Wildfire Management Large wildfires on Indian lands are becoming more frequent, costlier and more complex to manage. Centralization of fire suppression programs (national and regional control of allocation of resources) has had serious negative impacts on tribal ability to respond quickly at the local level and thus to keep fires small. Also, there is a major impact on tribal employment by eliminating use of local contractors, equipment, and firefighters due to difficulties in complying with national qualifications. For self-governance tribes are the national qualifications a law or convention? A key issue is that federal agencies will not reimburse fire suppression costs to tribes if the crews or resources used do not meet national qualification standards. Safety and funding are connected to the national specifications. Are these fire specifications and qualifications an unfunded mandate? Trust responsibility and tribal sovereignty may not be given proper consideration in allocation of national resources and ability to use local resources. In setting suppression priorities for trust property, it is a question of how it is valued, in relation to structures, for example. Fire suppression actions on Indian trust lands may need to be held to a higher standard of accountability, especially when those actions destroy trust resources to contain fires. In any case Incident Management Team (IMT) leadership assigned to wildfires on Indian lands should have special training relating to tribal sovereignty and the federal trust responsibility as it relates to protection of trust
A discussion of a burned area rehabilitation planting project on the Yakama Indian Reservation in Washington state. PHOTO CREDIT: VINCENT CORRAO
advances in self-governance and exclusive tribal control (ITARA) in achieving forest visions call for reassessing how Indian forests will be managed in the future and how needs and the BIA might change to align with this new management model?
forest management plan (FMP) integrating harvest capacity, scheduling of harvest and management of forest resources for their total ownership. BIA has been reluctant to support preparation of such plans due to funding restrictions and an expressed lack of authority to approve FMP’s which integrate trust and fee lands. Tribes are increasingly acquiring fee land some of which is brought into trust and acquired fee land is often not within the reservation boundaries. Are BIA reforms necessary to accommodate this trend?
Fee Lands, Co-management, and FMPs
Tribes have acquired significant acreages of private forestland and hold these lands in fee status. Some tribes have expressed the desire to manage both trust and fee lands under a single
154 Assessment of Indian Forests and Forest Management in the United States
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