Tribes Partner Up To Protect Environment

From Native Americas Journal/First Nations Development Institute

Tribes in Maine and Wisconsin recently entered into agreements with a multitude of partners to control and protect reservation environments.

The agreements strengthen the tribal commitment to restoring their reservations and are the most significant indication within Indian country that governments, businesses, and charities are working together to fulfill their missions. Because their collaboration will bring about a blurring of roles, but also an abundance of benefits, the issue now is how they will engage each other.

A 2001 Pew Partnership for Civic Change survey found that the federal government rated 14th out of 15 organizations on its ability to solve social problems. Local religious institutions, which run many charities, and charitable nonprofits rated second and third, respectively, after local police departments. The survey also indicated a continuing role for the federal government on many issues — respondents identified “problems that cannot be solved by local action alone” as their biggest problems.

So partnerships would seem to be the order of the day for all. Religious institutions and charitable nonprofits can help the government improve its local problem solving, as we’re in fact seeing on many fronts; the government can help the local folks tackle their worst troubles, something we’re also seeing more of.

No survey is known for tribal governments, but anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that people trust them on environmental issues.

All of these varied strands came together in the landmark Maine agreement, announced in October on the banks of the Penobscot River. The Penobscot Indian Nation, several environmental nonprofits, federal agencies, and a power utility got together on a plan to protect Atlantic salmon and other vanishing species.

One of the nonprofits, Penobscot River Restoration Project, will purchase three dams from a power company that owns all the lower Penobscot River dams — funding for the dam purchases will come from private donors, charitable foundations, and state and federal grants. Two of the purchased dams will be removed, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will help with construction of a salmon bypass at the third. Altogether, this will ease salmon passage to inland tributaries, improving survivability of the dwindling Atlantic salmon.

In return, the power utility wins permission to increase energy generation at dams less damaging to salmon, meaning it will sacrifice only ten percent of overall power output. Additionally, the other nonprofits involved in the agreement and the tribe will withdraw their opposition to the power company’s relicensing application for dams elsewhere in the state.

The agreement in Wisconsin is less complex, but may raise more issues as to how the convergence of government, business, and charitable services is supposed to work. At any rate, any land transaction involving the Nature Conservancy is bound to raise eyebrows after last spring’s Washington Post exposé. It turns out the then-richest environmental group in the world had been acquiring land to preserve it—only to pass it on to big donors, board members, and others without protections in place for threatened environments.

The article didn’t indicate if any of those practices are still at play in the Nature Conservancy’s October 1st sale of land to the Bad River Chippewa. Nature Conservancy had purchased 2,366 acres of timberland three years ago, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and sold it to the tribe for more permanent conservation. In addition, it assisted the tribe with acquisition details in a simultaneous purchase of 21,322 acres from a Seattle-based timber company.

In return, the tribe agreed to participate in future conservation projects on the land, as well as undertake habitat restoration projects of its own.

Terms of the agreement do not prohibit the tribe from developing the land, but tribal spokesmen insist that development isn’t among the current plans. Those plans are to return the land to nature, as it were, for purposes of hunting, fishing, and simply having it back.

Likewise, Indian country and Native peoples everywhere may want nothing more right now than to rejoice. For with the addition of these land purchases, 70 percent of the Band River Chippewa’s ancestral homelands have been restored to its control.