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Indian Country

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Mike Crouse: Logger's World

Tom Silver: Down Memory Lane

Alston Chase

Jay P. Kinney, first chief, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Division of Forestry, 1914-1933

Indian Country. Twenty-six million acres of forest and woodland scattered across thirty-three states. Forty-four billion board feet of standing timber. Twelve thousand years of human history. Maybe more.

Where this story of America really begins is lost in antiquity. But this much is true: The first “Americans” walked here on a long-gone land bridge that joined Russia to Alaska’s Aleutian Island chain. We aren’t sure what brought the first Americans here, but we think they were hunting mastodons, giant elephantlike beasts that once roamed North America. Whatever the reason, their descendents are still here. Among the politically correct, they are called “Native Americans,” though most of them say they prefer to be called “Indians,” a name given to them by a lost Italian named Christopher Columbus.

For centuries, historians credited Columbus with “discovering” America, but we now know there were millions of Indians living in North America when he sailed into the Caribbean in 1492. They had been here for perhaps 12,000 years, but until historians relegated Columbus to his more rightful place in history, there were few advancements in our understanding of how Indians lived, or how significantly they had altered the landscape first seen by European settlers in the 1500s.

“The first European settlers did not step off boats into a vast, primeval forest, untouched by human hands,” declared Dr. Edward Buckner, in a 1996 Evergreen interview. “Millions of Indians were living in these forests. More than half their food supply came from cultivated fields kept free of trees by repeated burning.”

Dr. Buckner, a University of Tennessee forest scientist, has spent years studying Indian influences on forests in the eastern U.S. He scoffs at the popularized notion that Indians lived “at one with nature” in vast, primeval forests untouched by human hands. “There is no historic or scientific evidence to support the largely romantic idea that eastern forests were somehow formed independent of human influence,” he declares. “To assume that some ‘natural’ forest condition existed here before European settlement began is to ignore 12,000 years of human history.”

Dr. Buckner’s views are upheld in hundreds of accounts, written by early explorers, pioneers and historians. More recently archeologists and anthropologists have unearthed still more evidence of advanced agrarian cultures developed by Indians hundreds of years before European settlement began. But warweary European philosophers who invented the Age of Romanticism chose to portray Indians as “noble savages” living in harmony with nature.

Two hundred years later—and much to the consternation of many contemporary observers—the image lives on in the popular press, propped up by voteseeking politicians and environmental groups who hold up Indian cultures as examples of the way all Americans should live. Writing in Clearcut, the Sierra Club’s attack on industrial forestry, Herb Hammond suggested Indians practiced a kind of forestry that placed protection ahead of use. “In scientific terms, we recognize that their use of the forest was ecologically responsible, meaning that it kept all the parts.” But Mr. Hammond’s vision has little basis in history. Most Indians were farmers and hunters, not foresters. To make way for crops, they cleared away millions of acres of forest, usually by burning. In the Southwest, where water was scarce, primitive irrigation systems were constructed, allowing water to be diverted and stored for use during dry summer months. Because Indians did not have fertilizer, they were forced to move on once the soil’s nutrients were depleted. More land was cleared, and previously cleared forests slowly grew back. These latter forests were the “wildernesses” the first Europeans described in their journals.

With millions of mouths to feed Indians were also adept and efficient hunters, a fact confirmed in Aboriginal Overkill: The Role of Native Americans in Structuring Western Ecosystems. The exhaustive study, by Utah State University wildlife ecologist Dr. Charles Kay, concludes that Indian hunting was the likely reason why early European explorers found so little game in the Intermountain West. But by keeping big game populations small, tribes also helped increase biological diversity in both plant and animal communities. “[It] appears to be a robust hypothesis that applies not only to elk, but also to moose, bison, mule deer and other ungulates throughout the Intermountain West, and I suspect that it applies to other areas of the Americas as well,” Dr. Kay wrote. “By limiting ungulate numbers and purposefully modifying vegetation with fire, Native Americans structured entire plant and animal communities.”

Dr. Kay’s research led him to a startling, if not controversial conclusion: leaving forests to the vagaries of nature disturbance including wildfire, disease and insect infestations—the current environmentalist mantra—will not restore pre-European forest conditions. “If aboriginal predation and burning created those [plant and animal] communities, then the only way to maintain what we call ‘ natural areas’ is to duplicate aboriginal influences and processes.”

By the time the Bureau of Indian Affairs Branch of Forestry was established in 1910, Indian Country was a vastly different place than it had been when European settlement began. Twelve thousand years of human history had been squeezed into some very small spaces called “reservations,” where it was assumed living apart from white society would give Indians time to adjust to a fast changing world. But by the late 1800s, it was clear confinement on reservations was not the answer, so Congress reversed course, granting millions of allotments—small tracts of land Indians could own on their home reservations. The idea seemed simple enough: land ownership would lure Indians away from centuries of communal living, enabling individual families to prosper farming their government granted homesteads.

The strategy might have worked had the government also turned away from paternalism. But it did not, though the search for ways to promote economic self-sufficiency eventually led to development of vast tribal timber reserves in the Upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest, where soils were poorly suited to farming but ideal for timber production. By the late 1870s, some of the largest logging and sawmilling operations in the nation were on Menominee and Chippewa tribal forestlands in Wisconsin and Minnesota. But the government did not give up easily on its one-sizefits- all vision of Indians as farmers. In 1873, the Supreme Court ruled (United States v. Cook) the Menominee’s had no legal right to sell timber, unless the clearing was for agricultural purposes. Otherwise, the court said, the logs belonged to the United States. The ruling did not set well with Indian agents responsible for nurturing tribal economic self-sufficiency. Its impact fell heaviest on western tribes that had already come to rely on timber harvesting as a source of both income and employment. Napoleon Bonaparte, chief of the Snohomish tribe, laid the situation bare in a January 1874 telegram to Interior Secretary Delano. “Don’t starve and scatter my children. Let them continue logging.” But it would be another 15 years before Congress charted the necessary course correction. It did so in 1889 with passage of the so-called “Dead and Down Act,” granting tribes the right to salvage dead timber for commercial purposes. Green timber still could not be removed, unless it stood on land that was being cleared for farming. Even so, the act became the first legal recognition of the Indians’ right to use their forests for commercial purposes.

It took two acts of Congress to create the Division of Forestry. The first, in March, 1909 appropriated $100,000 for forestry work on Indian reservations. The second, in June 1910, authorized the Secretary of Interior to approve the first ever sales of mature, live tribal timber. Since its founding, the Division has toiled in the shadow of the Forest Service never achieving the stature accorded its sister agency. Its initial $100,000 appropriation was not increased for 15 years. During one ten-year period when Division salaries were frozen, Forest Service salaries doubled. Indeed, the Division might simply have wasted away had it not produced two remarkable leaders: its first chief, Jay P. Kinney, who hired Indian forestry’s first professional foresters; and Earle Wilcox, a brilliant forester who headed the Division in the early 1970s, and developed its widely acclaimed inventory analysis system for uneven-aged forests. Although the two men never worked together, their careers spanned more than 60 frustrating years in which the Division struggled forward, its forestry mission always overshadowed by the more politically popular Bureau of Indian Affairs, to which it still reports. “We were never very popular with the Bureau,” recalls Bob Miller, a Division forester who worked with Mr. Wilcox for many years. “Nobody over there understood forestry. Our successes were often the result of Earle’s leadership or personal friendships that developed between Division foresters and tribal leaders.”

The late Mr. Wilcox worked for the Division for 33 years, and he was its chief for three years before retiring in 1973. Though he was one of the most respected foresters then in government service, Mr. Miller believes it was his considerable political skill that enabled him to accomplish so much in the three years he was Division chief. “Earle feared no one,” Mr. Miller says, recalling what he believes to be his friend’s greatest achievement. “For years, the federal government charged tribes millions of dollars annually for managing their forests. Earle convinced Congress the government should not be charging tribes to fulfill trust duties that courts had ruled to be constitutionally guaranteed. Thanks to his leadership, the government now returns those millions of dollars to tribes that invest the same dollar amount in improving their forests.”

Before his 1989 retirement, Mr. Miller was Assistant Chief of the Division of Forestry, a position that afforded him a close look at its underlying problems. “There never was enough money to go around,” he recalls. “But our deeper problems resulted from the fact we were a forest management organization wrapped inside a social services agency that was forever trying out a new program it thought would help the Indian people. Forestry was often swept away in nebulous, trust related issues over which we had little control.”

So it would seem: citing mismanagement, tribes have sued the Division for not harvesting enough timber and for harvesting too much timber. In the celebrated 1980 and 1983 Mitchell cases, the Division was successfully sued for not promptly replanting an allotment it had harvested on the Quinault Nation. The replanting work had not been done because the Division did not have enough money in its reforestation budget.

“Our warnings about funding deficiencies and resulting trust violations were routinely ignored by the Bureau,”

Mr. Miller recalls. Mr. Wilcox first sounded the alarm in 1968. [See Page 8] In an interview with a consulting firm hired to evaluate the Indian Forestry Program, Mr. Wilcox said he did not believe the federal government was managing Indian forests as well as it was managing its own national forests. He further suggested it might be cheaper for the government to improve its tribal forestry program than to defend itself in court. But Mr. Wilcox’s admonition seems to have fallen on deaf ears. After his 1973 retirement, Indian Forestry funding fell to such a low level that the Division did not have a single professional forester on staff in its Washington, D.C. office. “We were essentially nonexistent,” Mr. Miller recalls. “Imagine the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management without any professional foresters on staff in their Washington offices. It would be unthinkable.”

Despite chronic funding problems, Mr. Miller recalls a few good years when Indian forestry made progress. “In the seven years before my 1989 retirement, we were in the limelight, particularly in forest planning, fire management, mapping and woodland resource management,” he recalls. “Those are the years I like to remember best.” The good years began in 1977, when Congress finally boosted the Division’s budget by $5.5 million. The following year it rose by another $6.6 million. “But we and the tribes still had to fight for the money,” Mr. Miller recalls. “Several Bureau area directors and superintendents wanted to divert it to non-forestry programs projects, even though Congress intended the money for forestry.”

A modern-day Timberjack feller-buncher on the Yakama Indian Reservation

Since 1978, Congress has added money for numerous one-time activities including inventory and planning, woodland resources and forest products marketing, but it has yet to deal with the Division’s baseline funding needs. Almost eight years have passed since Congress ratified the National Indian Forest Management Act. Still today there is precious little money for environmental compliance, historic preservation, forest road maintenance, computer modernization or integrated forest planning, now the cornerstone of the Clinton Administration’s vision for managing federal forest lands nationwide. Mr. Miller believes the problem is not entirely of Congress’ making. “There is no direct chain of command linking the Division Chief to BIA area foresters or agency managers,” he explains. “All communications are passed along by BIA area directors and superintendents, who are often more interested in guarding their power bases than they are in forestry. I doubt Congress knows how serious the problem has become.”

Where recent funding progress has been made, Mr. Miller credits the emergence of the Intertribal Timber Council, an association of 73 tribes that own and manage timberland. “They have been able to help tribes appeal to Congress where we could not,” he explains. “Without them, I don’t think the Division’s budget would ever have been increased. We have helped each other immeasurably, to the ultimate benefit of the tribes.”

Since its formation in 1976, the Intertribal Timber Council has played an increasingly important role in tribal forestry matters. Its leadership position in Congress was secured by its involvement in An Assessment of Indian Forests and Forest Management in the United States, a landmark 1993 investigation of forests and forestry in Indian Country. But the study—by scientists widely regarded by both Republicans and Democrats, included recommendations that carry a price tag lawmakers seem unwilling to bear—a 182 percent increase in the Division’s baseline budget, from $66.2 million to $187 million a year. Such an increase, the scientists noted, would “put coordinated resource planning and management on Indian reservations on par with that of the National Forests.” While the recommended $121 million budget increase may seem excessive, it is not when compared to other federal forestry budgets. For example, the Division’s 1996 per acre timber production budget was only 63 percent of that of the Forest Service. Its budget for integrated forest management was only 38 percent of that of the Forest Service, up from 35 percent in 1991, but still insufficient to hire fish or wildlife bio-logists, soil scientists, range managers or archeologists— positions forest planners consider essential.

The Assessment presents a detailed summary of problems and opportunities present in tribal forests and woodlands: money for computers, scholarships in the environmental sciences, reforestation, technology transfer, roads made impassable by rain, historic preservation, fish and wildlife habitat restoration, forest protection and ecosystem management. The list goes on, providing plenty of ammunition for lawmakers fond of sponsoring legislation with environmental or cultural themes.

Albuquerque Area Forester, John Waconda, on a logging operation in the Jicarilla Apache Tribal Forest in northern New Mexico. At 36, Mr. Waconda is the youngest area forester in the BIA. He believes the Division of Forestry may eventually be disbanded, as more tribes take over management of their forests

The assessment also recites a litany of forest health problems westerners know well. Insects and diseases are spreading through overly dense pine and fir forests kept open for eons by frequent, low intensity fires started by lightning or by Indians who used fire to keep their fields and hunting grounds open. But as Indians were herded onto reservations, their fires went out. Then, in 1911, a nation fed up with wildfire forced Congress to put the Forest Service in the fire fighting business, unknowingly laying the groundwork for death and destruction in the West’s national forests.

The problem is less severe in Indian Country than in some national forests, a result of the Division’s greater reliance on selection harvesting techniques that replicate low intensity fire. But woody debris accumulations are increasing in some tribal forests, creating a paradox. One of the best ways to reduce the risk of large wildfires is to set small fires that gradually consume excess woody debris. By replicating natural and aboriginal fire patterns, so-called “prescribed” fires help reset the biological clock in fire-resistant forest types, thus aiding natural regeneration and plant diversity. They also help contain insects and diseases that reduce forest productivity if left unchecked. But intentionally set fires are a tough sell with a public that has been battling big forest fires since 1910. Prescribed fires occasionally escape their handlers. They also pollute the air, arguably violating state and federal air quality standards. But an increasing number of western landowners, including several tribes, have added fire to their management plans. Last year, tribes burned some 55,000 acres. Ecologists have targeted about three percent of total tribal acres fire for prescribed burning.

Beyond risk reduction, there are compelling economic reasons for using fire to protect the health and productivity of tribal forests. Across the nation, these forests provide jobs for more than 40,000 Indians and another 9,000 non- Indians. For the fiscal years 1992–1996, the harvest averaged 706 million board feet per year, and harvest revenue topped $154 million annually. Western tribal forests led the way, harvesting an average annual 436 million board feet of timber worth $132 million in harvest revenue. On some reservations, timber dollars account for more than half of all tribal revenue.

Tribal harvesting is also assuming newfound importance beyond reservations, where plummeting national forest harvest levels have decimated many federally dependent timber communities. In 1986, western national forests in Regions 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6 harvested almost 8.8 billion board feet of timber, almost 17 times what was harvested from western tribal forests. But in 1996, the same regions harvested just 1.97 billion board feet of timber, about 4.5 times what was harvested from western tribal forests. Even more revealing, the 1996 western tribal harvest exceeded all Forest Service regions in the West, except Regions 5 and 6, which harvested a combined 1.32 billion board feet, about 19 percent of their 1986 harvest.

Long overlooked tribal woodlands are also taking on new economic importance, especially in the Southwest, where forests give way to sparsely-timbered pinon-juniper woodlands. Here, Indians harvest nuts, fuelwood, fence rails for livestock corrals, herbs for Native medicines, pinion pitch for waterproofing baskets; and juniper tannin, an excellent wood preservative. The Division pegs the combined value of these harvests at $54 million a year, but economists estimate this revenue stream could be significantly increased with greater investments in manpower and technology.

It is the same everywhere in Indian Country. Manpower and technology shortages are forcing tribal resource managers to make do with less. Advanced computers and software programs capable of linking with advanced satellite mapping and global positioning systems— standard fare in other federal resource planning agencies—are rarely found on reservations. In March 1998 testimony before the House Appropriations Subcommittee for Interior and Related Agencies, Intertribal Timber Council President Jaime Pinkham, estimated almost $7 million is needed to eliminate deficiencies in the BIA’s forestry program. “It is an unfortunate truth that the Bureau, despite its legal obligations as trustee, has never fully provided current and appropriate management for the forest and woodland resources it holds in trust for tribes across the country,” he testified.

Jicarilla nursery technician, Terrence Julian, among 17-week-old ponderosa pine seedlings grown from seeds collected from nearby tribal forests. The BIA built this temporary greenhouse in 1979. Next door is a new forest development monitoring station, constructed at tribal expense.

Citing estimates from the BIA’s 1997 Status of Forest Management Inventories and Planning, Mr. Pinkham reported the volume of trust timberland acres covered by current, legally required management plans has declined to about 63 percent since 1993. Moreover, current management plans exist for only 40 percent of 17.1 million forest acres under BIA trust management. On a reservation-by-reservation basis, only 39 percent of forested reservations had current plans in place in 1997. “To operate such forests without current plans is to invite mismanagement, long term damage to forest resources and consequent federal liability for breach of trust,” Mr. Pinkham warned.

The seriousness of the funding shortage is further spelled out in the Division’s 1996 Funding and Position Analysis. According to the report, the Division operations budget declined by more than 17 percent between 1993 and 1996, and staffing declined 23 percent to 567 full time positions. Tribal forestry staffing increased seven percent to 528 full-time positions, not nearly enough to compensate for the loss of Division professional and technical staffing, which now stands at the 1984 level. Worse yet, temporary employment, which stood at 1,396 in 1993, fell to 547 in 1996, a direct result of federal government’s reduction-in-force program.

Most revealing though is the report’s acknowledgment that the federal Indian Forestry Program would not exist today were it not for millions of dollars from participating tribes voluntarily contributing year after year. In 1996, more than 40 percent [$31 million] of the $77 million program budget came from tribes. But even with tribal contributions, Indian Forestry is $40 million and 668 people short of what is needed to put it on par with other federal forestry programs. The situation has become so frustrating that many Division foresters now talk openly about separating the Division from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Others predict the Division will sunset in a few years as more tribes opt to go it alone, augmenting their forestry programs with federal trust dollars.

“My job is to eventually work my way out of a job,” says John Waconda, the Division’s Albuquerque Supervising Forester. At 36, Mr. Waconda is the youngest area forester in the nation and something of a superstar among tribal foresters. He is of Isleta/Laguna Pueblo decent and grew up on the Isleta Pueblo reservation, only minutes south of his Albuquerque office.

“Our main goal is to help tribes develop the technical expertise they need to manage their own forests,” he explains. “The money required to run programs would still come down through the federal system, as part of the government’s trust responsibility, but a majority of the decisions and the work should be the tribes’ responsibility.”

Mr. Waconda concedes he does not know if the strategy will work. “Many tribes see the government’s Self-Determination policy as a way for Washington to back away from its trust obligation,” he explained. “But the more economically viable tribes seem less concerned, while other tribes are simply too small to go it alone. It’s a mixed bag.”

Interestingly, none of the 13 forested reservations in Mr. Waconda’s area appear anxious to jump ship, and it isn’t because they distrust the government. Quite the opposite is true. “I think for the most part they trust us,” Mr. Waconda says. “Most of our foresters are too young to possess any of the old Division prejudices. Every tribe values its natural resources a bit differently, and the differences are often quite subtle. We try to cater to these differences, as any good business would.”

The Division’s contractual relationships vary from the turnkey operation Mr. Waconda’s staff provides for several Albuquerque area tribes, to agreements that progressively dilute the government’s role. Some tribes “contract” with the Division, dividing the workload in ways that create parallel lines of responsibility. Other tribes “compact,” meaning they develop and administer their own programs, with the Division providing technical assistance on request. In all three relationships, final authority over harvest plans rests with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which also makes certain tribes abide by federal environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act.

No two tribal forestry programs are the same. Some are spectacular successes, while others are struggling under the weight of events seemingly beyond their control. The most widely acclaimed programs are driven by state-of-the-art technology, with strong support from tribal members. Wisconsin’s Menominees have been harvesting their timber for more than a hundred years, and recently they won the Presidential Award for Sustained Development, presented by Vice President Gore. Southwest Washington’s Yakamas developed a land classification system that allows them to make money growing, managing, protecting and harvesting old growth forests—something the Forest Service no longer considers on its adjacent holdings. Northern California’s Hupas used advanced computer modeling techniques to perfect an integrated forest plan that protects 20 pairs of spotted owls and ceremonial dance sites, they also employ 65 in a tribal logging, log merchandising and forestry operation, and make annual dividend payments to tribal members. And in Northwest Montana, Confederated Salish and Kootenai foresters are pioneering an uneven-aged management program designed to add new age classes at each harvesting cycle. Prescribed fire is being used to control unwanted vegetation, creating open spaces where native ponderosa pine can regenerate naturally. The tribes are also using harvesting techniques that simulate disturbance patterns associated with historic wildfire frequency and intensity, adding still more structural diversity to old-growth pine forests that hold the genetic keys to a bright future.

The future also seems secure for western Washington’s Quinault Nation, thanks to an ambitious land acquisition program funded from several sources, including timber harvesting revenue. Large-scale logging began here in 1922, but it wasn’t until the early 1970s that the Nation demanded change in what had been a rough-hewn program emphasizing logging and natural regeneration. Using grants from the nonprofit Ford Foundation and the federal Economic Development Administration, the Quinault started from scratch, mapping and inventorying their forest for the first time.

“This is some of the richest timbergrowing land in North America,” declares Dawn Fullerton, the Quinault Indian Nation’s 27-year-old forest manager.

But there are still challenges. The Nation owns just 28 percent of the land inside its reservation boundaries. The remaining 208,150 acres belong to more than 2,000 allottees, mainly the seven coastal tribes whose ancestors acquired the land in the early 1900s, before the federal government gave up on the idea it could turn Indians into farmers. But there are other owners too—timber companies, speculators and other Indians whose holdings further fragment the Quinault forest, making timber management difficult.

“We are buying land to re-establish the land base as fast as our means allow,” Mrs. Fullerton reports. “It is hard to develop a coherent integrated forest plan when you have to deal with more than 2,000 landowners. Some allotments have more than 300 owners with undivided interests. Getting them to agree on a management plan can be very difficult.”

The Quinault tribal forest spans 56,702 acres, including an 11,000 acre parcel acquired in 1989 from the Olympic National Forest in a move aimed at correcting an error in an 1855 boundary survey. Mrs. Fullerton says the Nation is harvesting in the parcel, but the presence of marbled murrelets may prevent further harvest on 4,500 acres within the unit. “It would be upsetting if we could not move forward,” she says, noting the Nation plans to use the harvest revenue to buy more land.

The Quinault clearcut their forests because the dominant tree species - red cedar, western hemlock and Douglas-fir - respond best to even-age management. Selective harvesting is impractical because, in wet soils, residual trees are often blown down by high coastal winds.

About 2,100 harvested acres are manually replanted every year on Quinault tribal and allotment land. The job requires about 300,000 seedlings, mainly Douglas-fir, red cedar, western hemlock and lodgepole pine. Because it rains so much here, natural regeneration also occurs easily. Thinning is essential in both replanted and naturally reoccurring stands because they otherwise grow so dense sunlight cannot penetrate them, slowing tree growth. Brush and slash—the aftermath of past logging operations—poses a similar problem. Thousands of acres currently lie fallow because seedlings are unable to top dense underbrush that quickly invades harvest sites. Restoring the productivity of these acres is a major thrust of the Quinault forestry program. Hand fertilization, slash burning and broadcast burning help reduce brush competition while improving seedling survival rates. The Nation has also started a seed orchard where it produces fast growing, site-specific, disease-resistant seeds, which are grown into seedlings by contract nurseries before out-planting in tribal and allotment forests.

Three thousand miles east, Maine’s Penobscot Nation has placed its management priorities in a different arena. The six million board feet of timber harvested annually from tribal forests is a byproduct of Penobscot cultural concern for protecting—and creating—deer and moose habitat. The Penobscot forest—some 115,000 acres—consists of several large parcels, most of them a day’s drive distant from the tribe’s island headquarters on the Penobscot River at Old Town. Its 60,000- acre trust holding was created in the early 1980s with federal funds allocated as part of the Maine Indian Lands Settlement Act. Concurrently, the Nation has purchased another 55,000 acres of timberland, which it owns outright. Previous owners harvested the entire forest at least once, probably twice. The resulting mix of hardwoods and softwoods is much too dense to produce the grasses and forbs deer and moose prefer. Fortunately, area lumber mills pay top dollar for maple, yellow birch and spruce trees that reproduce nicely in small patch cuts and selective thinnings that open the forest canopy to sunlight long enough to increase browse production. Also, area pulp mills are also regular buyers of lower quality fir and beech trees the Penobscots are trying to remove from their forests.

“Ours is a pretty straight-forward program,” reports Russell Roy, the tribes’ forest manager for the past 14 years. “We have a stable working relationship with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and, when we ask, we get good technical help from both the Division of Forestry and the U.S. Forest Service. Annual harvest revenues are sufficient to pay for our staff foresters and biologists and still return a nice profit to the tribe.”

Elsewhere in Indian Country, life is not so simple. The Jicarilla and Mescalero Apache tribes have been caught in the downdraft created by the collapse of the sawmilling industry in Arizona and New Mexico. The industry, which drew most of its timber from national forests in the Southwest, has all but vanished in the wake of timber sale appeals and endangered species listings, leaving the tribes with few markets for their logs. The Jicarillas sell their logs to Rio Grande Timber, the only mill left in the region. Meanwhile, the Mescaleros are building a new small log mill next to their older mill. But the entire operation may now be in jeopardy because their only pulpwood buyer, 420 miles distant, recently went out of business.

The near-term economic situation appears more hopeful for the Jicarillas, thanks to a carefully nurtured trophyhunting program that has hunters standing in line to buy $5,000 permits. An Indian-guided hunt can cost $10,000 or more. The success of this and other business ventures has enabled the tribe to fund an ambitious land acquisition program. Since the early 1980s about 112,000 acres of timber and range land have been purchased from neighboring ranchers, rekindling an old debate about whether the tribe ought to replace a sawmill that burned down many years ago. Recent investments in inventory, planning, thinning and reforestation have made the Jicarilla forestry program one of the most admired in the region. Over the last five years, the tribe has poured more than $700,000 of harvest revenue into upgraded facilities, replacing “temporary” structures the Division erected twenty years ago. And in what may be the ultimate vote of confidence, tribal wildlife biologists recently asked Division foresters to prepare a harvest plan for the tribe’s fenced elk reserve.

“We are pursuing three long-term objectives here,” explains Division agency forest manager, Marvin Olson. “First, maintain a healthy and sustainable commercial forest. Second, generate an economic return for the tribe. Third, maintain or enhance big game habitat.”

Where Jicarillas are concerned, Mr. Olson is outspoken to a fault, and his often-sharp opinions are legendary in the Division. “We are an under-funded backwater program within the BIA,” he declares, noting the fact the Division’s $40 million annual budget amounts to about 2.2 percent of the total BIA budget. “I wish we could be the Indian Forest Service, totally out of the BIA. Perhaps then the forestry program would receive the funding and attention it needs and deserves. I am certain we could provide tribes with better quality services. Were it not for the financial backing of tribes, our current program would not exist. The federal government’s piece-meal commitment to Indian forestry ought to embarrass the whole country.”

In southern New Mexico, where pine forests melt into desert sand, the Mescalero Apache’s struggle with a different version of the same problem. Here, dead and dying forests and increasingly deadly fires are unwelcome features on a landscape that has been used and abused for most of this century. The situation is every bit as perilous as it is in the sickest of the Intermountain region’s overly dense national forests. The fact that Mescaleros depend on the 70 jobs their mill provides adds to the pressure on Division foresters. The tribe has sued the Bureau before for not cutting enough timber. In the past decade, there have been four forest managers. “It’s a tough place to work,” concedes Albuquerque area forester, John Waconda. “Mescaleros are adamant about the government’s trust responsibility. They’ve tested our mettle several times.”

But where forestry is concerned, the tribe has also given the Division wide decision-making authority, something David Koch has come to appreciate. Mr. Koch is in charge of forest development and inventory and planning on the Mescalero Reservation. “The tribe expects us to improve the health and economic value of their forest,” he explains. “How we do it is left to us.”

The Division’s objective is straightforward: restore the health of Mescalero forests by first reducing stand density and disease levels, then promoting seral species composition, including ponderosa pine. Historically, ponderosa was far more prevalent than it is now, owing to the fact it had adapted to frequent, low intensity fire. Although there is visible progress in Mescalero forests, Mr.Koch and his colleagues recently hit an economic roadblock that may undermine their progress, at least temporarily. The tribe’s sawmill lost its pulpwood buyer—another casualty of the Southwest’s imploding timber industry. As a result, timberstand improvement and disease control work may have to be slowed until a new pulpwood buyer can be found. Fortunately, the tribe’s golf resort and gaming operation near Ruidoso has become a haven for Texas fat cats, and reservation big game hunts are also increasing popularity, as is the tribe’s ski resort. But the prosperity of these ventures has not caused the tribe to reconsider its long-term investments in forestry. The three-way connection between forestry, harvesting and employment is clearly understood, as is the fact that the eventual recovery of big pine forests depends on the success of the Division’s forest restoration program.

A log truck rolls across the scales at the Mescalero Apache sawmill near Tinnie, New Mexico. The collapse of the Southwest’s federal timber sale program is undermining the tribe’s forestry and milling operation. Their pulpwood buyer—420 miles distant—has gone out of business, leaving them without a purchaser for low quality timber they are removing from their overstocked forests.

Hope fades at Window Rock, Arizona, headquarters for the Navajo Nation. Tribal forestry and tribal culture have collided head-on in the midst of a reservation the size of West Virginia. Navajos are suing Navajos in a first of its kind lawsuit filed by tribe members who oppose harvesting. They have aligned themselves with Santa Fe environmentalists in litigation challenging the tribe’s forest plan. In the three years since the suit was filed almost no timber has been harvested. Since 1992, annual revenues from harvesting have fallen from $4.2 million to zero.

The Navajos run their own forestry program, though the Division still provides technical services from its office next door to the tribe’s forestry office. Where one organization’s responsibility ends and the other begins is difficult to tell, which has added to the strain on both offices. “It would be an understatement to say that we are up to our teeth in pressure,” says tribal forester, Alex Becenti, himself a Navajo. “We are trying to make the best of a very difficult situation.”

Mr. Becenti is new to his post and is understandably mum about the lawsuit. But his Navajo predecessor, Robert Billie, is not. “This lawsuit is an inevitable consequence of Self-Determination,” he explains. “We have empowered tribal members who never would have dreamed of challenging the Division now think nothing of challenging Navajo Forestry. Environmentalists saw an opportunity to step in, and they took it.”

It is hard to put one’s finger on the pulse of this conflict. Some say the liquidation of old growth ponderosa was forestry’s undoing, but others think the once vast forestry operation moved too far, too fast for most Navajos. Suspicion replaced trust. It did not help that more than 80 percent of the reservation’s population lives beyond the forest, and is unconcerned about the tribe’s now idle sawmill, or the fact that it employed about 400 Navajos. “Now the mill is a pigeon roost,” declares Frankie Thompson, who works in the tribe’s inventory and planning department.

At its zenith, the mill and adjacent particle board plant processed 40 million board feet of Navajo timber annually. But the mill was designed to provide employment, not process logs efficiently. It closed owing the tribe millions of dollars for logs it had processed but not paid for. Modernizing the mill will cost an estimated $14 million, which may be more than the tribe is willing to pay given the fact that coal, oil and natural gas leases are its biggest revenue producers, by far.

Meanwhile, Mr. Becenti hopes to get the tribe’s new forest plan approved sometime this year. It must please the tribe, a federal judge and the government. In the end, the harvest level is expected to fall from 40 to less than 20 million board feet, but under the circumstances anything would be helpful. The timber program hasn’t generated any revenue since 1995, and the tribe’s state-of-the-art reforestation program is surviving on mining company contracts and growing native plants for reclamation sites. With environmentalists firmly in control, the near-term outlook is bleak. “They told us they intend to take us to court, no matter how good our plan is,” Mr. Becenti concedes. “We still hope to succeed.”

Litigation aside, the problem Navajos are facing is no different than the problem facing other tribes. Put simply, the road to Self-Governance is very rocky, especially for tribes trying to cope with the enormity of integrated forest planning. Most tribes lack the professional skills required to develop and administer such complex plans. Others lack the millions in up-front capital needed to purchase essential computer hardware and software. The Division is supposed to be helping with training, equipment and technology transfer, but it doesn’t have the money either. “It is very frustrating,” says Arch Wells, Acting Chief of the Division of Forestry. “The 1990 National Indian Forest Management Act makes the Division responsible for providing tribes with the technical and administrative support they need to complete their integrated forest plans, but we’re still waiting for the funding.”

The waiting should have ended in 1994, when Congress ratified the Tribal Self-Governance Act, reaffirming the federal government’s tribal trust responsibility. In its aftermath, most federal agencies began implementing their own self-governance policies, further strengthening the Indian hand where trust responsibility is concerned. Among them, the Division’s parent agency, the U.S. Department of the Interior. Interior Field Solicitor, Priscilla Wilfahrt, also confirmed the governvment’s trust responsibility in The Reality of the United States’ Role As Trustee for Indians, a briefing paper she wrote earlier this year.

“The development of a formal agency policy regarding Native Americans is a significant step in the implementation of the government-wide trust responsibility,” she wrote. Ms. Wilfahrt’s paper deals mainly with the 1994 Act, which she predicts will “require a great deal of judicial contemplation.” But she also touches on the underlying cause of the Division’s fiscal and political woes.

“The current policy of ‘reinventing government,’ combined with the forecasts for the fiscal welfare of the United States, leave no conclusion but that government will continue to shrink,” she observed. “That means that there will be fewer and fewer federal resources to administer a growing trust resource. For example, many of the tribes in the Minneapolis and Aberdeen areas are using gaming revenues to acquire lands, which they are requesting be placed in trust status, thus increasing the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ administrative burden at the same time Bureau staff members are diminishing.”

Clearly, Mr. Wells and the Division face a tough situation —cursed one day for trying to exercise too much control over sovereign nations, cursed the next day for abandoning their trust obligations. But he is determined to make the best of it, dividing his time between, “trying to figure out how to get more money from Congress and how to down-size an organization that is already too small to fulfill its mission.”

How or when Congress will finally address the Division’s baseline funding needs is anyone’s guess. Meanwhile, tribes that can afford it are investing their money in new industries including gaming, banking, telecommunications, electronics, clothing, resorts, food processing and trophy hunting and fishing. But for the nation’s largest and most remote reservations, future prosperity lies in profitably managing their natural resources, especially timber. For now at least, these tribes remain wards of a government that recog-nizes their independence, but shows no sign of wanting to return what is treasured most in Indian Country: the land.