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Forest Ownership, Tenure, and Social Systems

Indigenous/Native Tribes: Owners and Rights, USA 

Michael J. Dockry and Holly YoungBear-Tibbetts

College of Menominee Nation 

Introduction
 

While it is certainly the case that all landscapes are evocative, forests particularly command human attention, and frequently come to symbolize cultural values or apprehensions. These sensibilities take a diverse variety of expressions ranging from the sacred to the profane. This shared human trait is certainly also the case in the instance of native communities and their tribally owned forests. Tribally owned forests have multiple and profound levels of sacred or spiritual value for native communities in addition to their economic, ecological, and more mundane social values. These values may be further layered with shades of meaning and symbolism as a result of clan or totem affiliation, long practiced familial customary use, special sites of seasonal harvests, hunting, or gathering, and in the case of forest based cultures, whether expressed literally or metaphorically, cultural identity itself. Native cosmologies frequently emphasize the inter-relationships between disparate values, both sacred and secular. That cultural trait has direct implications for the spirit of stewardship native nations exhibit in the management of tribally-owned forests, and clearly influences local managerial decision-making, forest management practices, and consequent forest health and ecology.
 

Forests are an integral part of life on many American Indian reservations and communities. Forests provide American Indian communities with a complex mix of economic, social, and cultural opportunities as well as ecosystem services and opportunities for exercising tribal sovereignty. Forests provide wood products, firewood, clean water, traditional products like wildlife and plants, places for spiritual and traditional activities, as well as a source of jobs and economic income.
 

Indian forestland is defined in the National Indian Forest Resource Management Act as, "Indian lands, including commercial and non-commercial timberland and woodland, that are considered chiefly valuable for the production of forest products or to maintain watershed or other land values enhanced by a forest cover …". More broadly, Indian forestland can be defined as any forestland that Native American communities value for their economic, ecological, cultural, and/or spiritual significance.
 

There are 562 federally recognized American Indian nations in the United States, and an additional fifty native nations recognized by the states in which their lands are located. Of those tribes, 302 American Indian reservations have significant forest resources with a total of total of 17.9 million acres in forest with an estimated standing volume of 55,804 million board feet. While small compared to the total forest resources in the United States, they play an important role regionally and locally for both Indian and non-Indian communities.
 

Although, American Indian tribes have managed forests for thousands of years, forest management today is facilitated by both federal and tribal institutions. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is designated by the federal government to carry out the trust responsibility to manage American Indian forestlands. However, as of 2003, 121 tribes have acquired whole or partial management of their forests.
 

American Indian forests are as diverse as the tribes that depend on them. Forest types range from temperate rainforest in the Northwest, deciduous hardwoods in the Southeast, Northeast, and Midwest, conifer in the West and Southwest, and even cypress in Florida. Some of the forests are suitable for commercial timber management and some are less suitable for this activity. All of these forests are extremely valuable to tribal economic, social, cultural, and spiritual well being.
 

Tribally owned forests contribute benefits far beyond the boundaries of their native owners providing a critical role in delivery of environmental services. Indian reservations are frequently located in the most fragile landscapes, primarily in the arid west and to a lesser extent the Upper Great Lakes. Native stewardship of forested lands has proven to protect watersheds, provide carbon sinks, forestall erosion and mass wasting, mitigate climatic extremes, and replenish air quality. Native stewardship of forests assures habitat protection, biodiversity, and preservation of ecological corridors and connectivity. Despite these benefits, tribal forest management is challenged by proximity to non-tribally managed forests, disturbance, and fragmentation.
 

Historical Context and Ownership
 

American Indian communities have an intimate relationship with their land and resources and are acutely affected by management decisions made both on and off reservation forestlands. To the uninitiated, reservation lands can present a bewildering array of tenure status. Reserved lands may be located within ancestral lands or at remote distances as a consequence of tribal removals. A reservation may include lands held in trust by the federal government for the native nation, a specific band, or one or more individuals. Some individual trust parcels may have hundreds of “beneficial owners” and in some cases may be leased to Indian or non-Indian land tenants. All trust lands, however, share certain title and transfer constraints, and by definition cannot be sold, mortgaged, or used as collateral. Depending on the stipulations of relevant treaties or Executive Orders, tribal nations or their members may hold trust lands outside reservation boundaries, “restored ceded lands” which may or may not have trust protection. Fee lands present no less complexity and maybe owned by - Indian or non-Indian – individuals, families, bands, the tribe, its enterprises or corporations, or by non-Indian corporations.
 

Those patterns are a consequence of historical processes and are today remnants of a larger tribal forest estate, diminished through removals, treaties and allotments of tribally-held forestlands to individual Indians. Following its independence, and, a failed effort to forge a confederation based on the model of the Iroquois League, framers of the constitution held as a federal authority the exclusive right to “treat with the Indians.” Between the years of 1790 and 1871, more than seven hundred treaties were negotiated with native nations by the federal government with 348 ultimately ratified by the U.S. Senate, when the treaty era was formally ended.
 

Treaties with native nations were structured by sets of articles specifying four broad categories: peace and friendship; land cessions; reserved lands; and provisos for the further provision of federal services in health, education, and economic development. Those provisos for forest-based reserved lands frequently included provisions for sawmills and sawyers, and thereby institutionalized timber harvesting as a primary economic sector of nascent reservation economies. Reservations created by Executive Order after 1871, were historically coincident with the federal government’s own oversight of forested lands. Following a period of political compromise, the U.S. Forest Service was created within the Department of Agriculture, in response to rapacious destruction of forestlands. From the onset of Congressional designation of forest reserves and national forests, beginning with the 1902 designation of the Minnesota Forest Reserve today called the Chippewa National Forest, many tribal forestlands suffered the superimposition of U.S. Forest Service boundaries. The legacy of those historic events is a diverse set of overlapping, competing, and sometimes contentious array of tenure claims with resultant impacts on forest managerial authority, responsibility, and practice. Neither legislative nor administrative remedies have wholly resolved jurisdictional disputes of tribal forests located within the boundaries of national forests. Tenure patterns and consequent disputes were further exacerbated by the privatization of tribal lands beginning in 1887 with passage of the Dawes Act and other subsequent tribally-specific Congressional Acts, until 1934 when passage of the Indian Reorganization Act officially halted the allotment of tribal lands to individual tribal members.
 

Allotment was premised on the precept that native cultures and values inhibited the process of converting “American Indians into Indian Americans” through the supposed benefits of private property. Individual tribal members were allotted eighty – and in some instances subsequent allotments for a total of 160 - acres of reservation land. Lands “surplus” to the allotment were sold to non-Indians, whose presence, it was argued, would promote the “civilization” of the Indians. Through this vehicle, highly coveted forestlands were disproportionately removed from the tribal estate, leaving the tribal land base highly fragmented and the “checkerboard” pattern of land tenure and use easily recognizable on many reservations today.
 

Initiated by Eastern reformers, but wholly endorsed by western timber barons, who would become its principal beneficiaries, the allotment of communally held tribal lands to individual tribal members diminished the native land holdings from in excess of 138 million acres to less than forty eight million acres including both tribal lands and those owned by individual Indian allottees and their heirs. Losses in land values, however, far exceeded gross measures by acreage, with nearly half of the residual Indian lands desert or semi-desert, and the most valuable lands – particularly forests – accounting for eighty five percent of the former native land passing from Indian ownership.
 

The allotment process was rife with corruption, including manipulation of tribal enrollments through the device of “blood quantum” tied to levels of protection of individual property rights, “funny money” currencies good only at local trading posts for overpriced, inferior goods, and in numerous reservations, collusion of the pine cartel with the Indian Agent responsible for the allotment process. It is important to note that at the time of allotment neither tribes nor individual native people had recourse to legal remedies for their grievances in the allotment process and consequent loss of valuable timberlands. Allotted reservations were, as a consequence of fragmentation of forestlands, challenged to exercise comprehensive forest management plans. Loss of tribal forestlands would continue long after the formal end of allotment under the rationale that with each successive generation, ownership by heirs of original allottees compounded the number of owners with tenure as fractionated as their forestlands were fragmented.
 

Transfers of allotted lands, despite their designation as Individual Trust Lands, from the Secretary of Interior to the Secretary of Agriculture following passage of the Indian Reorganization Act, built the land base of the national forests at the expense of native individuals and tribes. Secretarial transfers to other federal agencies were not uncommon, and estimates of some twenty million acres of the remaining forty eight million acres of Indian trust land are dedicated to a variety of federal agency interests. The total loss of timber values to tribes has to date not been calculated, and may await resolution of the ongoing litigation by allottees covered in Corbell v. the United States. Economic impact is only one consequence of dispossession. While tribal forests represent significant economic interest to tribal communities, accounting for over $72,000,000 and six hundred million board feet annually in timber harvests, their social, ecological, cultural, spiritual, historical, aesthetic, ideological values far exceed those economic values.
 

Conclusion
 

While American Indian communities and their forests are extremely diverse, they share some general values which underpin their forest management practices. Surveys on uses and values of American Indian forests and forest management conducted in 1993 and 2003, identified “protection” as the primary native perspective informing forest management. Protection of the forest, for American Indian communities includes not only protection of the timber resource but of the forest and environmental resources as a whole. Cultural uses, beauty and spirituality are also valued along with water quality, water quantity, and employment. Accordingly, management strategies and silviculture for American Indian forests incorporates the perceptions, activities, and behaviors expressed by the communities that rely on them. The deep belief that human beings are a part of the ecosystem and directly related to all entities in the landscape helps tribal institutions balance economics with other factors in the management of American Indian forests.
 

American Indian forests, like other forests, face the very real threats of climate change, invasive species, unwanted wildfire, atmospheric pollution, urbanization, and fragmentation. Some of the unique threats faced by American Indian forests include the challenges created by allotments, high population growth in native communities, and increasing demands on forests by tribal institutions.
 

Forests offer American Indian communities opportunities for incorporating tribal visions of sustainable forestry into their management activities. Many have completed sustainable forest management certifications, a trend expected to continue. Tribes are exploring opportunities in carbon sequestration, expanding carbon markets, payments for other ecosystem services, and biomass energy production. Many native nations are exercising tribal sovereignty in expanded jurisdiction over their natural resources in order to exemplify sustainable forest management by providing economic opportunities while preserving ecosystem structure and function, providing community and cultural benefits and promoting sustainable forestry world wide.
 

See also: Community Dependency and Rural Development; Community Forest Development; Community Ownership and Relations; Forest Certification; Forest Values; Green Accounting / GDP; Indigenous Alliances; Indigenous/Native Tribes: Owners and Rights Canada; Indigenous/Native Tribes: Owners and Rights South America; Landscape Management; Native Americans Land Use; Nonmarket Valuation; Non-Timber or Non-Wood Forest Products; Sites: Ecologic, Historic, Cultural, Social Systems; Social and Cultural Factors Affecting Forests;  Sociodemographics Values and Attitudes; Sustainable Development: Definition and Process; Sustainable Forest Management: Criteria and Indicators; Sustainable Forestry; Tenure Rights and Responsibilities; Traditional Knowledge and Use
 

References and Further Reading
 

Bureau of Indian Affairs. http://www.doi.gov/bureau-indian-affairs.html. (21 March 2006)
 
Evergreen Foundation. “Forestry In Indian Country: Models of Sustainability for our Nation’s Forests?” Evergreen Magazine. Winter 2005-2006. Also available at http://www.evergreenmagazine.com/PDFs/EG%20INDIAN%2012-20.pdf. (21 March 2006)
 
Indian Land Tenure Foundation. “General Allotment Act reviewed 115 years later,” Message Runner. Little Canada, MN, November 2002.
 
Intertribal Timber Council. An Assessment of Indian Forests and Forest Management in the United States. The Indian Forest Management Assessment Team. November, 1993.
 
Intertribal Timber Council. An Assessment of Indian Forests and Forest Management in the United States. The Second Indian Forest Management Assessment Team for the Intertribal Timber Council. December, 2003.
 
Meinig, D.W., Editor. The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes. Oxford University Press: New York, Oxford, 1979.
 
United States Code. “Title 25 – Indians, Chapter 33 – National Indian Forest Resources Management, Section 3103 – Definitions”. http://www.gpo.gov/uscode/title25/chapter33_.html. (21 March 2006)
 
Venables, Robert W. American Indian History –Five Centuries of Conflict and Coexistence, Volume II 1783-Present. Clear Light Publishers, Santa Fe, N.M., 2004.
 
Posted:  August 2006

Updated: 22 April 2007