Wildfire Story From Modoc County Record

“There is important work to do that will protect the Reservation and the greater community from wildfire and we are excited to put forward this partnership to better meet the need in front of us,” Chairman Ruvalcaba said. “The approval of this Tribal Forest Protection Act project is a milestone in our collective efforts to facilitate tribally led collaborative forest health and ecosystem resilience work across our ancestral homelands.”

Approval of the TFPA proposal in December 2023 by Regional Forester Jennifer Eberlien of the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Region set the stage for a request of $6.5 million in federal funding, with an additional $550,000 in private funding secured by Lomakatsi. The funding will facilitate environmental analysis and future implementation, including ecologically based timber harvest and thinning, and fuels reduction work adjacent to the Reservation on Modoc National Forest lands, said Glenna Eckel, East Zone District Ranger for the Modoc National Forest.

“This TFPA is the first request of its kind on the Modoc National Forest for the Northern Paiute Gidutikad Band of the Fort Bidwell Indian Tribe for leadership in strategic and mutually beneficial partnership with federal agencies for landscape restoration,” said Modoc National Forest Supervisor Chris Christoffersen. “We look forward to working together to accomplish landscape restoration objectives, maintain healthy and resilient forestlands, and protect both the tribal and non-tribal communities in this area by reducing the risk of wildfire.”

The new project will complement ongoing efforts to improve local tribal workforce capacity and protect cultural resources such as traditional foods, wildlife habitat, and sacred sites on the Reservation, said Hiedrick One Horse Meza, Tribal Council Member and Cultural Committee Chair of the Fort Bidwell Indian Community Council.

According to the TFPA proposal, the Fort Bidwell Indian Reservation has a “very high risk of wildfire”—higher than 96% of all Tribal areas and communities in the United States—and high accumulations of fuels are choking out water resources and cultural plants, medicines, and herbs. Insect and disease infestation threatens the tribe’s timberlands, and flammable vegetation poses a direct risk to homes.

The TFPA authorizes the U.S. Secretaries of Agriculture and Interior to give special consideration to tribally proposed forest restoration or other projects on U.S. Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management land bordering or adjacent to Indian trust land to protect the Indian trust resources from fire, disease, or other threats coming from those adjacent lands, according to Dan Meza, a retired Director of Tribal Relations for the U.S. Forest Service, who volunteered his time to advise the Northern Paiute Gidutikad Band in the development of the TFPA project.

“This project opens new doors for us to accomplish this necessary work as a community, to protect homes within the Reservation and beyond, and the places we find spiritual connection, and at the same time recover and enhance our First Foods and Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge practices that keep us healthy and living in tune with the land,” One Horse Meza said.

This all lands initiative builds on tribally driven projects on the Reservation going back to the early 2000s and juniper thinning projects in 2016. Most recently, in the summer of 2023, an inter-tribal crew of 20 from Lomakatsi (including Klamath, Pit River, and Northern Paiute Gidutikad Band tribal members) completed ecological fuels reduction treatments in strategic locations within the wildland urban interface by removing overgrown vegetation to create defensible space and opening a fuel break behind homes that extends into the upland forest.

“At the request of the Northern Paiute Gidutikad Band, we’re excited to support this growing partnership with federal agencies and corporate funders that lays the foundation for long-term stewardship and resilience of the Tribe’s ancestral lands,” said Lomakatsi Executive Director Marko Bey. “Lomakatsi is honored to lend our expertise and capacity to achieve large-scale restoration, while integrating tribal workforce training opportunities.”

In the summer of 2023, Lomakatsi’s inter-tribal crews also improved ingress and egress along 6.5 miles of impassible Reservation forest road infrastructure, enhancing firefighter transport routes and opportunities for future prescribed fire maintenance and cultural burning. Hand pile burning this winter represents two years of fuels reduction work on the Reservation and sets the stage for work still to come—with the goal of bringing prescribed understory burning to the land and expanding the footprint of ecological fuels reduction treatments, Bey said.

“We’re thrilled to see that all the efforts by the Tribe and our partners to build community and ecosystem resilience over the years have developed into a cohesive Fort Bidwell Reservation Protection Project,” said Liz Hernandez, Tribal Council Member of the Fort Bidwell Indian Community Council. “With the addition of the TFPA approval, we are better positioned than ever before to promote the long-term stewardship of our ancestral lands beyond the borders of our Reservation.”

The Tribe organized a Joint Incident Command Information session on the Reservation with the U.S. Forest Service and community members to support a coordinated community emergency response strategy during the Barnes Fire, and has since arranged seven meetings with U.S. Forest Service leadership—including USDA Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment Dr. Homer Wilkes—on this most recent visit to the Coast in November 2023—to develop the proposal.

Chairman Ruvalcaba then traveled to Washington D.C. for the White House Tribal Nations Summit in December to further discuss the Fort Bidwell Reservation Protection Project with Under Secretary Wilkes and members of his team.

“In serving our tribe and caring for our ancestral land base, it is important to leverage the strengths of our partners as well as the support of our neighboring tribes to achieve success in this historic moment as we have to begin co-managing our land and natural resources while putting our people to work,” Hernandez said.

The Fort Bidwell Reservation Protection Project lies within the ancestral tribal homelands of both the Northern Paiute Gidutikad Band of the Fort Bidwell Indian Tribe and the Hewsiedawi Band area of the Pit River Tribe. The Pit River Tribe formally supported the project with a tribal council resolution, as 2,000 acres of the 9,000-acre project are adjacent to Fandango Valley, near Lassen Creek.

“As tribal people, we’re recovering our ability to co-steward our ancestral lands, promote cultural fire and biodiversity, and nourish the spirit of our communities,” said Ray Alvarez, Hewsiedawi Band Tribal Councilman of the Pit River Tribe. “Through this strategic partnership, tribes, nonprofits and agencies, project by project, this healing work continues to take root across the landscape, from the national level to individual communities.”

The anchor for this all-lands work is a Master Stewardship Agreement between U.S. Forest Service Region 5 (covering all of California) and Lomakatsi, which serves as the mechanism to accomplish environmental analysis, cultural resource and wildlife surveys, technical assessments, and implementation going forward, while threading together co-investment from federal, state, private, and corporate sources to accomplish the work,” Bey said. The Fort Bidwell Indian Community Council sought out Lomakatsi to help navigate and secure federal, state, and philanthropic funding sources and provide technical support to keep forest restoration and community defensibility efforts active—ranging from small projects like turning thinned trees into firewood for the tribal community to landscape-scale proposals that call for government-to-government consultation and extensive planning and coordination, Hernandez said.

“We enter 2024 energized by monumental successes in the past year, with two tribal resolutions signed in support of the Fort Bidwell Reservation Protection Project and its benefits for our land and our people,” said Lomakatsi Tribal Partnerships Program Director Belinda Brown, enrolled Kosealekte Band Pit River Tribal member and Northern Paiute descendant. “In addition to forest health and wildfire habitat improvements, this partnership has and will continue to facilitate training and employment opportunities for the local inter-tribal workforce and non-native communities to support connection and learning in relationship with the land.”