of accounting for all the tangible and intangible parts of tribally owned forests and grasslands. Everything.” Public concern – and impatience – with the wildfire calamity that has engulfed federal lands across much of the West has grown significantly in recent years, so Dockry and those who share his point of view are correct in predicting widespread public support for tribal forestry’s many assets. “There are two take home messages in IFMAT IV,” Dockry said. “One is the increasing tribal emphasis on managing for non-timber values. That’s huge. The other is that the values tribes ascribe to need to be fully funded. What is not well under- stood is that equitable funding is not just a tribal issue. It’s an issue for every landowner that lives adjacent to federal land that is not being protected.” “When insects, diseases and wildfire jump from federal land to state or private and it becomes everyone’s problem,” Dockry continued. “In the reverse, when federal land is as professionally managed as tribal lands, everyone benefits.” Although their assessments vary with their expertise, every- one we interviewed for this re- port said much the same thing. Everyone also said that the federal focus on project funding – as opposed to programmatic funding – is the reason tribes lack the staffing needed to do more of the cross-boundary work Congress envisions. “Fund tribes the same per- acre basis as the Forest Service and the wildfire crisis we see on federal land will begin to subside,” Dockry said. “Wildfire will give way to prescribed burns that are safely set to reduce the on-the-ground fuel loads that feed big fires. I know it is coun- terintuitive, but it works. Tribes have been doing it for hundreds if not thousands of years.”
specifically the urgent need for Congress to erase the increas- ingly serious lack of adequate funding. “Every funding deficiency identified in IFMAT IV exposes a problem that has persisted since IFMAT I was completed 30 years ago.,” Dockry said. “Tribes are doing more with less. Congress needs to erase the underfunded budgets that IV identifies. These are trust responsibilities.” Although Dockry was new to IFMAT, he was one of twelve technical specialists selected to work with the four-member core team. He brought two significant assets to his assignments: He is a member of Citizen Potawatomi Nation and he holds a PhD in forestry from the University of Wisconsin. Dockry is an Assistant Pro- fessor of Tribal Natural Resource Management in the University of Minnesota in St. Paul. His interdis- ciplinary research and teaching focus on blending Indigenous knowledge and tribal perspec- tives into forestry and natural resource management. He incor- porates previous IFMAT reports into his classroom lectures. Federal natural resource managers responsible for the nation’s forests and grasslands could learn a great deal from Dockry about the cultural and holistic underpinnings of the trib- al resource management model. “The model is not as useful for private owners that are exclu- sively in the timber growing busi- ness, but the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management are not in the timber business either, certainly not as they were for forty-some years following World War II. “ But the transition would not be without controversy since the tribal forestry model would require thinning in overstocked forests, actions widely opposed by special interest groups that favor preservation, no matter the environmental cost. “It is my opinion that if the public could see tribal forestry in action, they would become huge supporters,” Dockry said. “The holistic nature of the model means that it does a beautiful job
Page 9 Thinned forest, Spokane Tribe of Indians, eastern Washington.
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