Thanks to the presence of its two mills, the tribe was able to process about 112 million board feet of burnt logs from be- tween 2013 and 2016 – timber that likely would have burned again if it had not been removed and the ground replanted. The Yakama currently harvests about 88 million board feet per year from its forests – an amount sufficient to employ 240 mill workers in its White Swan mills, near the tribe’s southern boundary on the Columbia River. The product mix of the two mills includes common boards, dimension and framing lumber, export lumber, lam stock, mould- ing, shop grade lumber and lum- ber third-party certified by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative. To help secure its future in a topsy turvy forestry world increasingly dominated by killing wildfires, the Yakama tribe assumed a leadership role in the formation of the Tapash Sustainable Forest Collaborative,
Wenatchee and Mt. Baker-Sno- qualmie National Forests. But the only companies currently operating east of the Cascades are Boise Cascade at Kettle Falls and Yakima and Vaagen Brothers Lumber Company at Colville. Neither company has shown interest in the idea because such a mill would cost north of $100 million to con- struct, with no assurance that the Forest Service – by far the largest landowner Washington – could provide the log volume needed to keep the mill running on a year-round basis for the 25 years required to amortize the investment. The four tribes in eastern Washington and northern Idaho – the Spokane’s at Wellpinit, northwest of Spokane, the Coeur d’ Alenes at Plummer, Idaho, the Nez Perce at Lapwai, Idaho and the Colville’s at Nespelem, Wash- ington – all have easy access to a wide variety of wood processing facilities in northeast Washing-
Riparian habitat, Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin.
their own sawmills. It makes the Tapash Collaborative’s job much easier. Tribes that lack ready access to wood process- ing infrastructure have a more difficult time because there are no easily reached markets for their trees. “The BIA has been providing some grant money to get small operations going but most tribes are managing on a stewardship basis and not for volume,” explained Vincent Corraro, Program Man- ager for IFMAT IV and president of North- west Management in Moscow, Idaho. “Much of that is because in many areas there is no infrastructure to manufacture the volume. The real story is that without these manufacturing facilities the tribes are not able to do the treatments that are needed to im- prove or in some cases bring back the traditional and cultural ways and it’s all burning up in some cases or dying and the foods are disappearing.” Increasing Central Washington’s wood processing capacity is challenging. The Nature Conservancy has been look- ing for several years for someone it can partner with in the development of a new high speed, small log mill it would like to site somewhere near Wenatchee. The goal – which is universally shared by the Tapash partners – is to provide wood processing markets for the massive die-off of trees in the Okanagan-
a partnership that includes The Nature Conservancy, the U.S. Forest Service, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Washington Department of Natural Resources. The collaborative draws its name from Táp’ash, a noun. According to the Sahaptin dic - tionary, Táp’ash means “pine tree” in Sahaptin. Sahpatin is a Plateau Penutian language spoken in south-central Wash- ington and northern Oregon. Imítichnik táp’ashyaw ánichatak, which means, “Go bury it under the pine tree.” The collaborative works across own- ership boundaries on a landscape scale in the mountainous Central Cascades to improve forest ecosystem health, minimize the after effects of catastrophic fire, protect fish and wildlife habitat for a remarkable variety of species, retain cultural values for present and future generations and support de- velopment of a sustainable restoration economy. Tapash’s boots-on-the-ground work involves restoring forests and watersheds via adaptive management – a term that gained prominence in the late 1980s, during the late Booth Gardner’s first term as Washington State Governor. Adap- tive management draws on the same holistic principles that the Yakama have observed for thousands of years. See QR code. The Yakama are fortunate to have
ton and northern Idaho.
Montana’s Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes are within easy log hauling distance to mills north – in the Flathead Valley and south in Missoula – so they have many options for managing their forests. The same is true of tribes based in western Washington. All of them, including the Quinault Nation, which manages impressive stands of Douglas-fir and alder, have easy access to dozens of sawmills and panel plants that produce lumber, plywood, laminated veneer lumber, oriented strand board and cross laminated timbers. Tribes in Oregon, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and the central and eastern states have a tougher time because there are fewer mills. The lesson here is straight-forward: No matter the brand of forestry – holistic or high yield – the presence of nearby wood processing infrastructure makes all the difference in the world.
Menominee
Yakama
Tapash
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