Five Oregon tribes seek transfers from Siuslaw National Forest as part of growing “land back” movement

By GOSIA WOZNIACKA/The Oregonian/OregonLive

On tribal land northwest of Salem, a thinned stand of evergreen trees rises above an understory of sword ferns, berry shrubs and young saplings.

To Kelly Dirksen and Colby Drake of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, the lush landscape illustrates their vision for Oregon’s forests — one that balances logging with wildlife habitat, forest health and public access.

To advance that commitment to forest stewardship and recover ancestral lands, the Grande Ronde is seeking the return of 18,600 acres in the Siuslaw National Forest, part of a broader “land back’ movement that has gained momentum nationwide as tribes seek to recover territory lost through forced removal, broken treaties and federal termination policies.

In Oregon, where timber interests and endangered species protections have long clashed, the proposals have raised sensitive new questions about how to balance giving land back to tribes with environmental protections against logging. Further complicating this conflict are President Donald Trump’s efforts to weaken federal regulations on public lands.

Oregon environmental groups say they strongly support returning land and honoring treaty obligations. But tensions arise when land returns include forests containing mature trees, fragile wildlife habitat and other public areas that conservationists spent decades fighting to protect.

The Grand Ronde is one of five federally recognized tribes in Oregon pursuing legislation that would transfer public lands into tribal ownership, Oregon’s congressional delegation confirmed to The Oregonian/OregonLive.

“Very legitimate tribal justice goals are running up against also legitimate environmental protection goals,” said Steve Pedery, an attorney with Oregon Wild who is working with the congressional delegation to minimize conflicts in the current proposals.

“We recognize there’s a justice issue that we all need to step up and deal with,” he said. “But we want to try and find a way to do that that doesn’t just shift the harm back to spotted owl or the coho salmon that didn’t have anything to do with creating this mess. They just happen to need the same acres.”

A coalition of environmental groups, including Oregon Wild, Cascadia Wildlands and Willamette Riverkeeper, last week sent a letter urging lawmakers to preserve old-growth forests, roadless areas, public access and wildlife habitat as they consider tribal land transfers.

“Combined, this could result in the loss of several hundred thousand acres of public land, potentially without adequate safeguards to protect public values,” the groups wrote.

The land-transfer proposals are unfolding as the Trump administration pursues a sweeping overhaul of federal land management. In recent months, the administration has pushed to dramatically expand timber production in western Oregon, weaken key Endangered Species Act protections and rescind the two decade-old roadless rule.

Tribal leaders say those policy changes could make national forest lands more vulnerable to logging, development or potential transfer out of federal ownership.

“With Trump’s pressure on the U.S. Forest Service, I feel there is no better time than for the original stewards to be managing these lands,” said Drake, the Grand Ronde natural resources department manager.

Lessons from the past

For tribes, land returns are essential to sovereignty and to rebuilding their economy and cultural ties fractured by colonization, federal termination and assimilation policies, Grand Ronde leaders said.

Native people lived throughout what is now Oregon for thousands of years before settlers arrived. During the mid-1800s, tribes ceded millions of acres through treaties and were forcibly removed to reservations. A century later, federal termination policies dissolved reservations and stripped tribes of federal recognition and their remaining land. Nine Oregon tribes eventually regained recognition beginning in the late 1970s but many received no land or recovered only a fraction of their former reservations.

The Grand Ronde, whose lands once stretched from southern Washington to northern California, reflects that history. Termination reduced its 69,000-acre reservation to 2.5 acres — a cemetery. Five years after Congress restored Grand Ronde’s federal recognition in 1983, the confederation received 9,800 acres back — about one-seventh of its original treaty-era land.

Tribal leaders say that history is why Grand Ronde and other Oregon tribes have spent decades advocating for additional land returns. Conflicts emerged as tribes sought larger forests that were economically and environmentally significant.

One of the most contentious efforts involved the coastal Coquille Indian Tribe.

In 1996, Congress transferred roughly 5,400 acres of federal forestland in Coos County to the tribe, with the stipulation that it be managed consistent with the Northwest Forest Plan adopted after the timber wars to protect old-growth trees and threatened species. The Coquille’s logging plans triggered opposition from environmental groups concerned about mature forests and northern spotted owl habitat. The groups sued over a timber sale. The tribe and the Bureau of Indian Affairs ultimately prevailed.

“The hangover from that has cast a long shadow on land transfer legislation ever since,” Oregon Wild’s Pedery said.

The tension resurfaced in 2017 when the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians sought to buy the Elliott State Forest in partnership with a timber company, drawing fierce opposition from conservation groups who feared privatization and aggressive logging. The state canceled the sale.

A year later, Congress passed the Western Oregon Tribal Fairness Act, returning more than 17,000 acres of federal land to the Cow Creek Tribe and nearly 15,000 acres to the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians. Environmental groups were involved in shaping that legislation, Pedery said, though the debate was less intense.

A model in the Siuslaw

Nowhere is the tension more visible today than in the Grand Ronde’s Siuslaw National Forest transfer proposal.

The Siuslaw, a temperate rainforest, once produced more timber per acre than any other forest in Oregon, said Jerry Ingersoll, the Siuslaw’s forest supervisor from 2010 through 2018. It became one of the key battlegrounds in the timber-versus-spotted-owl conflict of the late 1980s and ’90s. The timber wars and court rulings led to a major shakeup in how the forest is managed.

Logging in the Siuslaw today focuses on thinning younger plantations created after clear-cutting in previous decades, to promote old-growth characteristics. Many environmentalists hold the forest up as “the gold standard for environmental stewardship,” Pedery said.

Although they concede the Grand Ronde has managed its lands much more sustainably than private timber companies, they still worry the tribe would clear-cut some of the old trees and open up the Mount Hebo roadless area.

Les Helgeson, whose property neighbors the proposed land transfer area, shares environmental groups’ concerns. He has watched timber companies nearby turn entire watersheds into massive clear-cut “moonscapes” of stumps and dead brush. But after recently visiting the reservation and meeting with Grand Ronde forest leaders, Helgeson said he came away reassured.

“It sounds like the tribe is not going to clear-cut,” he said. “My big question still is what proportion of the landscape are they going to leave alone? I’m cautiously optimistic.”

Grand Ronde leaders counter that their practices differ sharply from industrial timber operations and that tribal stewardship offers benefits that federal management cannot — especially at a time when the Trump administration seeks to loosen public land protections and reduce Forest Service staffing and budgets.

“The Forest Service made it very clear they don’t have the resources to effectively manage these lands,” said Toby McClary, council member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde who has lobbied for the land transfer with lawmakers and forest service officials in Washington, D.C.

The tribe’s current reservation is open to the public for recreation, hunting and fishing — and any transferred land would remain open to everyone, the tribe said.

Tribal foresters emphasize thinning, habitat restoration and long-term forest health.

Compared with industrial timber operations, the tribe logs much smaller parcels of land, harvests on longer rotations, maintains wider buffers near streams and leaves significantly more trees after harvest, tribal leaders said.

Rather than planting primarily Douglas fir, the tribe plants a mix of species to promote a more diverse forest. It places culverts for salmon, maintains protected elk meadows and preserves “legacy trees” and old forest stands under a strict no-harvest policy. The tribe also uses prescribed fire and says it avoids herbicides commonly used on industrial timberlands.

The Grand Ronde plans to keep the Mount Hebo area roadless no matter what the Trump administration does, tribal land managers said.

“We look at seven generations ahead,” said Drake.

The tribe said it would bring more active management to the newly proposed land – but not clear-cuts – because some stands in the Siuslaw are overstocked, competing for light and water. The Grand Ronde would thin those stands to a more park-like, “working, living forest,” Drake said.

Rather than maximizing timber production on the transferred land, the tribe would manage it for wildlife such as elk, deer and salmon and for forest health, he said. And because it has a casino, it’s not dependent on timber revenue, he said. The new land would expand cultural opportunities for tribal members – hazel for basket weaving, cedar for carving and building, berries for picking – and allow the Grand Ronde to build more trails for the general public.

“We see huge opportunities for bringing species back and bringing people in to enjoy the land,” he said.

Siletz and other transfer proposals

The other tribes pursuing land-return proposals are the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, the Coquille Indian Tribe, the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians and the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians. The four declined to share the locations or acreage of their proposals with The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Conservation groups said they learned of the Coquille Indian Tribe’s proposal through a timber industry representative. According to them, the tribe is seeking 52,000 public acres on its ancestral lands located in Coos County’s Coquille River watershed. The land includes over 13,000 acres of mature forests aged 80 to 120 years and 15,000 acres of forests that’s more than 120 years old, according to location data analyzed by Oregon Wild.

The Coquille’s tribal council chair, Brenda Meade, told The Oregonian/OregonLive the transfer would correct a historic injustice and allow the tribe to care for the land based on traditional ecological knowledge. It would protect the northern spotted owl – which the tribe considers to be a spiritual relative – and other endangered species by maintaining and restoring habitat and selectively logging to make the forest more resilient to wildfire and climate change.

“The Coquille Indian Tribe would thoughtfully manage these lands, retaining trees to improve structural complexity, increase species diversity, increase resilience to wildfire and improve wildlife habitat,” Meade said, adding that it would seek “both ecological benefits and timber outputs.”

The tribe also said it would maintain public recreational access and is proposing to split timber revenue from the transferred lands between the Coquille and Coos County, where many tribal members reside, Meade said.

In their letter to Oregon’s congressional delegation, conservation groups said Coquille’s revenue sharing with a local county could lead to more aggressive logging.

The groups asked lawmakers what protections would remain once land leaves federal ownership.

“How will these lands be managed for logging and other extractive activities, and will there be protections for old-growth stands, roadless wild areas, and public access?” the groups asked.

Grand Ronde tribal officials said they don’t plan to share revenue with Yamhill or Tillamook counties – both have come out in support of the transfer plan. The tribe said characterizing its approach as focused on high yield timber production is “a huge misrepresentation,” said spokesperson Sara Thompson.

“Those who don’t believe us just need to look at our management on the reservation,” Thompson said. “They may also want to note that the tribe has land management experience that goes back to time immemorial – there wasn’t a single species listed [as threatened or endangered] under the tribe’s watch.”

• Gosia Wozniacka is a reporter at The Oregonian/OregonLive and can be reached at [email protected]