Tribal Forest Talks Suggest
Ways To Adapt With Hope

The city is seeking input on its vision for the next ten years, reimagines its parks system, and builds the possible effects of climate change into its efforts — all while acknowledging that we live on Native American land. Meanwhile, from another corner of environmental thinking, research, and practice, a set of ideas is emerging that, in time, could unify all of those strands into a single approach.

Those ideas are surfacing in ​“Tribal Forestry: Understanding Current Issues and Challenges,” a series of talks co-developed and co-hosted by The Forest School and the Yale Center for Environmental Justice at Yale School of the Environment, and Salish Kootenai College.

“Tribes and First Nations have been forest stewards since time immemorial on the land that is currently called North America,” an accompanying description states. ​“In the face of climate change, tribes and First Nations continue to work with institutions, NGOs, and federal and state agencies to support Indigenous sovereignty and resilient forested landscapes. This webinar will focus on the current state of tribal forest management and Indigenous stewardship with a series of speakers from different tribes, universities, nonprofits, and agencies. Beginning with an introduction to tribal forestry and the trust responsibilities, topics will include the history of forest stewardship on tribal lands in North America, federal laws and tribal forestry, contemporary uses of plants and wildlife stewardship, fire, conclusions from the Indian Forest Management Assessment (IFMAT), tribal co-management, and the future of tribal forestry in the face of climate change.”

The talks are focused on the management forests on tribal lands. But as Gary Dunning, executive director of The Forest School, suggested in introducing the first talk in the series on Thursday, the ideas contained in them can address concerns related to ​“all forests.” And as one of the presenters later suggested, the general ideas embedded in this specific practice suggest a more ​“hopeful” way forward in adapting to climate change.

Dunning started by explaining that the Forest Forum talks began as in-person seminars and moved to virtual meetings in 2021 during the pandemic shutdown. The overwhelming response — thousands of people tuning in from all over the world — convinced The Forest School to maintain the format after it became possible to meet again; he noted that he was pleased to be able to make them ​“open and free.”

For the first installment of ​“Tribal Forestry,” Dunning enlisted the speaker series’s three hosts and facilitators: Gerald Torres, professor of environmental justice at the Yale School of the Environment and professor of law at the Law School; Marlyse Duguid, senior lecturer in field ecology, research scientist, and director of research at Yale Forests; and Adrian Leighton, natural resources division head at Salish Kootenai College, a tribal college in Pablo, Montana. 

“Nice to see so many people interested in this topic,” Duguid said. She mentioned that Yale’s forestry school, at over 120 years old, is the oldest in the country, and that meant that, ​“for better or worse,” it has been involved in the fractious history of managing resources on tribal lands. That tacit acknowledgement set the tone for the presentation that followed.

It fell to Leighton to ​“set the stage,” as he put it, for the entire speaker series by providing an introduction to tribal forest management. (See his PowerPoint presentation here.)The most recent developments in the field, he said, were ​“coming full circle in a way,” as thousands of years of ​“accumulation of place-based knowledge” from tribes around the country were finally making their way into land management plans and affecting policy, to the point that a December 2022 White House memoranda acknowledges the importance of ​“recognizing and including indigenous knowledge in Federal research, policy, and decision making.”

“There’s been renewed public discussion of this,” Leighton said, but they are ​“long-established traditions.”

Putting a huge caveat on his statements — not all tribes were the same, of course — Leighton ventured that before White settlers arrived in the Northwest (the area he knew best), the relationship between people and the environment was ​“reciprocal” rather than ​“managed,” he said, a system of practices in which all living things benefited. ​“It wasn’t until interactions with settlers” that ​“these systems were challenged,” Leighton said. Most concretely, through a series of over 400 treaties, tribes ​“had to give up much of their traditional lands.” The system put in place, codified in Supreme Court cases and solidified under the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), created a ​“very paternalistic sort of relationship,” with the goal of the federal government to erase indigenous cultural values through reeducation in boarding schools and to, in short, turn the people on reservations ​“into farmers.”

This agenda was made manifest in the Dawes Act, or General Allotment Act, of 1887, which ​“broke a lot of the arable land” on the reservations ​“into 40 or 80 acres,” parceled out to tribal members to farm, Leighton said. ​“A lot of the surplus land” was sold (some tribes have since reacquired it over the years).

Again, Leighton reminded the audience, this was a sketch of a ​“very turbulent” history.

Leighton focused in on what the shift meant for the forests on tribal lands. At first, he said, people living on reservations could only cut trees to make fields. The legal arrangements of the reservations meant that they couldn’t sell the timber because they technically didn’t own it. A mill that bought timber from a reservation was sued. In time, these rules changed. The BIA created a forestry branch in 1910, and ​“green timber sales were finally also recognized,” Leighton said. But the effort was ​“underfunded,” and a ​“one-size-fits-all attempt” with no real consultation with tribes, even into the 1980s and 1990s. The idea may have been sustained forestry, but the focus was on profit, not protection.

“Less than a quarter of the foresters working for tribes were Native,” Leighton said. That balance is starting to change; Salish Kootenai College is a part of that, training indigenous people in forestry. As tribes have become more involved and ​“take control of their forest management” in recent decades, priorities have shifted from income to protection. That greater control is part of the larger move toward self-determination among tribes that began in the 1970s and continues today.

Most recently, non-indigenous foresters have started to come around to ideas based on indigenous practices of reciprocity, that, among other things, prioritize protection over profit. This is partly because those practices seem to show a way forward in the era of climate change, a way to adapt and survive — ecologically and culturally.

“There has been increased realization that tribal forestry, because it takes traditional knowledge and melds it” wit current scientific practices, ​“has created this really hopeful model on how it can work.” It’s ​“ecosystem management with cultural place-based knowledge front and center.” The practices, ​“at a landscape level,” can be a cultural and natural ​“restoration plan.… a proactive, place-based model that can serve the country well.” More generally, the ideas are even entering the popular consciousness as a ​“hopeful model of have management can happen” in the face of climate change.

But — as has been true for over a century — ​“there is insufficient funding and staffing” at the BIA ​“to achieve the potential of this model,” Leighton said. The open questions hung in the air: Will that support arrive? What will it take?

Torres thanked Leighton for the ​“heavy lift of giving us the background” regarding tribal land management. He added that what can look ​“like an evolution has been the result of tribes asserting more authority” — asking or demanding it — through ​“self-determination and control of resources. What looks like a smooth evolution isn’t necessarily a smooth evolution.” He also reiterated that ​“every tribe is different. Every nation is different.” The individual stories and situations, from people to people and place to place, could vary greatly.

Duguid agreed; in subsequent talks, bringing the diversity within indigenous peoples under one umbrella ​“is going to be complicated.” Some groups would be underrepresented. There would be some ​“necessary simplification.” And despite the popular interest in ethnobotany, the series would remain focused on ​“forests and forest management.”

For now. ​“My hope is this can be the initial entry” into a ​“series of courses” on ​“tribal knowledge about the management of resources,” said Torres. Beyond forests. Beyond tribal lands. Maybe — who knows? — even into city plans.

“Tribal Forestry: Understanding Current Issues and Challenges” happens every Thursday from Jan. 18 to April 25, from 12 p.m. to 12:55 p.m. Visit the Forest Forum’s website to register. There will be no webinars on March 14 and 21. The series is free and open to the public. Each session will be recorded and posted to the website.