Native Americans and the Environment: A survey of twentieth century issues with particular reference to peoples of the Colorado Plateau and Southwest (page 3 of 10)

Author: David Rich Lewis. Adapted from: Lewis, David R. 1995. "Native Americans and the Environment: A survey of twentieth century issues." American Indian Quarterly, 19: 423-450, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Visit the University of Nebraska Press website at nebraskapress.unl.edu/.

Forest and Watersheds

The extensive forests on some Indian reservations made them attractive targets for exploitation in the early twentieth century.  While the BIA struggled to develop forest management and sustained yield programs, millions of acres of Indian timber were transferred by executive order into adjacent national forests.

One early effort by BIA and Forest Service officials to manage timber resources in the West was to outlaw Indian-set fires. Indians argued from long experience that such burning was a necessary form of environmental management. They used fire to clear dense undergrowth and improve game habitat and hunting. Fires cleaned the forest floor of accumulated debris, neutralized soil acidity, and warmed the earth, speeding the germination of new and useful vegetal materials. Periodic low-burning fires likewise reduced the potential for destructive crown fires. But government officials banned the practice as destructive to market timber resources, thereby changing the human ecology of large areas of the West.

Indian lumbering in the West did not take off until new technology and post-World War II demand made relatively inaccessible timber economically viable. Tribal timber corporations and government-managed timber sales brought a level of economic prosperity to isolated reservations. Some, like the White Mountain Apache, have established sustained yield timber management programs and lumber mills that employ tribal members. Others have witnessed the gross mismanagement of sustained yield programs or the impact of federal termination policies that contributed to wholesale clear-cutting, erosion, watershed impairment, and the loss of forest habitats.

Mismanagement of a Navajo Forest Products Industry has left it $6.7 million in debt, with thousands of acres harvested but not replanted. Plans to harvest "Grandfather trees" (old-growth ponderosa pine) in the Chuska Mountains have put the tribe at odds with its own members who oppose desecration of this sacred area. It also has put them at odds with the government's Endangered Species Act which protects critical habitat for Mexican spotted owls. Navajo requests for ESA exemption of trust lands based on inherent tribal sovereignty were denied by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1994, but a proposal for a five-reservation, one-million acre exemption reemerged in 1995, signaling the wildlife service's retreat in the face of a growing conservative backlash against federal regulatory power in the West.

Follow these links to:
Hunting and Fishing
Water
Natural Resource Mining and Pollution
Waste Storage and the Atomic Threat
Tourism
Stereotypes and Interests in Conflict
Conclusion
Selected References