Whose Home on the Range?
Conservationists oppose Interior plan to let tribes manage federal land.
By Julia M. Klein | From Preservation | November/December 2003
In a test case that has sparked vehement opposition from national environmental and other groups, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes are negotiating with the U.S. Department of the Interior to share management of the National Bison Range and two smaller national wildlife refuges on northwestern Montana's Flathead Indian Reservation. Critics, concerned about the Bush administration's environmental record and its interest in shrinking government, consider the plan a threat to the refuge system and a strategy for privatizing federal jobs. Tribal leaders argue that increased control over reservation land would advance their evolving self-governance, and the Interior Department says it is just following the law.
The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes want the new responsibilities because of their historic and cultural ties to the land and the bison that still roam there, says D. Fred Matt, tribal council chairman. After creating the 92,000-acre Mission Mountains Tribal Wilderness Area in 1979 and running a utility company and other enterprises, "we're proud," he says, "of the management regimes that we have established when it comes to wildlife, fisheries, water quality, and air quality."
Any agreement involving the refuges—22,500 acres of grasslands, forests, and wetlands sheltering bison, black bears, and coyotes—would leave ownership and the top management post with the federal government, says the government's lead negotiator, Paul Hoffman, appointed deputy assistant secretary of the interior by Sec. Gale A. Norton. Native Americans would be held to federal environmental regulations, he says.
The tribes' claim is rooted in 1994 amendments to the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act that require the Interior Department to entertain proposals from tribes seeking to manage federal lands with "special historical, cultural, or geographic significance" to them. But the legislation forbids the government from turning over "inherently federal responsibilities," a vague term at the center of negotiations.
Since 1995, the Interior Department has published an annual list of National Park Service units (34), as well as national wildlife refuges and fish hatcheries (19), eligible for tribal management. The only agreement reached so far has allowed the Grand Portage Band of Minnesota Chippewas to do maintenance work at the Grand Portage National Monument since 1999.
Opponents of tribal management of federal land have circulated a petition, taken to the airwaves, and met with Hoffman to try to derail the bison range talks. "We know the secretary of the Interior is pushing for the tribal management takeover of the National Bison Range and related refuges," says Gerald W. Winegrad, the American Bird Conservancy's vice president for policy. "And many believe that this is part of the effort to turn over management of wildlife refuges, national parks, and other [federal] lands to private entities." In addition, he says, "from the administration's environmental record, no one really believes that environmental laws and regulations will be strictly enforced at the range."
The conservancy cites ongoing threats to rare and native birds from Native Americans' farming and grazing practices, overhead power lines, expansion of a stock car racetrack, and stockpiling of construction debris at the two smaller refuges the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have asked to manage. Interior's Hoffman says these issues are being resolved in negotiations and promises to hold public hearings if a draft agreement is reached.
Within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Interior agency that currently manages the properties, enthusiasm for ceding responsibility is lukewarm at best. David S. Wiseman, the manager of the refuges on the Flathead reservation, says he favors "a partnership where it's a win-win for the American people, the refuge system, and the tribes" but worries about creating "a bunch of individual systems managed according to somebody else's priorities."
Tribal management "is a national issue because it involves dedicated federal lands that are held in trust for all Americans," says Gene Hocutt, who monitors refuges for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a national association of resource professionals. "The real question here is whether or not dedicated federal trust land should be contracted out for administration or operation to any group or entity or, in this case, a sovereign nation."
Whatever happens, the outcome, says Hocutt, "will set a number of legal, political, ecological, philosophical, and other precedents that will have critical implications for dedicated federal trust lands for decades to come."
Julia M. Klein is a freelance writer in Philadelphia.
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