Hoonah Native Forest Partnership

A History of Mistrust

Back in 2015, Indigenous communities, environmental organizations, private landowners and the Forest Service were in the early stages of working collaboratively on land-management decisions, intentionally identifying shared goals and values.

By then, Alaska’s timber-industry boom, which lasted from the 1950s through the late 1990s and saw more than 1 million acres of old-growth logged, were long in the rearview. In those years, disputes between environmentalists and timber companies all up and down the West Coast were long on publicity stunts and short on constructive discourse. Alaska Native Tribes and communities were frequently sidelined or simply not consulted in negotiations over the forest’s future.

In the Spasski Watershed, roughly 6,000 of its 21,000 acres of old-growth forest were logged. Before the passage of the National Forest Management Act in 1976, it was common to harvest trees right up to the banks of salmon streams, removing shade that keep waters cool. This practice went on even longer on private land. In some places, there were no more trees left to fall into streams, as they normally would, creating pools, shallows and riffles where baby salmon get their start and slowing and filtering rivers and streams on their way to the ocean. Forest roads plowed right across streams in some places, and, in others, inadequately sized culverts made it difficult for salmon to reach their spawning grounds.

By the late 1990s, the easily harvestable stands of old growth were gone and the industry began to decline, leaving the region with an all-too-familiar, post-boom economic hangover.

In 2001, when President Bill Clinton signed the first iteration of the Roadless Rule, it prompted remaining timber companies and communities to dig in and fight for their tenuous hold on prosperity in a remote region with few other economic opportunities. The on-again, off-again Roadless Rule, which has been rescinded and reinstated in the Tongass four times since 2001, left the region locked in conflict and uncertainty over its future.

Creating a New Future

In 2006, The Nature Conservancy in Alaska helped organize an initiative called the Tongass Futures Roundtable to identify shared values and goals for the forest and its management amongst the region’s people, landowners and industries that depend on the forest. Within a few years, the relationships formed through the initiative led to the establishment of the Sustainable Southeast Partnership. Today the partnership is a network of hundreds of communities, Tribes, organizations and individuals across the region working toward a more sustainable future for Southeast Alaska built on Indigenous leadership and dedicated to place-based economic opportunity and a holistic view of community and cultural well-being.

The Hoonah Native Forest Partnership—along with a growing number of similar Indigenous-led conservation and stewardship programs throughout the region—receives support from the Sustainable Southeast Partnership through funding and technical assistance.

Within a couple of years, the HNFP identified the Spasski Watershed as a top priority for restoration. In fact, the first several years of the HNFP were spent collecting the data that would form the basis for the Forest Service’s designation of Spasski as a priority watershed.

Ian Johnson is the environmental director for the Hoonah Indian Association, a role supported in part by the Sustainable Southeast Partnership, and leads fieldwork for the HNFP. He’s been with HNFP since 2016 and described major changes in that time in how HNFP partners work together, such as greater consultation between landowners and the community.

Two years ago, HNFP partners signed a formal Memorandum of Understanding with the Forest Service, a move that was previously prohibited by federal law. The MOU led to HNFP being granted “Good Neighbor Authority” by the Forest Service, which allows it to conduct restoration work on federal lands.

“The overall mindset has changed,” Johnson explained.

Since then, one grant at a time, one brief summer field season at a time, local crew members have doggedly repaired the damage from decades of logging: fish-friendly culverts have been installed; “woody debris,” the technical term for dead trees and other detritus that a healthy forest deposits in streams and along streambanks, has been manually returned; and tree stands have been thinned so larger, healthier trees can survive while bringing light back to the plants, berries and mosses on the forest floor.