Tribes to Collaborate Toward Wildfire Crisis Solution

From a small parking turnout across the dirt National Forest Service Road to the Ruby Lakes Estates in central Ruby Valley in northeast Nevada, Cliff Banuelos, tribal member of the Te-Moak Tribe of the Western Shoshone, pointed up at one of the nearby mountains and told the group gathered there, “my mother told me she lived in a mud hut just over this hill, she also lived in a house a little further east.”

A little further northeast, a wide swath of decaying piles of juniper pine dots the mountain nestled between tall sage brush, rabbitbrush, and a diversely mixed ecosystem of other trees, forbs, and brush. The mix is part of an area designated in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest Plan for habitat protection of the sensitive greater sage-grouse.

The sage brush is ideal sage-grouse habitat, the piled juniper is both an extreme fire hazard and a perch opportunity for predatory raptors, and the rabbitbrush is considered a colorful plant through the USDA Forest Service lens.

Through another lens, the sage brush that thrived in the Ruby Valley a century ago is sacred and used for medicine and other traditional uses, the piled juniper is the depredated half of an important symbiotic relationship with pinyon pine, and for some tribal families, the rabbitbrush is used as medicine.

Wanting to see the forest in the resource rich gem that is the Ruby Mountains through a new lens is the reason Mountain City-Ruby Mountains-Jarbridge Ranger District Ranger Josh Nicholes invited representatives of the four Bands of the Western Shoshone and members of the Sho-Pai tribe of Duck Valley to collaborate on developing a plan to manage fuels risk in the Ruby Mountains portion of the Sierra and Elko Front Wildfire Crisis Landscape area August 3 and 4. It is what the District hopes will be the first of many conversations.

The first day, representatives from three Tribes listened to the overarching goals of the Wildfire Crisis Strategy and provided their concerns about treatments that may change the landscape. One tribal leader said most people think Elko is in the middle of the desert, so they don’t want to come until they realize this is a bit of an oasis. The range was carved by glaciers and hosts diverse resources not found anywhere else in the nation, and the Tribes do not want to do anything that encourages resources to become more limited.

During the field trip, District Fuels Technician Matt Nease reported that the fire potential conditions on the unit on August 3 this year are about what they normally see on July 3 in an average year. In fact, more than 80 percent of the area in this landscape is considered high or extreme fire risk within four identified critical firesheds that pretty much encompass the entire Ruby Mountain Range.

The conditions coupled with the fact that more than 60 percent of the fire starts in the area are caused by humans presents a unique challenge to balance the multitude of resource interests in the area.

This year, the area saw the largest snow accumulation they have seen in generations and high levels of rainfall that has encouraged a massive growing season. It has only exacerbated the volume of dry grasses available in the event a fire burns out of control in the coming months. The presence of more fuels represents a threat to home and business structures, energy infrastructure, cultural heritage resources, mineral resources, protected species, wetlands, and most importantly – human lives.

District employees arrived at the meeting with a suite of potential land management tools, information about available funding, a desire to build trust and collaboration, and a plan to shape a proposed action to protect the landscape.

Building on strong Nevada partnerships through shared stewardship, the Wildfire Crisis Strategy focuses on a broader set of activities that include mastication work, road improvements, wildfire prevention messaging, larger-scale prescribed fire, noxious weed treatments, targeted grazing, and replanting native species of more fire-resistant grasses and shrubs. All they need to get started is for Tribes to identify the resources they value and point to the generalized areas where those resources exist on the landscape.

And that is where things get a little complicated. The landscape falls in the historical footprint where a number of nomadic tribes traveled through and settled in from time to time, that were grouped by the U.S. government more for geographical convenience and bargaining volume than actual common cultural mindsets.

The treaty signed in 1863 that applies to the Bands of the Western Shoshone, other Western Shoshone Tribes, the Confederated Tribes of the Goshute, and other Tribal Nations in the region, is a peace treaty not a land ceding treaty. It was meant to ease aggression toward riders of the Pony Express, the in-progress establishment of the telegraph, and the well-known intent to establish a massive investment in the future of travel and supply routes and communication through a transcontinental rail line connecting the tidal boundaries of an emerging nation. It was a decade worth of technological development that brought more competition for resources as the potential for gold and silver prospecting gained attention.

With the push for green energy exploring the potential for lithium mining in the area, Banuelos said the landscape is facing similar challenges today. He said he is concerned that widening the roads will invite more and larger traffic with increased noise and air pollution. For the District, it necessitates balancing the future of travel and communication innovations for the world with the need to preserve the other, lesser-known resources that may also be critical for health and nutrition resources in the future.

During the meeting District Ranger Nicholes described past projects focused on removing hazard trees, clearing avalanche areas, and small-scale prescribed burning that favored keeping the Pinyon Pine and removed the problematic Juniper Pine.

Banuelos spoke out about the symbiotic relationship between all things, particularly between the Native Americans and the pine trees, including the Juniper. Later in the meeting, a tribal elder described how it takes 100 years for a Pinyon Pine to mature enough to produce the pine nuts used ceremoniously and for medicine and food. But the area her family travels to for the harvest is showing significant decline in production. Banuelos said tribes are reluctant to share, sometimes even within their own family, because they are concerned that the resources will disappear.

The Tribes have oral traditions, values passed face to face and remembered generation to generation. The Shoshoni language was captured in writing only a generation ago, which means there are words in the language that have no direct translation into English and only about 1,000 people left who are native speakers.

In some instances, verbal stories are the only means that some tribes can locate the burial sites of loved ones who, traditionally, were buried where they passed away with no physical markers. Because there were so many Tribes whose historical footprint cross-shadows this area, very literally the whole of the National Forest System lands likely could be protected as a cultural heritage site. But everyone in the room acknowledged that given the current crisis, protection cannot mean delayed action.

Nicholes team approached the subject of capturing an ethnographic study, a study of how a culture uses land and resources. It is a kind of study sometimes done to support the National Environmental Policy Act process. Nicholes wants to conduct this study to ensure important tribal cultural knowledge and practices can be identified and considered as the forest develops their proposal to address the wildfire crisis strategy.

Because of the broad nature of how the resources are used and by whom, Nicholes says the study will be critical to meet the goals of the landscape work. That kind of written history doesn’t exist for these Bands because of their oral traditions. The tribal representatives expressed that the idea that a cultural study could be accurately captured by anyone without conflicting biases is an idea that may need to be revisited at another time.

For now, the tribes are asking the District to consider some direct impacts they may not be aware of because they live outside the culture. For example, the landscape has a number of areas where cattails that are used in basket weaving are harvested. When basket weavers are weaving, they place the reeds in their mouths to help shape the material. The Tribes asked for better communication about the hazards of the kinds of herbicides that are being used to eradicate invasive plants. They would like notification for where the herbicides are being distributed and how long the effects of the herbicides last so artists will be able to alter their harvesting strategy to protect lives and the health of the weavers.

Then ideas turned from the strictly practical to the possibilities of finding a way to provide economic opportunities for tribal youth to work with the government toward resource protection: both natural resources and heritage resources; offering the wood removed through cutting or mastication for use by tribal elders for a heating resource; and other possibilities toward a sustainable, mutually beneficial future.

With an understanding that the timeline for the project will be driven by the NEPA process, the tribes requested a list of the possible treatments to review. In return, the district requested that if a tribe knew of any activities not on the list that would further protect resources or human life that information be reciprocated.