This wildfire season has hit northwest tribal lands particularly hard. Firefighters’ first priority is “life and property.” But some tribal members wonder why protecting some kinds of property—like farms and even second homes— comes before tribal forest land.
Several inches of ash blanket the ground where a wildfire recently passed through a pine forest on the Colville Reservation. Most of the trees have scorched trunks and dull brown needles…but some could still bounce back. Cody Desautel, the tribe’s Natural Resources Director, grabs ahold of a scorched bough on a small sapling. “These buds in the end, see, they’ll still look pretty viable,” he says. “So next spring potentially these things could break bud and you could have green needles come out of this.”
This summer, a pair of large wildfires burned through more than 20% of the tribe’s commercial timber land. Other fires burned major tracts of forest on reservations throughout the Northwest. And while the full effect may take years to gauge, the fires have renewed calls by tribal officials to revisit firefighting priorities.
Here’s how Dalan Romero, Northwest liaison for the National Interagency Fire Center, explains those priorities. “The single overriding suppression priority is the protection of human life,” he says.