Wednesday, February 8, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
MANAGEMENT:
Tribes have different
approach to land
Continued from page 20
is one of the first to have tim-
ber land again.
Vredenburg said between
the time the tribe was occu-
pying its ancestral lands and
now, the forest has changed
dramatically, with more tim-
ber crowded together.
Gordon, who’s also the
co-chairman of the three
assessments for the National
Indian Forest Resources
Management Act, found
through his site visits across
the country that where tribal
lands exist, forest manage-
ment is going well, but the
tribes are underfunded and
the lands are increasingly
threatened by wildfire, dis-
ease, insects, development,
climate change, urbaniza-
tion and declining access to
markets.
“With the small amount
of land they have now, we’re
trying to employ modern tech-
niques while blending tradi-
tional knowledge and we’re
looking at using a variety of
different approaches from
variable retention harvest-
ing and reintroducing fire to
those landscapes in a thought-
ful way,” Vredenburg said of
Cow Creek.
“That does include log-
ging, and while logging can
be controversial, our goal is
to leave a plot in the position
where it can become healthy
again and to contribute to it
being healthy now, whether
it’s through thinning or other
methods,” Rondeau added.
Cow Creek had a treaty in
1854 to designate a permanent
reservation, but the treaty was
never recognized. The tribe
is hoping that Congress will
finally create the reservation.
In the meantime, Cow Creek
has a goal to buy back its his-
toric forestland that is now
under federal ownership.
“I wish them well in their
efforts and I’m very glad they
continue to work toward for-
estry management as a long-
term economic development
tool,” said Wayne Shammel,
the former attorney for Cow
Creek. He retired from that
position in 2014 after 19 years
of providing legal counsel,
drafting legislation for land
acquisitions and lobbying to
get the lands placed in a trust.
“It’s been in the long-term
strategic plan of the tribe
since its restoration and hav-
ing been there a long time it’s
nice to see they’re continu-
ing their efforts to not just
acquire land but work coop-
eratively with the regional
timber companies and for-
estry management,” Shammel
said. “It looks like some of
their efforts are beginning to
mature. I know they’ve com-
pleted some sales and they
have done some harvests and
things seem to be progressing
well and I’m happy for them.”
Though the Cow Creek
Tribe and the Confederated
Tribes haven’t been able to
regain a large portion of their
ancestral lands, they do a
good job with what they have,
Gordon said.
“They do a very good job
of blending the objective of
environmental health and
timber production ... they’re
able to do both,” Gordon said.
“The forests these tribes are in
are some of the most produc-
tive forests anywhere.”
Though the Cow Creek
Tribe has yet to regain much
of its original land, it does
manage what it has sustain-
ably, according to Gordon.
Before coming to work for
the tribe, Vredenburg helped
manage the Coquille Indian
Tribe’s portion of regained
land, according to the param-
eters of the Northwest Forest
Plan, protecting water quality,
habitats and old-growth stands
while producing an average of
3 million board-feet per year.
“They did so successfully,
so that’s the only land under
the Northwest Forest Plan
where both the environmental
and timber targets have been
met,” Gordon said.
Douglas County has
been the epicenter of con-
troversy around timber har-
vest and endangered species,
31
particularly the spotted owl,
but Vredenburg and Rondeau
said Cow Creek can help
provide models of a good
approach to forest manage-
ment that not only maintains
the forest and its surrounding
community, but improves it.
“I’m hoping through Tim’s
leadership and the tribe’s his-
torical desire to improve the
landscape, we can provide
methods and examples for
others in the timber industry
and environmentalists that
can learn there is a happy
medium,” Rondeau said.
“That’s one of our hopes in
the Elliott project and really
through anything the tribe
works on, using traditional
knowledge and blending that
with modern technology and
science to show relevant and
effective management meth-
ods that support all the things
we care about in the forest,”
Vredenburg said.
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