The Yakama Nation manages about 632,000 acres of forestland in southern Washington, but it doesn’t plan on cutting too many of those trees.
“We don’t have a tree farm — we have a forest,” said Doug Olney, tribal member and the timber resource manager at Yakama Forest Products. Just 300,000 acres are subject to timber harvest, less than half the tribe’s forestland. The rest is set aside for reforestation, wildfire resiliency, and habitat restoration. Some of those projects are conducted alongside state agencies, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Nature Conservancy through the Tapash Sustainable Forest Collaborative. The tribe requires all logging contractors to have master loggers on site, and it brings Yakama youth into the forest to encourage and inform the next generation of forest managers. All that culminated in the Sustainable Forestry Initiative giving the Yakama Nation its 2019 President’s Award.
“We manage carbon better than anyone else,” Olney said. “We manage at a level that’s sustainable for all species. Our goal is to make it work so that it’s beneficial to future generations.”
As climate change unfolds, scientists predict Native communities will be some of the hardest hit. But tribal nations are responding with measures that simultaneously enhance cultural, economic, and ecological resilience — and the Yakama and its neighbors are leading the charge.
“The Northwest has really led these efforts over the last 20 years,” said Don Sampson, climate change project director for the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, a consortium of 57 regional tribes. “We’re trying to replicate that throughout the country.”
Indeed, ideas started here are percolating throughout the West. Most tribes with climate adaptation plans are in the Pacific Northwest, but the planning process is spreading throughout Indian Country. Tangible solutions are taking root, too. In 2018, the Spokane Tribe partnered with the Tribal Solar Accelerator Fund to build a 637-kilowatt rooftop solar array. The solar push was triggered in part by the 2016 Cayuse Mountain Fire, which burned more than 18,000 acres and destroyed more than a dozen homes on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Farther south, the Jicarilla Apache tribe is going bigger. The tribe is in the early stages of building a utility-scale, 50-megawatt solar array in New Mexico.
Tribes are also influencing climate science. For instance, Sampson authored a report in 2015 that identified shortcomings in Columbia River Basin tribes’ adaptation strategies, particularly when it came to resources and staff. So Sampson connected with the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group, which created a series of resources to help tribes figure out how they’re vulnerable to climate change.
“We’ve been on the forefront and have some of the best scientist leaders,” Sampson, a citizen of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, said. “It’s time for Indigenous people around the world to come together and have their own accord.”
One such scientist is Margaret Redsteer, a climate researcher at the University of Washington Bothell and enrolled member of the Crow tribe. Redsteer didn’t set out to study climate change. She spent most of her 20s living on the Navajo Nation, where issues with water supply and quality triggered her interest in environmental science. After completing her Ph.D. in geochemistry at Oregon State University in 1999, Redsteer joined the U.S. Geological Survey, where she was assigned to work with a group of paleoclimate scientists in 2001. Redsteer’s new colleagues had already been documenting the effects of climate change, and their work struck her.
“It was a startling revelation to me that climate change was not some hypothetical issue that we’d be dealing with in the future,” she said.
Redsteer has since authored and co-authored numerous reports on water access issues and the vulnerability of tribes to drought and climate change, including a 2014 report on climate adaptation for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
“That was an amazing opportunity to spend lots of time thinking about climate change adaptation,” Redsteer said. “Just being able to take the science and translate it into something that people can make use of is a great way of spending your time.”
But adaptation policies, Redsteer said, aren’t taken seriously enough by state and federal lawmakers. A recent example was Initiative 1631, a Washington state initiative that would have instituted the nation’s first carbon fee. The measure was crafted in close collaboration with state tribes, and earmarked funds for tribal communities. It was rejected by voters in 2018. Oregon lawmakers this year failed to advance a cap-and-trade policy that garnered support from tribal governments.
“Climate change is a poverty multiplier,” Redsteer said. “It’s more pronounced in areas that are more marginal. If we have no policy, then people who have the means to adapt to climate change will adapt and those who don’t, won’t be able to. It’s an enormous environmental justice issue.”
According to the IPCC, Indigenous communities are disproportionately vulnerable to changes in climate. Alaska Native people are becoming some of the country’s first “climate refugees” as they are forced to relocate from eroding coastal villages; Washington tribes are also having to move parts of their communities inland thanks to rising sea levels. Washington, Oregon, and California tribes are coping with dwindling salmon runs.
Because Northwest tribes are some of the first to feel the negative effects of climate change, Redsteer said, they’re uniquely positioned to make a difference. “Northwest tribes have been engaged in the issues for a lot longer [than other tribes],” she said. “But it’s about who has the strongest political voice.”
Tribal climate leaders are amplifying that voice. In the fall of 2018, the National Congress of American Indians established its Climate Action Task Force — a group of tribal leaders supporting tribes’ climate actions and advocating for policy changes. The task force met this spring in Reno, and established a technical committee that met in Albuquerque last month.
“It’s all starting to come together,” Sampson said. “We’ve got leaders across the country now.”
