The fact that tribes do everything they do in their forests for one-third the per acre money that the Forest Service gets tells you something isn’t right.” The Cow Creek Band does not own a mill – unless you count the two portable sawmills, they purchased to do some sal- vage logging following the 2019 Milepost 97 Fire, a 13,000-acre lightning-caused fire on Forest Service land that had not been salvage logged following a 1987 fire. “We were able to sell some of our burnt timber following the Milepost fire to local sawmills, but the BIA’s sale prep process took too long. Insects invaded before we could sell all of it,”Vredenburg said. “So, we bought a two-man portable mill to see if we could cut some lumber from the burnt logs no one could process.” Portable sawing is slow going – so slow that Vredenburg calculated that it would take 45 years to finish every acre, so the tribe bought a larger portable to see what more they could salvage. “Over the last four years, we have worked our way through all of it and we have planted 1.5 million seedlings,” he reported. “Someday, it will be beautiful again. It’s all about vision, shared respon- sibility and follow through.” Mike Dockry shares the frustrations voiced by his fellow IFMAT IV colleagues,
after the Cow Creek Band signed a treaty with the federal government in 1854, ceding 512,000 acres of land for 2.3 cents per acre, the government sold the land to settlers for $1.25 per acre, then ignored their government-to-government trust with the tribe for nearly 100 years. Despite his considerable expertise, Vredenburg found himself in awe of what he saw in Indian Country during IFMAT IV site visits that took him from coast to coast. “It was a fascinating and amazing experience,” he said. “The depth and breadth of forestry tribes are practicing is a world apart from what we do in Doug- las-fir here in Southwest Oregon. For me, the lasting lesson is that after tribal leadership sets its vision, the responsibil- ity for implementing the vision is shared by everyone. The timber guy is responsi- ble for clean, cold water for fish and the fisheries guy is responsible for the timber growth and health.” Vredenburg confirmed the shift from a singular timber focus to a broader and more holistic approach that includes tra- ditional, non-timber resources that grow in the same forest. “It’s the outcome most tribes want now,” he explained. “It’s a great model and certainly one that Congress should seriously consider for national forests.
ments, but the big question is what can tribes and the Intertribal Timber Council do to raise awareness and support in Congress and relevant federal agencies?” Wilson believes IFMAT IV does a respectable job of peeling back “the timber part” of the tribal story but he thinks tribes may want to focus more on the BIA’s Office of Trust Responsibility, a necessity expressed throughout the IFMAT IV report. Tim Vredenburg is Director of Forest Management for the Cow Creek Band based at Roseburg, Oregon, a position he has held for 12 years. He is the only IFMAT IV Technical Specialist who works directly for a tribe. Vredenburg is an expert in tribal Self-governance and Self-determination, which goes a long way toward explaining how the Cow Creek Band secured one of the first two ITARA demonstration proj- ects and sold the first ITARA timber sale in the country using tribally developed rules, not the BIA’s rule book. “I can’t overemphasize its signifi- cance or impact,”Vredenburg said. “It’s an enormous accomplishment for a tribe that Congress did not formally recognize until December 1982 and we did not gain permanent status until 2018.” The story is too long to tell here but
8 Evergreen Collapsed stringer bridge, Chugach Alaska Native Corporation, southcentral Alaska.
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