American Indians and National Forests by Theodore Catton (review)

American Indians and National Forests by Theodore Catton is the first comprehensive history of relations between the Forest Service and American Indian peoples. This history of an administrative agency of the Department of the Interior begins with a brief history of Indians and their uses of forests before examining the early years of animosity between Forest Service managers and Indian peoples that began with the founding of the Forest Service in 1905. This comprehensive history continues through the efforts to reform the Forest Service in the 1960s and 1970s and ends with the most recent history of Forest Service and Indian relations. Catton tells the story of a bureaucratic journey where the outlook of the Forest Service has harmonized with Indian perspectives over time and can now respect traditional ecological knowledge. While Catton never neglects the long history of miscommunications and conflicts between the Forest Service and Indian peoples, he nevertheless presents this history of an administrative agency as a success story of cross-cultural communication. Though there remain outstanding issues and conflicts, especially in the areas of sacred site protection and resource management, Catton’s history is one of a once hostile Forest Service coming to better understand and at times embrace Indigenous cultural perspectives on land management.

Theodore Catton is an associate research professor of history at the University of Montana. He has worked on public history projects for the National Park Service and published several books and articles on aspects of public lands, forests, and Indian relations to those public lands and forests. In this book, Catton identifies the interactions between the Forest Service and Indian peoples as a conflict between different types of memory. The Forest Service has an institutional memory, or the knowledge, understanding, and limited perspective of a bureaucratic agency. For Catton, this is a particularly short or limited memory. Catton states that Indians, by contrast, view things through their long cultural memories. Initially, these different perspectives of memory and time clashed, but Catton concludes the history of the relationship between the Forest Service and Indigenous peoples as coming to a place of some mutual understanding and cooperation.

The initial chapters quickly cover the formation of the Forest Service and its initial difficult interactions with Indian nations at the start of the twentieth century. As the United States forced land concessions from Indigenous peoples, some Indian nations successfully bargained for the retention of rights to the use of lands ceded over the hundred or more years before the founding of the Forest Service. Thus, on many lands later incorporated into national forests, Indian nations retained the right to access such lands for hunting, fishing, and religious uses. The United States took other lands without such conditions. Reserved treaty rights were unevenly distributed across forests, causing confusion in policy makers. Many Indigenous peoples insisted on continuing their traditional forest management techniques, which included controlled burning. This practice of burning was particularly troublesome to a Forest Service that engaged in policies of constant fire suppression. The Forest Service, under mandate to produce forest commodities, often clashed with Indian peoples that sought to protect and maintain their traditional land uses.

The first half of Catton’s work brings the reader through the familiar historical changes in US Indian policies, beginning in the assimilation era, moving through the Indian Reorganization Act, to termination, before finally ending at government-to-government relations. Each change is examined in turn, with an explanation of how it impacted the work of the Forest Service. The period of assimilation and allotment saw Forest Service managers looking to take over more “surplus” lands for conservation purposes. The 1934 Indian Reorganization Act brought an end to such transfers, but the Forest Service still coveted those lands. With termination beginning in the 1950s, the Forest Service returned to grabbing more land, as in 1961, when the lands of the terminated Klamath Nation became the Winema National Forest.

The second half of the book is where Catton...