. “We recognize that the forests are [Tribes’] ceded lands,” said Dylan Kruse, the executive director of Sustainable Northwest. “We say, fund them to do the treatments they want to do.”
A seat at the table is only part of the equation. As co-management efforts have increased, federal funding remains limited, leaving tribes understaffed and underfinanced.
The most recent Indian Forest Management Assessment Team report, which evaluates the government’s management of tribal lands, recommends allocating $313 million a year to tribal forestry and fire management. Last year, tribes received half of that.
Since 2001, the gap between federal investments in the Forest Service and tribes has been steadily rising, as tribal funding remains stagnant. For every dollar the Forest Service receives, tribes get 30 to 40 cents.
The lack of funding has caused staffing shortages, which make it difficult for tribes to meet annual harvest volumes and implement silvicultural treatments.
“It’s like, how do you expect us to meet these goals and objectives without having the people to do the job?” Rigdon said.
Each tribal and Bureau of Indian Affairs staff member manages double the acreage of their Forest Service counterparts, and over six times that of the Bureau of Land Management. In many cases, increases in project funds have proven irrelevant because tribes lack the staff to implement them.
To compensate for their limited resources, tribes rely on dedicated staff and more flexible regulatory frameworks.
In recent years, tribes have prioritized hiring Native foresters. Today, Native Americans comprise half of the tribal and Bureau of Indian Affairs forestry workforce, a shift that, according to Desautel, fosters a deeper sense of accountability to their communities.
“Their dedication and work ethic is really unlike anything you see in other federal or state agencies,” Desautel said.
Tribes are subject to the same laws as any other federal agency, including the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act. But, tribes have more flexibility in how they follow environmental laws and regulations because tribal lands are held in trusts, which give them the right to use and benefit from the land.
While federal agencies are focused on the legal risks of implementing treatments, tribes prioritize ecological outcomes. “For a Forest Service agent, it’s not, ‘What does this stand need to be healthy, fire resilient, and free of insects and disease?’” Desautel said. “He’s thinking about, ‘If I treat this block, am I going to go to court?’”
As a result, tribes respond faster to forest health issues through silvicultural treatments and salvage operations than federal land managers.
One tribal authority that Kruse, with Sustainable Northwest, is looking to capitalize on is third-party National Environmental Policy Act analysis. Normally, when any management plan is implemented on national forests, a federal agency’s staff must complete its NEPA-required analysis, a process that can take years.
Tribes, however, can conduct this analysis independently and contract environmental reviews for upcoming forest projects to non-agency personnel.
“Think about an A-team of top scientists and lawyers all working together to say, ‘Everything we’ve fought about in court, and all the science that we know about that everyone’s been ignoring, let’s do it ourselves,” Kruse said.
The problem is, tribes lack the funding to execute third-party NEPA. That’s where Sustainable Northwest comes in. Over the last several months, the organization has submitted concepts on three forests in Oregon where they have longstanding partnerships with the Klamath, among other tribes. They hope that if approved, these projects will increase acres treated and decrease litigation.
Limited budgets keep many tribes from using their most effective tools, such as third-party National Environmental Policy Act analyses, at the scale needed to confront today’s wildfire and climate crises. To address this, organizations like Sustainable Northwest are collaborating with tribes to implement projects that speed up treatments and reduce legal delays. These partnerships show what’s possible and highlight the need for policies and investments that empower tribes to lead at a landscape level.
“A tribal approach would help fix many of the management issues we see,” Desautel said. “But the solution is not going to be quick. The question is, several hundred years after we’re gone, what will people see on the landscape, and will we have made the situation better than it was when we got it?”
This story was originally published by the Washington State Standard.
Washington State Standard is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Washington State Standard maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Bill Lucia for questions: info@washingtonstatestandard.com.