Yosemite Reservations

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FOREST SERVICE EXPLAINS ITS ‘LET IT BURN’ POLICY
Chris Bowman
Sac Bee
18 July 2008
If every cloud has a silver lining, what good can be said of the big brown dome of wildfire smoke that capped much of California these past few weeks?
Plenty, say ecologists who study the effects of fire on the landscape.
While the siege of lightning-sparked fires continues to inundate parts of Northern California with hazardously smoky air, the blazes also consumed more than 1,400 square miles of dangerously overgrown forests and oak woodlands – the size of nearly three Lake Tahoe basins – leaving that much less fuel for future, more catastrophic and expensive fires.
Federal land managers in California are retooling their firefighting strategies to capture more of the public safety, economic and environmental benefits of letting wildfires run their natural course without overwhelming the public with smoke and destroying homes.
That’s a tough balancing act in the nation’s most populous state, which already endures the smoggiest and grittiest air in the country. But in a select few remote national forests, parks and wilderness areas, ecologists say, the federal government has been weaning itself off Smokey Bear’s admonitions with measurable success.
“We didn’t have any injuries. We didn’t burn any houses, and we cleared out 15,000 acres of dense vegetation that hasn’t seen fire in decades and, in some places, a century – and that’s a good thing,” said Brent Skaggs, a U.S. Forest Service fire management officer who let nature take its course under close watch – and tricky weather – in the Clover fire that was recently contained in the Sequoia and Inyo national forests.

Federal officials call it “reintroducing fire” to the landscape. Historically, wildfire smoke filled the Central Valley and draped the mountains flanking much of the summer and fall. Extinguishing the fires became a federal mandate with the creation of the Forest Service at the turn of the 20th century.
The firefighting made it safer to extend development into the woods, but also made for more dangerous forests with the buildup of deadwood that would have otherwise gone up in smoke. As a result, modern blazes recur more frequently. And they often do more damage than good to the flora and fauna – humans included.
Backing off from total fire suppression and letting fire run more of its natural course effectively inoculates the forest from more virulent fires that denude large swaths of the landscape, which in turn invites mudslides.
“We could have suppressed it and had the thing out earlier, Skaggs said of the Clover fire, which was discovered May 31. “But by doing that we would be just prolonging the inevitable. We had an opportunity to manage fire or have it manage us.”
The practice, of course, could backfire. A sudden shift in wind direction or unexpected gusts in the unnaturally dense forests could turn such experiments into disasters – plastering communities with smoke or, worse, burning them down.
Fire managers have reduced the chances of a hands-off fire running awry by limiting the practice to the remote backcountry of the central Sierra and the desolate northern corners of the state.
Namely: Portions of the Mendocino, Klamath and Shasta-Trinity national forests that encompassed large wilderness areas; Lassen National Park and the neighboring Lava Beds National Monument and Modoc National Forest; and Yosemite and Sequoia-Kings Canyon national parks and surrounding Stanislaus and Sequoia national forests. Managers of these forests have plans in place for using the let-it-burn approach, known in firefighting parlance as “wildfire use” or “appropriate management response.”
Even then, the practice cannot be used without a series of approvals up the Forest Service line of command, from the ranger on the ground to the brass at headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Beyond that, forest officials in many cases need the permission of local air pollution control districts.
The Forest Service had a tough time getting the cooperation of pollution regulators when it began “wildfire use” about five years ago, said Trent Procter, air quality program manager for the agency’s Pacific Southwest region, which includes California.
Working against the agency were earlier “prescribed burns” – deliberately set to thin out fire-prone thickets – that went awry at Lake Tahoe and the Stanislaus forest.
Relations have since improved. “They realize that in the absence of (natural burns), we’ll end up with more catastrophic wildfires like those we have now, where the smoke will be worse, Procter said.
For its part, the Forest Service recently added at least a dozen portable air pollution samplers to the state Air Resources Board’s network for monitoring the smoke levels, which reached the hazardous level Thursday in the Trinity County seat of Weaverville, said Jeff Cook, an emergency response coordinator with the air board.
Starting today, the federal agency will be providing “smoke forecasts” enabling the air board to give the public more advance warning of unhealthful conditions.

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TRIBES CLASH, VYING FOR PLACE IN YOSEMITE HISTORY
Garance Burke
Guardian UK
14 June 2008
YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. (AP) - Visitors to Yosemite Valley have for decades been taught about the Southern Sierra Miwok, whose ancestral ties to the park are venerated in books, brochures and a replica village built near the park’s roaring falls.
Now, another band of American Indians is calling part of that story a total invention.
Joe Rhoan, who traces his ancestry to Paiute peoples from the park’s eastern edge, claims his elders were Yosemite’s first stewards and that the Miwok are playing down the Paiute role in the area.
“The park manufactured a lot of its history,” said Rhoan, of Roseville, a suburb of Sacramento. “You’ve got living direct descendants of the people in old photos displayed in exhibits telling the park they have the wrong signs up, and they’re not listening to us.”
Yosemite historians chafe at the suggestion their exhibits could be wrong, and say they’ve been crafted over years drawing from academic research, geological records and consultations with seven American Indian tribes that advise the park on its interpretive programs, including two Paiute bands in the Eastern Sierra.
Such disputes are beginning to surface as the nation’s parks start to reconcile the sometimes brutal events that helped to create today’s cherished preserves, said Bob Sutton, the National Park Service’s chief historian.
“In the past, we operated with this idea that great men made American parks what they were, so we wrote stories about a lot of great white men,” Sutton said. “In some instances, the history we have on the books may not be accurate, and we need to take a lot of care in making sure we’re telling it correctly.”

Rhoan’s great grandmother Maria Lebrado was one of few survivors of a massacre in 1851, in which white settlers drove out the native families who lived in and migrated through the valley.
Five years later, tourist magazines were promoting Yosemite as a pleasuring ground for the moneyed classes of San Francisco. By 1892, most surviving Indians had left the area, or had taken jobs working as maids, tree fellers or dancers to entertain visitors.
Tony Brochini, chairman of the 800-member Southern Sierra Miwok tribe, was born in the last Indian village in the valley in 1951, and grew up exploring the park’s flowering meadows and swift rivers as his backyard.
He says the Miwok have been working to keep Indian cultural and spiritual traditions alive in Yosemite. The tribe plans to build a new cultural center on the old village grounds with a sweat lodge and a roundhouse they propose as a gathering place for all area tribes.
“We’re the indigenous people of Yosemite Valley and have the most lineal descent to this area, and are the spiritual leaders for all tribal activities,” he said. “The disgruntled ones want that whole history changed.”
Rhoan and another Paiute activist, David Andrews, have sent Yosemite’s tribal liaison reams of information they say demonstrates the park’s improprieties. Andrews, a member of the Walker River Paiute reservation in Nevada, cites early photos of Yosemite as evidence that early inhabitants were Paiute.
Brochini, a Park Service employee who also has Italian and Paiute blood, acknowledges that intermarrying means some early valley residents were Yokut, Chukchansi and Mono - as well as Paiute.
Rhoan is a distant cousin of Brochini.
Paiutes are already mentioned in displays at a refurbished visitor’s center that opened last year, and on signs in the native museum.
But Andrews wants the park to go further: he’d like to see signs rewritten and photographs relabeled to say the park’s original stewards were all Paiute. He also objects to the thousands of dollars in payments for cultural services the park has made to the nonprofit organization the Miwok tribe formed as they seek federal recognition.
Officials said such criticisms have in part spurred park historians to consider taking a second look at its Indian historical materials when funding is available.
Gerard Baker has been overhauling exhibits at Mount Rushmore National Memorial since he became the park’s first American Indian superintendent in 2004. This spring, he organized a summit of Lakota, Nakota and Dakota elders to discuss issues including ways to help heal wounds stemming from the country’s violent history with American Indians.
In Death Valley National Park, members of the federally recognized Timbisha Shoshone Tribe are working under a Park Service grant to map sites of cultural and historical significance. In 2000, after decades of negotiation, the tribe was ceded acres of park land as a part of their ancestral territory.
Pat Parker, chief of the Park Service’s American Indian liaison office in Washington, lauded such efforts, and said the agency plans to issue guidelines detailing how parks should work with tribes to ensure visitors are told a complete history.
“What people know about the landscape in our parks, the body of knowledge that they’ve carried through from generation to generation and have memorialized in songs and stories, is a resource to be protected just as much as the trees and the rocks and the fish,” Parker said.’