The Intertribal Timber Council’s report on the status and needs of tribally managed forests says tribal forest departments face increased threats from wildfire, pests and disease
A new report found tribally managed forests in Oregon and across Turtle Island need a dramatic increase in federal funding to address immediate threats.
The Intertribal Timber Council, or ITC, is a Portland-based organization that produces a Congressionally mandated report on the status and needs of tribally managed forests across Turtle Island every 10 years. Their fourth-ever assessment, the Indian Forest Management Assessment Team IV or IFMAT IV, released this fall, documents tribal forest management practices and forest health while making recommendations to Congress.
The IFMAT IV found tribal forests in Oregon and across Turtle Island struggle with a lack of funding, understaffing and little capacity to expand work capabilities. Shorthanded, underfunded tribal forestry departments are dealing with increased threats from wildfire, pests and disease.
The IFMAT IV team consists of researchers, forestry scientists and tribal members who conducted more than 40 visits with tribes to compile the data in its latest report.
Protection as priority
One of the significant findings in the IFMAT IV report is the “unique vision” tribes have for forest management, including a focus on sustainability and what is officially called “non-timber forest products.”
Surveys of tribal members consistently show income generation is the lowest priority for respondents, the report found.
“Managing tribal forests for forest protection, cultural, and spiritual values, continues to be more important than income for tribal members, tribal council, and natural resource managers,” the report said.
John Sessions, ITC co-chair and professor of forestry and Strachan Chair of Forest Operations Management at Oregon State University, participated in the last four ITC reports.
Sessions said tribes place a high level of importance on forest protection.
“If you were to look across Indian Country, in terms of forest condition, you'd say that the tribes' highest priority is forest protection,” Sessions said. “Now, they also rate cultural uses of the forest as important, but generally, it's forest protection.”
Sessions said the fixed nature of tribes and tribal forest locations means tribes contend with the consequences of their forest management decisions more intimately, leading to a different approach.
“Tribes can't move very easily, and they have to kind of live more closely to the ground, and they also live closer to the results of their actions,” Sessions said. “You might say the owners of the federal forests are urban areas — big urban areas — generally away from forests, and people don't recognize the value of the forest as closely or as intimately as tribes do, who live right with their forests.
“There's kind of a different approach to policy when you're not as close to the issues.”
Sessions also highlighted the greater interdependence between tribal communities and tribal forests compared to non-tribal communities and forests.
“Certainly, a larger group depends upon forest services more directly than the public at large,” Sessions said. “Meaning that they hunt, they fish, a lot of their cultural identity is wound up with the fish and wildlife and the condition of their forests.”
A growing debate over using a metric called allowable annual cut, or AAC, reflects the changing priorities of tribal forestry programs. AAC is the maximum amount of timber tribes can harvest from a particular forest each year. Most tribes do not hit their maximum AAC each year, which the report says reflects tribes’ view of forest management.
“Acknowledge the shift from timber production and harvesting the full AAC to broader forest stewardship as a success measure,” the report recommends.
Seven of the nine federally recognized tribes currently hold roughly 516,000 acres of trust forest land in Oregon. The total acreage fluctuates as more land is brought into trust. Some tribes may hold land that is not yet in trust or managed outside of trust. The Burns-Paiute Tribe and Klamath Tribes do not hold land in trust.
The Klamath Tribes’ ancestral homelands include forest land, but settlers took much of it during colonization. The rest was lost during the termination era. The ancestral forests of the Klamath Tribes are currently part of the Fremont-Winema National Forests.
Importance of non-timber forest products
While most federally managed forests are managed solely for timber production, tribal forests are managed for a multitude of reasons and often place a high value on “non-timber forest products,” or NTFP, which includes everything from herbaceous plants and berries to fish and wildlife.
The ITC report found tribal members discussed nearly two dozen uses and benefits for gathering NTFP, and many surveyed disagreed with forest management solely for timber production.
Many NTFPs are culturally important, and the continued ability to harvest these products is a high priority for tribes.
Tribal members can face a variety of challenges when collecting NTFP.
Habitat destruction, invasive species and wildfires are some of the challenges tribal forests face in Oregon.
Fire can be beneficial and harmful to the collection of NTFP — many species of trees and plants, like camas root and huckleberry, first foods for many tribes in the Northwest, benefit from fire. Still, the increasing prevalence of high-intensity fires can be harmful to the landscape and force the destruction of culturally significant gathering areas during fire suppression efforts.
Both fire suppression efforts and prescribed burn tactics can have unintended consequences for collecting NTFP.
Fire retardant is often dropped aerially over large swathes of land near wildfires. The retardant, which is toxic, has been found to kill fish if dropped in water.
A recent report by King 5 Washington found fire retardant drops in the Pacific Northwest killed thousands of fish, including endangered salmon. The U.S. Forest Service is supposed to maintain a 300-foot buffer zone around water sources during fire retardant drops, but the King 5 report found the USFS dropped fire retardants in water sources more than three dozen times between 2012 and 2019.
The ITC report highlighted potential issues with the use of drip torches, a standard tool used in igniting controlled burns, around bear grass, a common plant used for basket weaving by tribes in the Pacific Northwest, finding chemicals falling on bear grass from the drip torches pose a risk to basketweavers who put the material in their mouths.
In a separate section, the ITC highlighted the need for increased funding and attention to the use of cultural burning practices. Over the past century, the total fire suppression tactics used by the U.S. Forest Service led to forests dense with fuel and underbrush, creating the conditions for high-intensity wildfires and choking out many culturally significant NTFPs.
Funding complexities
Tribal forests receive roughly one-third of the federal funding of other federally managed forests, and the ITC report found tribal forestry departments suffer from the lack of funding.
“Most notably, tribal forestry departments are underfunded and understaffed compared to their neighbors and high stand density conflated with limited processing infrastructure has created complex forest health conditions,” the report concluded.
The report found increases in funding for Bureau of Indian Affairs forestry programs hardly kept up with the rate of inflation and were not enough to bridge the gap between tribal forestry and Bureau of Land Management and National Forest funding.
However, funding alone won’t solve all the problems tribal forests face, according to Sessions, as capacity is a fundamental issue in managing tribal forests.
“The federal agencies have found out you can throw money at a problem, but if there's nobody there on the other end to catch the money, it doesn't do any good,” Sessions said.
Tribal forestry departments are understaffed, and Sessions said there are issues with “equal pay for equal work,” meaning positions in tribal forestry departments are lower paid than their Bureau of Land Management or Forest Service counterparts in the same roles.
That creates issues with attracting and retaining employees — issues already compounded by the fact tribal communities are often rural, remote and lacking in housing options.
“Even funding that's out there, available from either public or nonpublic sources, that takes a significant effort to get, and that effort means you need to have some staff to do it,” Sessions said.
Threats to tribal forests
Tribal forests face a multitude of threats and lack the funding to adequately address the threats they face, the ITC report found.
In Oregon, tribal forests face threats including wildfires, pests and disease.
Sessions points to the growing threat of the emerald ash borer, an exotic beetle that kills ash trees, and sudden oak death as issues affecting tribal forests in different regions of Oregon.
“The emerald ash borer, which is the most destructive pest that people say have hit American forests in many, many years — many, many years — and that one attacks a particular kind of hardwood that's very valued to the tribes,” Sessions said. “And that'd be mainly over on the west side (of the state), and it hasn't developed into a big problem yet. But in the east, it's caused extensive damage.”
The now perennial threat of wildfire in Oregon is an ongoing issue for tribal forests, further exacerbated by drought.
“Wildfire for tribes, particularly those in the drier forests, it's a major, major issue,” Sessions said, pointing to the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, and the Klamath Tribes as Native nations facing increased wildfire threats.
The changing fire suppression tactics over the past century have led to too many trees in tribal forests, which Sessions says is an issue for a number of reasons.
Too many trees in a forest’s understory can choke out culturally important NTFPs and create “fire ladders,” which allow wildfires to spread from lower on the ground into the canopy of larger forest trees.
Long droughts weaken trees, and according to Sessions, too many small trees in the forest increase wildfire severity.
“The fewer trees that are out there, the more resilient they're going to be,” Sessions said. “But on the fire side, the smaller trees also create pathways for fire to get from the ground, spreading across the ground, to get up into the canopy of the trees. That's a serious problem.”
Sessions said if the trees in the understory are young enough, controlled burns can be effective, but in many places, the understory is too old for controlled burns to be effective, meaning mechanical removal of the trees is needed.
More space between trees makes it more difficult for fire to spread quickly and reach incredibly high temperatures, which can be fatal even to species that are adapted to survive some fire.
Tribal timber production
While tribal governments and members reiterated they prioritize protection and conservation for their forests, revenue generation is still important to these communities, the ITC report found.
Tribes often use revenue generated from timber production to fund programs to benefit their citizens, like the Coquille Indian Tribe located on the Southern Oregon coast.
The Coquille Forest helps the tribe maintain self-sufficiency, and the profits derived from the forest are used to fund health care for tribal members and education for tribal children.
Although many tribes have the desire to harvest timber for profit, a lack of infrastructure can pose issues for the tribes to obtain a profitable harvest, such as a lack of sawmills or a lack of buyers for the products.
Sessions says several tribes in Oregon, like Warm Springs, don’t have a sawmill near them, requiring them to transport their logs a considerable distance for processing, which hampers efficiency and cuts into revenue.
Tribes are getting proactive to address issues of infrastructure and capacity.
The Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians, located in the southern Umpqua Valley, is creating needed infrastructure.
In 2019, more than 3,600 acres of forest managed by the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua burned in the Mile Post 97 fire. The tribe had only recently re-acquired possession of the land affected by the fire. The tribe sought to sell the timber affected by the fire but struggled to find a buyer for the scorched wood.
In the four years since the fire, the tribe opened its own sawmill to process the wood, primarily incense cedar. The lumber the tribe produces includes a variety of wood qualities, including some that are of lesser value due to fire and disease impacts. Still, the sawmill has been a success.
The tribe says it is focused on sustainable management of its lands and considers how its actions will affect the next seven generations of its people when managing its forest.
Congressional report
In the coming months, the ITC will present its report and recommendations to Congress, as it has in the past.
The recommendations in the report are nonbinding, and recurring issues from past IFMAT reports, like funding for tribal forestry, will surely be addressed again.
Congress may hold the 2023 hearing in a different format — the report could be presented in a “field hearing,” which would take place outdoors.
“If this fall stays as a nice fall, they'd have a meeting out in the forest to look at some of these things firsthand,” Sessions said.
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