Oregon: Maybe we’ll let ’em buy and log the last of the little pine trees

Jeff Mitchell said once they own the Mazama Tree Farm, the Tribal
Forests Protection Act of 2004 will give them greater influence over
management of the neighboring national forest lands. Mitchell grew up
camping out with his dad at fire lookouts and guard stations, watching
over the tribes’ forests in the 1950s. “There used to be plenty of
work around here then,” his dad, Ben Mitchell, said. “We never wanted
for anything. Everything was here.” When he wasn’t working for the
tribal forestry program, Ben Mitchell was working for his
brother-in-law’s logging outfit, setting choker — wrapping the end of
the steel cable around the log so it could be yarded up the hill to
the landing — or hook tending on the landing where the logs were
loaded onto trucks.

When he wasn’t working, he hunted and fished on
forests and creeks now blocked off by subdivisions. All that changed
when the tribes lost the only home they’d ever known. Tribal members
were paid off from the sales, given checks for thousands of dollars,
more money than many had ever seen. Some bought cars, others got
drunk. A few, like Edison Chiloquin, a descendant of the chief for
whom the town is named, refused to cash the checks and burned a sacred
fire until the government gave him 580 acres (235 hectares) back. “We
just didn’t have sense,” said Ben Mitchell. “Back then, everyone
looked down upon him. But he was the only smart person in the bunch.”
Since then, the tribes’ hopes would surge and wane with each new
development. Amid a water crisis, the Bush administration considered
returning national forest lands that came from the reservation, but
nothing came of it. Other private parcels came up for sale, but were
out of the tribes’ reach. Still, they developed a formal plan for
managing the forests they hoped to get back. Then, three years ago, a
strip of land from the northwestern corner of the old reservation came
on the market following a timber company bankruptcy. Fidelity National
Financial, primarily a title insurance company, holds a majority share
in Cascade Timberlands, LLC, which now owns the 300,000-acre
(121,410-hectare) property. They are retaining some of the land but
selling off the old Mazama Tree Farm. Chiloquin Mayor Mark Cobb does
not expect the tribes to ever get back the parts of their reservation
that became the Winema and Fremont national forests — too many old
resentments among local folks. But he thinks most folks in the area
support the Mazama sale because it will mean jobs at a time when mills
in Klamath Falls have been laying off. The property straddles 26 miles
(42 kilometers) of U.S. Highway 97 in northern Klamath County. When
the tribes lost it, the lodgepole pine had little commercial value.
But now it can be milled into posts and poles, 2-by-4 studs, and
chips. Drive through the forest and elk tracks come into view, along
with weathered stumps dating to the days of tribal logging. Standing
on the high point of the Mazama Tree Farm, a volcanic cinder cone
called Round Butte, Will Hatcher, the tribes’ natural resources
director, points out peaks on the crest of the Cascade Range and
marshes where the Klamath people harvested water lily pods, ducks and
fish.

The tribes have already bought an old lumber mill site with a
railroad right of way in the middle of the property. They named it
Giiwas Green Energy Park after their name for Crater Lake.They have
bought machinery that cuts and splits lodgepole pine logs and bundles
them into plastic-wrapped packages of firewood to be sold at
convenience stores. They plan to buy an 8-megawatt generator that runs
off the gas drawn from composting wood wastes, particularly the trees
and branches that will come from thinning the thick stands of
lodgepole on the Mazama Tree Farm. So far, the only hard evidence of a
revived timber industry is several cords of firewood the tribes paid
some of their members to cut and pile on the floor of the old mill,
for sale later this winter.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/24/america/NA-FEA-US-Getting-Some-Back.php?page=2

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