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Oregon’s Tribes Bring Ancestral Knowledge Back into Forestry
Restorative Balance
Oregon’s tribes bring ancestral knowledge back into forestry
written and photographed by Daniel O’Neil
It's hard to say who really arrived here first. As the last Ice Age glaciers melted away a little more than 10,000 years ago, today’s forests unfolded into the woods we know. Yet archaeologists have found remains of people in modern-day Oregon that date back 18,000 years, and the tribes begin their story when the Creator placed them here long, long ago. Either way, Oregon’s forests and its Indigenous peoples have essentially co-existed forever.
As forests emerged across what became Oregon, tribes evolved with them, shaping them with elements like fire and being shaped by communities of plants and animals. Yet since the arrival of Euro-Americans, profit-driven mismanagement of Oregon’s forests has led to unhealthy, unstable, and fire-prone ecosystems, all in a rapidly changing climate.
In this new century, public and private landowners have begun to collaborate with local tribes to revitalize Oregon’s forests. Such partnerships benefit tribes, non-tribal entities and forest ecosystems across the state. They also help build relationships founded on a shared respect for each other and for Oregon’s forestland. The age of tribal forestry has dawned, even though it has been here the whole time.
Tribal forestry encompasses much time and space. It is rooted in a sense of respect and balance, viewing the forest ecosystem as a whole that includes flora, fauna, land, water and humans. Today, the concepts behind tribal forestry form what’s called traditional ecological knowledge, an innate understanding of how a place is supposed to be.
Traditional ecological knowledge resides in the legends and stories that Native Americans have carried through millennia as residents here. The legends and stories also remind the tribes of their long-standing responsibility to steward these quote-unquote resources.
“Traditional ecological knowledge isn’t in one place. It’s not in a document, not in a policy. It’s in our people, spread throughout our people,” said Don Gentry, who recently served as the Klamath Tribes chairman. Now, as a natural resources specialist for the tribe, Gentry helps manage their forestlands while also collaborating with non-tribal groups to co-manage ceded Klamath Tribes land.
Traditional ecological knowledge isn’t in one place. It’s not in a document, not in a policy. It’s in our people, spread throughout our people.
As Western forestry supplanted tribal forestry, cascading changes came to the land. The two views of how to manage the woods differ just as much as their cultures, but they also compliment each other using their relative strengths.
The Western approach provides an elaborate, analytical and detail-obsessed scientific knowledge—think chemistry and biology, satellite imagery and computer modeling. The tribal component brings traditional ecological knowledge and a holistic appreciation of the forest. Rather than look at the forest from the outside, tribes view it from within.
“Other management styles still separate people on one side, and the environment on the other,” said Nakia Williamson, director of the Nez Perce Tribe’s cultural resource program. “That’s a foreign concept to Nez Perce people, and if you think about it, it’s a false perspective. Mankind throughout the world has always been connected to landscapes. But I talk about these sorts of things and some people’s eyes glaze over, like, ‘What is this guy talking about? This is some esoteric perspective that doesn’t relate to me and the time and place that I live in, with all this technology, all this ability, all this science.’ And I say, ‘No, it does.’”
For the Nez Perce and other tribes, land management, including forestry, does not just consider what the Western world calls “resources.” Nor does it focus on single species or objectives, such as Douglas-fir production or managing only for revenue. Instead, tribes value overall forest health and reciprocity with the natural world.
“There’s a disconnect when you commodify something that your cultural lifeways taught you wasn’t just something to be used,” said Taiontorake Max Oakes, a wildlife biologist with his tribe, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. “Your creation stories, and the things that you were told, and what guided you in your lifeways all taught you not to take that for granted.”
Tribes like the Klamath, Nez Perce and Warm Springs, as well as others across the state, have realized they can have a greater effect on their ancestral territory if they partner with neighboring landowners. Likewise, groups like The Nature Conservancy, the U.S. Forest Service and Columbia Land Trust recognize the benefit of including traditional ecological knowledge and an Indigenous perspective as they grapple with restoring forests in a changing climate.
In 2021, after the Bootleg megafire had devoured 650 square miles of forested land east of Klamath Falls, a few stands of ponderosa pine stood out. To some extent, it was an experiment gone right. The Klamath Tribes did not know a large-scale wildfire would soon test their approach, but they did believe their efforts would contribute on many levels, including fire resilience.
Before the fire, under a treaty-based stewardship agreement with the Forest Service, the Klamath Tribes managed the above-mentioned stand of Fremont-Winema National Forest using traditional ecological knowledge. This involved returning a more historic, circa-1850 look to the arrangement and size of trees. For example, older, bigger ponderosa pines remained in clumps separated by openings in the forest. The management plan also applied fire to the landscape, a frequent and necessary visitor to this land until the Forest Service’s commitment to absolute fire suppression in the early 1900s (which has only led to more fires).
The Bootleg fire swept through that stand but left it intact, burning the understory while leaving the large, old trees alone. What survived was a healthier forest made more resistant to wildfire, insect threats and climate change. Partnership between the Klamath Tribes and the Forest Service made this possible, and now the tribes are managing the Saddle Mountain area, a sacred site to them, in the same way, under the same stewardship agreement.
“It allows us to employ tribal members to actively manage their homeland, so it gives them a sense of being empowered to tend the land,” said Tim Sexton, fire program manager for the Klamath Tribes. “Even though the land is now administered by the federal government, the Klamath Tribes consider it their land.”
Today, the tribe’s influence extends beyond agreements with the federal government. With one eye on the future and another on the past, The Nature Conservancy has worked with the Klamath Tribes for several decades now, welcoming traditional ecological knowledge on its properties in the area.
Wildlife ecologist Craig Bienz has worked in tribal/nontribal collaborative partnerships for more than four decades.
Today he is The Nature Conservancy’s lead representative in South-Central Oregon. The Nature Conservancy had already combined its Western scientific information with Klamath Tribes traditional ecological knowledge to return its Sycan Marsh Preserve to a more historical state, which saved it, too, from the Bootleg fire.
As director of the Sycan Marsh program, Bienz relied on a master stewardship agreement with the Klamath Tribes to reintroduce traditional ecological knowledge. “The more we allow the tribes to bring their practices back into the management of these lands, the more we’re going to see a healthier Earth,” Bienz said. “There’s a depth of understanding that is yet to be understood in Western science, the complexity of where they’re really coming from.”
Gentry is proud to be involved in such partnerships, including a recent strengthening of ties with the State of Oregon. Gentry appreciates the gains for his tribe and its ancestral forests. Just as these lands ignore cartographic boundaries, he sees advantages across borders and communities. “I truly believe that if you protect and provide for our interests in ecosystem management, you’re doing something that will be sustainable for everybody. It doesn’t just benefit the tribe. It benefits the region.”
Despite its place-specific name, Oregon white oak grows along both sides of the Columbia River. This keystone species helps create an important ecosystem across a large swath of land that defies map quadrants. Protecting Oregon white oak woodlands thus becomes a multi-agency endeavor.
The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs reservation spans 1,000 square miles of land. Oregon white oak lives here in rolling woodlands similar to those in the Columbia River Gorge. Restoring and preserving the health of this forest means, for example, removing encroaching Douglas fir, reintroducing cultural burning and protecting tribal first foods like huckleberries and deer and also traditional medicinal plants. To accomplish all this, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs are partners in the East Cascades Oak Partnership, or ECOP.
ECOP began in 2017 as a Columbia Land Trust initiative, and today it has nearly twenty core partners, including the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, and the Yakama Nation in Washington. Such a far-ranging, diverse group demonstrates the benefits of collaboration with tribes while also revealing some of the challenges.
“The collaborations bring ideas,” Oakes said. “They bring resources and people to the table.” This matters because with so much land to manage, and a legacy of federal underfunding, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and other tribes can only do so much. That’s where projects like ECOP, and others, can help get things done.
Traditional ecological knowledge can lead a forest to health, but it can also test the trust involved in a burgeoning relationship. Warm Springs tribal members, for instance, keep their traditional plants and gathering areas close to their chest. A history of colonialist disrespect toward this body of knowledge fostered such a response, but open Western minds meet this secrecy with understanding, which tightens the bond.
Mars Galloway, Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs cultural resources department manager, has found ECOP partners helpful and receptive in understanding and working with those confidentiality concerns. “Which has been fantastic because it’s not always an easy point to get across and have folks understand and still say, ‘We can do good work,’” she said. “It’s about establishing and falling back on that trust-based relationship.”
ECOP manager Lindsay Cornelius, who works for Columbia Land Trust, is more than willing to accept traditional ecological knowledge on its own terms. “We’ve had tribal elders who have freely shared stories and reflections on the ways that oak have been valued and used, and they shared that information in the context of trust, that we wouldn’t replicate or share that beyond the partnership without permission,” she said. “Much of Western culture carries this expectation that we deserve knowledge and that it should be freely shared, and that’s not necessarily the case.”
Even the Forest Service, which has a rather tangled history with tribes, stands willing to listen and learn. It helps to have Kameron Sam, an enrolled member of the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe, as East Side District Ranger for the Mount Hood National Forest. “For me, the continued piece of the future as we move forward is, ‘What’s missing?’ And I think the tribes can give us perspective and cultural experience to help us find out what is missing. You can’t do that without a co-stewardship strategy.”
Besides filling tribal vacancies, tribal foresters are now in demand at nontribal entities in Oregon and beyond. Dr. Cristina Eisenberg is committed to getting more tribal boots on the forest floor. A Native American and Latinx ecologist, Eisenberg is also an associate dean in Oregon State University’s College of Forestry, where she recently created that school’s Indigenous Natural Resource Office and its Traditional Ecological Knowledge Lab.
Eisenberg works across Oregon’s timber industry and said even private timber companies are becoming curious about tribal forestry, especially as trees struggle in a hotter, dryer climate. “I see a future where we work together across cultures in a way that fully honors tribal sovereignty, where tribes have an equal seat at the table, looking together to find solutions,” she said.
In Eisenberg’s view, forests across Oregon and the West require a new approach and effort. “We can’t spend the next fifty years debating whether the Northwest Forest Plan works or doesn’t work, because it’s all going to burn,” she said. “Everybody is at that breaking point where you realize you’re in trouble and you have to do something. We’re experiencing a major paradigm shift, and the College of Forestry and the tribes in Oregon are at the heart of that shift in the Pacific Northwest.”
I see a future where we work together across cultures in a way that fully honors tribal sovereignty, where tribes have an equal seat at the table, looking together to find solutions.
Wallowa County is steeped in tribal history. Its namesake lake and mountains were once, and in many ways still are, home to the Nez Perce Tribe. When the county and other local partners began looking for ways to protect the undeveloped east side of Wallowa Lake, the Nez Perce Tribe was welcomed to the table as an equal, not only because of its ancient ties to the area and its treaty rights, but more so because of its recent reconnection with Wallowa County.
In 1993, when Columbia Basin salmon and steelhead landed on the federal endangered species list, Wallowa County and the Nez Perce Tribe began working together to help those fish. This forged a relationship that continues today.
The East Moraine Community Forest’s 1,791-acre property transferred to public ownership under Wallowa County in January 2020. A newly developed management plan will now guide this flank of Wallowa Lake in a way that serves many interests, including those of the local community and those of the Nez Perce Tribe, whose reservation lies nearby in Idaho.
“I would say overwhelmingly that if you come to the county you get the idea that we embrace Nez Perce heritage,” Katy Nesbitt said. Nesbitt is Wallowa County’s economic development and natural resource director and is the lead county official responsible for the EMCF. “And that’s what we’re trying to do is find that balance between the Euro-American style of land use and the Indigenous style of land use.”
To prove its interest and commitment to the community forest, the tribe donated $300,000 to the cause at a critical junction, which encouraged other parties to follow suit. The Nez Perce believed in the universal benefits of this project and wanted to have a real role in the forest’s management.
At Nakia Williamson’s first meetings with the EMCF partners, he stressed the importance of tribal involvement on multiple levels. He feared the Nez Perce input would, as usual, be buried in some report under the cultural section. Williamson argued that tribal forestry does not separate the cultural and the practical—they’re one and the same.
Conservation land management goals address three tenets: natural, economic and social. For the EMCF, this means satisfying interests from hiking and cattle grazing to mountain biking, logging and traditional first foods gathering. Nils Christoffersen, executive director of Wallowa Resources, a community-based nonprofit deeply involved with the EMCF, believes the social element includes improving connection and opportunity for local and for tribal communities.
“I’m hoping the EMCF is contributing to improve relationships and opportunities that lift up the local, rural community’s connection, while keeping its long-term prosperity in place, and that it creates new opportunities for tribal families and nations in these landscapes as well,” Christoffersen said. “Working together is really important to the future of our rural communities, for a better future and for the mutual benefits to families and to the lands we live on.”
Williamson agrees. “The Nez Perce Tribe has always extended our hand and tried to work collaboratively with state, local and federal entities,” he said. “Even though we may have differences, if we come together, we can accomplish much more.”
