Tribal Watershed Management: Culture, Science, Capacity and Collaboration

During the colonization of North America and the subsequent expansion of the United States, Indigenous peoples were dispossessed of the resources that formed the core of their economic and spiritual sustenance. Today in the United States there is a tremendous diversity of Indigenous resource and land management. Some tribes are well on their way to regaining power over the resources that define their culture and economies, most notably with the adoption of tribal-state comanagement. Effective exercise of reserved rights, as established in the treaties of the 1850s, has contributed to goals of regaining sovereignty for tribes in the Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes regions.¹ At the same time, many tribes have yet to recover even a sliver of jurisdiction over their traditional lands and resources. We believe there are a host of factors that contribute to the relative success of some tribes in the field of natural resource management. These factors include but are not limited to the existence of reserved treaty rights; past and historic relationships with the non-Indian community; current economic status of the tribe; and cultural dependence on specific resources.

This research focuses on two elements of contemporary American Indian natural resource management. First, we explore the capacity of tribes to manage natural resources, including the merging of traditional ecological knowledge with Western science. Second, we analyze tribal management in the context of local and regional collaborative watershed groups. Collaborative watershed management groups are defined as the voluntary association of stakeholders, which may include local community leaders; state and federal agency employees and elected officials; tribal, environmental, and industry representatives; and community members. Stakeholders are unified geographically by a watershed or political boundary and work together to solve natural resource management issues within their watershed.

Of particular interest to this discussion is the variation in the capacity of individual tribes to participate actively in resource management. We compare three cases—two from the Pacific Northwest and one from the Southwest—to explore the challenges tribes face to regain partial or complete control of traditional lands and resources. We find broad differences in tribal capacities and conclude that developing tribal resources for management is a prerequisite for successful collaborative watershed management. However, there has been little attempt to examine the role of tribes in collaborative watershed groups.

Research Design

We draw on field research and case study analysis to examine contemporary tribal environmental management in a real life context.² Three cases are compared: the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe in the Dungeness Watershed in Washington State, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (ctuir) in eastern Washington and Oregon, and the Yavapai-Apache Nation in Central Arizona. While we recognize the differences in political and environmental conditions between the Pacific Northwest and the Southwest, the cases were selected based on a public concern or controversy over water quantity and quality and on the existence of at least one collaborative watershed organization. The collaborative watershed groups in all three geographic areas tackle common issues such as endangered species, rural and suburban growth, floodplain development, irrigated agriculture, grazing, and forestry. Water quantity, the primary issue in the Southwest, is also a vital part of discussion in both Northwest examples. This case study draws on a variety of information sources including direct observation, historical and contemporary documents, and open-ended, structured interviews. Research was conducted between March 2004 and March 2005. The emergent and place-based nature of watershed collaboratives makes them well suited to the case study research model.

Tribal Resource Management

Although their land base is currently a fraction of historic territories, tribes are major stakeholders in many watersheds throughout the country, managing approximately ninety-five million acres of land.³ While each tribe is distinct, one commonality is a historical and intrinsic connection to land that permeates their modern way of life.⁴ One reflection of that connection is traditional ecological knowledge (tek), "a collective storehouse of knowledge about the natural world, acquired over hundreds of years through direct experience and contact with the environment."⁵ tek is slowly gaining Western recognition...