Parks Stewardship Forum

Cover, Masthead, and Table of Contents PSF Vol. 41 no. 1

In this "Letter from Woodstock," our columnist draws lessons from Italy that are relevant to the incoming Trump administration.

This essay launches a new editorial column in Parks Stewardship Forum , "Branching Out," which provides a space for guest columnists from outside the traditional conservation community. The authors make the case for broadening the conversation in order to achieve a more unified approach to conservation.

An announcement describing the selection of the journal for the Library of Congress' digital collection.

An introduction to the Featured Theme papers in this issue.

This article begins with a very brief overview of the diverse, multilayered, traditionalist relationships that underpin Native California land stewardship. From there it summarizes the impacts of Spanish, Mexican, and early American colonization on Native Californians and their eons-old relationships with the land, including the outlawing by early Spanish colonizers of cultural burning. These summary discussions provide context for a deeper understanding of the significance of ground-breaking, mid-20th-century Native California organizational initiatives to restore ancestral land management, beginning with the 1940 establishment of the Pomo Indian Women’s Club and the 1951 founding of the Northwest California Hoopa Pottery Guild, an effort to preserve ancestral basketry designs in fired clay that would eventually lead to the restoration of regional basketry traditions and the application of cultural burning techniques necessary to generate the growth of the healthy, flexible shoots used to weave a shapely basket. This article ends with the history of the first-ever cultural gathering policy by a California-based, land-holding agency (California State Parks).

In 1997, Karuk Indigenous Basketweavers and the Orleans Ranger District of Six Rivers National Forest in Northern California established Following the Smoke, a multiple years-long, award-winning, summertime project initiated and led by LaVerne Glaze (Karuk, 1932–2017) and other Karuk Indigenous Basketweavers members. Initially conducted under the aegis of the US Forest Service (USFS) Passport in Time (PIT) program to “engage volunteers” in the USFS heritage program, and later under the aegis of California State University, Humboldt (now California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt), Following the Smoke, which concluded in 2012, has inspired other similar projects on public lands in the state, including Following the Smoke II of the California Indian Basketweavers Association. This article will detail the intent, content, and outcomes of Following the Smoke, which centered on a robust, organizational effort to encourage the appreciation of the need for culturally appropriate stewardship and management of vital ethnobotanical “resources” and the application of cultural burning to achieve those ends. It ends by providing two examples of programs and initiatives through which the convenors and facilitators of and participants in Following the Smoke continue to magnify its teachings, followed by a discussion of contemporaneous collaborative research being conducted by the Karuk Tribe about cultural burning and related topics.

A poster prepared on behalf of the Karuk Tribe describing the Tribe's approach to burning vegetation for cultural purposes.

This article will detail the wide-ranging and effective land stewardship and management initiatives by a Native California organization, the California Indian Basketweavers Association (CIBA). Founded in 1992 to “preserve, promote and perpetuate California Indian basketry traditions,” CIBA has a proud history of working with public land-holding agencies to initiate policy changes around the management and gathering of basketry plants on those lands, including the reduction and sometimes outright elimination of pesticide spraying, the encouragement of cultural burning, and an unprecedented, joint US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management gathering policy for ethnobotanic materials. Currently, CIBA spearheads training programs in land stewardship and cultural burning through its Following the Smoke II and Rekindling Culture and Fire projects. It has also inspired the establishment of other Native basketweavers associations in various regions of the US.

At Bears Ears National Monument (BENM) Indigenous wisdom-keepers have been transmitting knowledge and activating this “living landscape” and the Native cultures thriving within it across hundreds of generations. In this article we ask, “What should true collaboration look like between Tribes, federal agencies, grassroots Native communities, and the land?” In today’s dialogue around collaboration, US agencies are asserting Western ideas around “co-management,” “co-stewardship,” and “Traditional Ecological Knowledge” (TEK). Instead, this dialogue needs to begin at the community level to understand Native land ethics, “human” and “non-human” bonds, and kinship relationships that define reciprocity between Indigenous People and the land. Collaboration must begin by treating Native wisdom as proprietary, because knowledge in itself is a powerful entity. How we treat and use Native wisdom has consequences and, thus, transmission of such knowledge needs protection. Agencies should take steps to support Native communities themselves in passing this knowledge along to younger generations. Every Tribe might be at a different stage of maintaining or restoring cultural relationships to the land and each ancestral landscape will have different ecological needs. Co-management of ancestral lands by Tribes is a worthwhile step toward achieving true collaboration with federal agencies. And as Native People return to the land, they will also be seeking the return of buffalo, beaver, native plants, and many extirpated species in order to restore their own cultures and relationships to the Earth. And much like these human relationships that must be formed as collaborations are established, these ties between Native spiritual leaders, ancestral lands, and wildlife must also be restored. Finally, the first step in any collaboration is building trust. All of this will take time and must be done one ancestral landscape, one Native community, and one agency office at a time. True collaboration by federal agencies will allow Native People to practice spiritual sustenance, strengthen their languages and cultures, and keep ancestral landscapes activated and healthy while respecting Tribal sovereignty and self-determination. It should also be acknowledged that the benefits for land and people of leading with Native epistemologies, and ways of knowing and doing, extends well beyond Native communities and land and are vital to the resolution of the current biodiversity and climate crises.

A description of Indigenous Mayan biocultural management in the Puuc Region, Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico.

For public land management agency managers and staff, co-stewardship and co-management may just be another element of the job, but for Native peoples it’s their very life. This article details respectful Tribal consultation from Native California perspectives, the foundation upon which successful co-stewardship and co-management of public lands rests. For those managers and staff who are unfamiliar with the Tribes and Tribal communities in their area, we begin by providing a note about naming terminology and some sources for identifying Native groups who are/were historically located in a given area. From there, after introducing the concept of respectful Tribal consultation, we describe the relationship and trust-building process between Tribal governments and their designated representatives and public land management agency managers and other staff, relationships that must be proven and nurtured across time, rather than initiated as time- and process-challenged business arrangements. We also explicate “community protocol,” the etiquette, customs, and traditional ways of interacting that support, protect, and promote the community, so once you get to the “business” part of the relationship, there can be equality, honor, and respect within it. Next, we provide links to best-practice models, resources, and agreements for effective collaboration and consultation in the stewardship of public lands. We end by making a case for the integration of natural and cultural “resources” in the procedures and policies under which Tribal consultation and co-stewardship and co-management of public lands takes place. Many of these processes are time tested and active in current co-management projects.

An artist statement regarding the cover art for this issue.

The author applies principles from the classic film "Rashomon" to improve co-stewardship efforts between Indigenous People / Tribes and government agencies.

Public land management decisions rely on science but there is a disconnect between research and practical application; this is referred to as the research–management gap. Within the context of the United States (US) National Wilderness Preservation System, this gap has implications across 111 million acres of land managed by four federal agencies. To better understand how to bridge research with management within the US wilderness context, we conducted facilitated conversations with 68 wilderness managers using interactive virtual whiteboards to guide conversations around decision contexts, the role of science in wilderness management decision-making, and opportunities to improve the use of science in wilderness management. We found that wilderness managers operate within four main decision contexts (operational, relational, informational, and policy), and that they rely on a variety of sources of information, with science as one of many sources, to guide management action and decisions, both directly and indirectly. Bridging the research–management gap requires a two-tiered approach: (1) bottom-up, working with local managers to develop, apply, and interpret relevant science in a co-produced manner; and (2) top-down, working with agency and wilderness leaders to champion the integration of research into policy and management directives. Better working relationships between managers and scientists could improve the adoption of science in wilderness management as well as improve how scientists understand the range of competing policies, programs, and priorities that guide wilderness managers.

After a century, America’s national parks have become so popular that they are in danger of being smothered by affection. Many people struggle to visit a national park without making heroic planning efforts, booking reservations many months in advance, and incurring significant travel costs. How can we save wildlife and historical treasures in parks struggling to survive onslaughts? This saga has the makings of a classic story arc—Good Deed > Collapse > Escalation—but only if we can reinvigorate National Park System stewardship to ensure humanity’s heritage survives unimpaired in parks as intended by our ancestors.

A poem in the "Verse in Place" section of Parks Stewardship Forum.