How Indigenous partnerships are restoring the Pacific Northwest

When Jeanine Moy began restoring a plot of land, she didn’t want to just restore an ecosystem. She wanted to build a deeper connection between people and nature.

As the founder and director of Vesper Meadow, a nature preserve and education program based in the southern Cascades in the U.S. state of Oregon, Moy consulted an array of experts, did some baseline studies and pored over historical archives.

Then, she found an old anecdote from an elder of the Indigenous Latgawa people: they would once come to this meadow in the summers to tend camas (Camassia) plants.

“There is a human relationship between camas and humans,” says Moy. “It’s a beautiful purple lily plant that has a bulb. It’s almost like the potatoes of our society today.”

Camas thrived and evolved with humans in the area over thousands of years. The plant can be seen on the logo of the nature preserve, where it still grows to this day.

Vesper Meadow represents a growing movement of non-Indigenous environmental organizations across the globe that are embracing traditional and Indigenous knowledge. Here in the Pacific Northwest, this movement has spearheaded major policy changes, too.

A brief history of the Pacific Northwest

The Pacific Northwest is a region in western North America that sits between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. While it has no official boundary, it’s typically understood to span the U.S. states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho and the Canadian province of British Columbia.

Dotted with mountains, plateaus, fjords and islands, the region is a biodiversity hotspot full of iconic species including the humpback whale and the towering Douglas fir tree, as well as seasonal salmon runs.

It’s also home to many Indigenous Peoples, who have managed their local landscapes for millennia, even long after being colonized by what are now the U.S. and Canada.

Until the mid-19th century, the U.S. and British (later Canadian) governments regarded the region as a sparsely populated fur-trading realm. But in the 1850s, white settlers began to arrive in larger numbers to seek out gold and other natural resources.

These settlers and their governments forcibly displaced Native American Tribes and Canada’s First Nations from their ancestral homelands, ignoring any treaties that had been agreed.

This expulsion from their ancestral lands severed a vital connection to their way of life and deprived these landscapes of their traditional ways of management.

Can traditional knowledge prevent wildfires?

Indigenous knowledge and practices are often the result of thousands of years of deeply local experience in stewarding the land, which researchers around the world are now tapping into.

One example is the use of controlled fires to mitigate damage from wildfires in western North America.

Indigenous groups have long practiced ‘cultural burning,’ in which the landscape is burned in a controlled manner as part of a long-standing tradition that was disrupted when they were colonized and deprived of their land.

In the U.S., these controlled burns were instead outlawed. This led to the buildup of fire-prone vegetation in forests, meaning that the fires that do happen are likely to be more devastating.

Today, policymakers have largely reversed this approach. Earlier this year, California reached an agreement with the Karuk Tribe that allows them to freely practice cultural burning.

Government agencies now even start their own controlled fires, known as prescribed fires, to reduce this flammable vegetation.

They’re also increasingly partnering with Indigenous groups to harness their unique local knowledge, which often makes them effective stewards of their landscapes and natural resources.

In February, the Canadian federal government signed an agreement with the Haida Nation that recognizes its ownership of Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off the coast of British Columbia.

The Nation is heavily involved in protecting its own land and sea territory. It co-manages several marine protected areas with the Canadian government, works to eradicate invasive species and monitors its waters for trawling vessels.

Bringing back Indigenous stewardship

Tribes and First Nations are now partnering with environmental nonprofits, too.

Conservation Northwest, for instance, has joined forces with Tribes and First Nations on several initiatives spanning both sides of the U.S.–Canada border.

The organization has recently been working with the Colville Confederated Tribes to trap Canadian lynx in British Columbia and bring them to Washington state to reestablish a local population of this keystone species.

It has also been offering ‘land back’ gifts in which donors help acquire lands that are vital to species that Indigenous Peoples value and then returns them to their traditional stewards.

“We are acquiring lands that are going to enable the movement of species across fractured landscapes,” says Jen Syrowitz, a senior manager of conservation programs at Conservation Northwest.

“We’re trying to conserve and restore land on either side so that they’ll be able to get to the movement corridors.”

Vesper Meadows, meanwhile, is not only helping Tribes gain access to water-loving camas but also restoring two creeks that run through the property.

Stasie Maxwell, the organization’s Indigenous partnerships program manager, is Iñupiaq (Alaska Native) but grew up in a local Native community in southern Oregon. For her, these two initiatives are perfectly aligned.

“By restoring waterways and mitigating damage from cattle and timber, we’re restoring degraded land back to an abundant, healthy ecosystem that benefits not only food plants like camas lily but also some of the imperiled species on the property,” she says.

The preserve’s streams feed into the Klamath River. Last year, the last of this river’s four dams was finally demolished after years of campaigning by Tribal groups who hoped it would lead to the return of salmon, which is a vital food source to them.

Now, salmon have already been seen returning their historical range and in numbers higher than expected.

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Putting Indigenous stewards on an equal footing

Maxwell believes forestry and land management sciences are increasingly respecting Indigenous knowledge, especially with the return of cultural burns to the Pacific Northwest.

She stresses that the best way to adequately involve Indigenous Peoples in restoration is to seek them out, consult them and center their voices early on in projects.

Equally important is that organizations should also make an effort to understand the groups they work with: “Learn about the particular Tribe, how to pronounce their name correctly, what their current projects are and what their goals are. Each Tribe is distinct and unique.”

Syrowitz emphasizes building strong relationships and trust with Indigenous partners. Money, however, is also essential: in an economic system where money equals power, financial means can guarantee them a seat at the table to make their voices heard.

Perhaps it’s the notion of a hierarchy of knowledge systems that needs to change. Two-eyed seeing is a concept in which the world is understood through both Western and Indigenous worldviews. Both are braided together, rather than one dominating the other.

“It’s about coming together on an equal plane,” says Syrowitz.