Department’s responsibilities in managing Federal lands” and each department shall undertake making agreements to co-steward federal lands with tribes. Furthermore, a with a subject entitled: Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Federal Decision Making states ‘where appropriate, ITEK can and should inform Federal decision making along with scientific inquiry’. Both the Joint Secretarial Order 3403 and the ITEK Presidential Memo may allow tribes to incorporate their knowledge and values for various federal decisions regarding forest management. Following the order and memo mentioned above decisions made in 2022, additionally provided two NEPA authorities related to fire breaks and fuel treatment. These are summarized below and influence additional cross- boundary efforts on tribal lands with their neighbors: 1) A Categorical Exclusion fuel breaks up to 1,000 feet in width and under 3,000 acres of treatments. 2) “Emergency Actions” that authorizes the Secretary to determine that an emergency
San Carlos Apache tribal member, Twila Cassadore, works to protect tribal food sovereignty through the Western Apache Diet Project PHOTO CREDIT: SERRA HOAGLAND
Who: Commonly adjacent landowners to tribal lands included federal (e.g., USFS, NPS, BLM etc.), state (state forests, state parks, state conservation areas), forest industry, counties, and private. In some cases, the tribe was semi-landlocked and had only one neighbor with forested lands and in some cases they had more than five different entities to consider working with on cross-boundary type projects. The USDA Forest Service (USFS) was the most common neighbor to tribal lands. With new internal guidance such as that provided within the Confronting the Wildfire Crisis Strategy and
and observations that could be gathered during the team’s visits with tribes and regional BIA offices over the period of nearly two years. Task J is similar to Task K, where the focus is on institutional capability, staff, equipment, facilities and organizational components necessary to accomplish landscape level projects. However, in Task J the focus is on understanding the who, what, where, when, and why of landscape-scale forest and ecologic restoration and how tribes contribute to, or may benefit from such work.
exists on National Forest System lands and allows vegetation and other treatments to be carried out pursuant to the Secretary’s emergency determination.
These national scale actions and impacts were in active development and implementation as the IFMAT IV assessments were completed, thus IFMAT was not able to report on their potential influence on landscape- scale ecologic restoration. The focus of this Task was on insights
Task Findings and Recommendations 187
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