In the Klamath language, Chiloquin means “meeting of two rivers.” On the sparsely populated eastern slope of the Cascade Range, the tribal hamlet of Chiloquin sits near where the Sprague and Williamson rivers meet. The no-stoplight town is surrounded by the lodgepole and ponderosa pines of the Winema National Forest. But the outer quiet here belies a tension between the tribes that first inhabited this place and the U.S. Forest Service. Unlike the rivers, minds here have not always met. Though only the rivers and a highway separate the tribal and Forest Service offices, the land management ideas within them are split by a much wider ideological divide.

“We hold certain property rights on this land,” says Allen Foreman, the tribal chairman. “This is a unique situation. This is probably the only, that I’m aware of, national forest that was created from a reservation.”

He unfolds a map that has the tribes’ old reservation boundary superimposed over the current markings of the forest. The ramifications of a 1961 Forest Service action, which took the Klamath Indian Reservation and made it into the Winema National Forest, have long been felt here. Mistrust of the federal government after it terminated the tribes in 1954 contributes to the tension. Amid this climate has emerged one of the most unusual, oft-unstable and longstanding intergovernmental relationships in the Forest Service’s recent history. But later this year, it all could flip-flop. Forest Service employees here may eventually work for the tribes. A presidential working group and the tribes are working on a land restoration deal that could take the Klamath Tribes from no reservation to a new, 692,000-acre land base, eliminating more than half of the Winema National Forest.

“Obviously, it’s pretty controversial in a lot of circles,” says Foreman. “But it’s something we hope will work out. It’s something we’ve been working on since termination.”

The deal is on the fast track: talks between the tribes and the Department of the Interior began in March 2002, and a decision from the presidential working group is expected in September. Though the tribes’ pretermination reservation was much larger (land that’s now wildlife reserves, Crater Lake National Park and privately held), both parties agreed that the project should focus on land reclamation from only one government agency. If the plan goes through, essentially all Forest Service land within the former reservation boundary will go back to the tribes. After the working group makes its recommendation, the plan will go to Congress for a vote. If the tribes get the land they want, the entire 480,000-acre Chiloquin Ranger District will disappear, along with smaller sections of other districts in the Winema National Forest (now 1.1 million acres) and a small part of the adjacent Fremont National Forest.

For tribal members, the land has always belonged to the tribes. But the force behind the land claim—why it’s happening now and at such a quick pace—grew out of a fight over water rights in the Klamath Basin during a severe drought two summers ago. Tribal members’ contact with senior Interior Department officials helped recharge the Klamaths’ struggle to restore their reservation. During a divisive battle between the tribes, ranchers, farmers, environmentalists and the federal government over who had rights to water, the tribes asserted themselves in the debate. After it was all over, the feds listened. They created the presidential working group to finally lay out a tribal land restoration plan. The group includes the secretaries of agriculture, commerce and the interior. According to Foreman, a staff representative from the group travels from Washington, D.C., to Chiloquin about once a month to meet with him and various tribal department heads.

All the national attention is exciting for the 3,500-member tribes. But during the in-between times, after the presidential working group representative returns to Washington, D.C., the tribes still feel powerless against the federal government. Mistrust still exists over forest management practices that date back nearly a century. For tribal members, their land was unjustly taken and the resources were squandered while out of tribal control.

This doesn’t mean the land was untouched wilderness before white settlement; Foreman said that long before termination, the tribes ran successful logging and grazing operations. Their resource management was so successful that the Klamath Tribes were among the wealthiest American Indians in the United States at the time. But without the reservation, the tribes have struggled with both economic and cultural loss.

The Forest Service insists it has involved the tribes as much as possible. For example, the Forest Service gives the Klamath Tribes forty-five days to comment on Winema timber sales before the general public ever hears about them. Outgoing Winema Forest Supervisor Chuck Graham, a forty-year Forest Service veteran, says that during his twelve years on the Winema, the tribalñForest Service relationship has been “comfortable.” He said the dynamic changes slightly with changes in tribal leadership. Graham admits, though, that the tribes have stuck to their value system when it comes to land—a value system that differs from that of the Forest Service.

“We still cut trees, harvest trees and grow trees,” says Graham.

Though timber sales are few now, the effects of the past can’t be missed: rivers on the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality’s “dead and dying” list, endangered birds and fish, high-density, same-age forests. In the Forest Service’s latest land management plan for the Winema, timber harvest is still a main goal. When the plan was written about ten years ago, 79 percent of the Winema’s forests were slated for timber harvest. The plan, and that figure, stands today, though Winema land managers aren’t aggressively marketing even a fraction of it. Part of the reason is the Forest Service can’t sell the trees: they’re too small. Most Winema trees are second growth, and some recent timber sales have been canceled due to a lack of interest. Both the tribes and the Forest Service agree the forest needs to be restored. Now it’s a matter of who will be leading that charge and how that will affect on-the-ground management of this forest.

“I could have been blown over by a feather,” says Rick Ragan, ranger for the Chiloquin Ranger District, of first hearing of a possible tribal land deal. “I was in shell shock.”

It was March 2002 and Ragan was nine days into the job. Never in his twenty-five years with the Forest Service had he dealt with anything like this. Most of his staff of forty-five in the district office—many of whom are members of the Klamath Tribes—had also read the local headlines that day. Ragan remembers walking into the district office in Chiloquin and being met by anxious staff asking if they’d lose their jobs. He assured them otherwise. If and when the tribes got the land, he told them, he’d help make the transition smooth.

“I don’t really care who gets this land,” Ragan says. “If the tribe gets it, they’re going to get the best piece of land they can get. We’re professional land managers. We’re going to do the best job we can no matter who has it.”

Ragan and I have met to take a drive into this forest. We pass the tribal offices, drive through the town of Chiloquin and head up one of thousands of narrow Forest Service roads snaking through the Winema. Just over a hump in the land sits one of the tribes’ traditional campsites. The camps are not open to the general public under a special agreement with the Forest Service. It’s a crisp December morning, and about four inches of snow crunches under the wheels of Ragan’s big four-by-four. He shows me where the Forest Service has thinned trees and cleaned up slash to reduce fire danger. But on the other side of the hill, still on Winema lands, it’s a different story.

On the Forest Service’s map, the words special trust land marks our location. Here, there’s only a blue and white striped ribbon tied to the trunk of a pine. But a closer look reveals that the trees are closer together. Bitter brush grows at thigh-level between the trunks. Descendants of the former Klamath trustees have asked that the Forest Service leave this land alone, says Ragan. For the Forest Service, this is prime fire danger area that abuts a reduced-fuels area the Forest Service has worked hard to create.

“From our perspective, we try to meet or exceed our obligations to the tribe,” says Ragan, adding, “That doesn’t mean we always agree.”

Exactly what these obligations are can be blurry at times for Forest Service employees. Though the tribes don’t own the land anymore, they’ve retained special treaty rights. The tribes have senior water rights on the rivers running through the former reservation, the headwaters for the massive Klamath Lake. The water rights are linked to their treaty-guaranteed rights to hunt, fish and gather on former reservation lands now under federal control. Sometimes this means tribal biologists and Forest Service biologists collaborate on projects. Sometimes it means the Forest Service backs off when the tribes say so. Sometimes it means no one quite knows what to do—or not do—in terms of the other. Often it means the governments work separately.

Part of the reason for such confusion is that the tribes’ history is linked to these lands. Klamath stories, passed down through the generations, recount the eruption of Mount Mazama, which created Crater Lake, 7,000 years ago. The tribes originally living here—the Klamath, the Modoc and the Yahooskin Band of the Snake Paiute—once controlled about 22 million acres of forest. When the three traditional rivals entered into a treaty agreement with the United States in 1864, their reservation had already dwindled to 2.2 million acres. Though the tribes were forced to live closer together on this land, no tribe kept it.

Western settlement and industry reduced the tribes’ land base to 880,000 acres by the early 1900s. Then the Termination Act of 1954 (a law that wiped away official U.S. governmentñtribal relationships, as well as tribal lands throughout the West) dealt the final blow to the Klamath Indian Reservation. Government officials gave adult tribal members a choice: take an allotment of acreage or a payout of $43,000. More than three-quarters of the tribes’ members chose the money, not fully understanding that it meant giving up their ancestral lands. Then the federal government condemned the reservation. In 1961, the Forest Service took possession of it to create most of the Winema National Forest.

Over the next forty years, the Forest Service opened the Winema to timber sales. The former reservation lands produced more than $450 million in revenues for the government during this time, according to the tribes’ analysis of Forest Service records. At the same time, many tribeal members who had taken allotments along the Sprague and Williamson rivers sold them to white ranchers. Today all the lowland areas are privately owned. It wasn’t until 1986 that the Klamath Tribes regained their identity as a tribe from Congress. But that action didn’t get the tribes any land back. Still, through it all, the tribes retained their 1864 treaty resource rights to hunt, fish and gather on the former reservation.

In the early 1990s, the Klamath Tribes sued the Forest Service to get a declaration that the agency pay attention to the tribes’ resource rights when making its forest management decisions. The tribes won. The tribes have publicly called the Forest Service’s decisions “destructive” and the lands “nearly decimated.” In 1999, the tribes and the Forest Service drew up a memorandum of agreement. Since then, there’s more face-to-face time in Chiloquin, and the Forest Service and the tribes meet quarterly.

“It takes us longer to do things here because we deal with the tribe,” says Ragan. “What is unique is this [agreement] that lets them have a say, almost to the point of veto power.”

Still, the tribes feel they have little influence with the Forest Service. Even Ragan acknowledges that at the quarterly meetings (which always take place at Forest Service offices) the tribes usually just respond to what the Forest Service already plans to do. Ragan would like the tribes to bring more plans to the table. The tribes says they’re doing that. But the tribes say that although the relationship has become less adversarial over the last decade, it took the memorandum of agreement to change things.

Elwood Miller, director of the tribe’s Natural Resources Department, helped draft the memorandum. He thinks it’s working fine, though he says the relationships between the governments could be better. Recently he took a walk through the forest with some other tribal members. Six of them stretched out their arms and touched fingertips to encircle a 600-year-old ponderosa pine.

Trees like this are rare in the Winema National Forest, Miller says. He is proud of how well he and other tribal members know this forest and where to find old-growth groves. Like many tribal members, Miller has lived in Chiloquin all his life. Miller, who has worked for the tribes for twenty years, has also served as director of the Klamath Tribes Cultural Heritage Department. When it comes to managing the Winema, the key difference, he says, between the tribes and the Forest Service is cultural.

“We’re driven by the traditional economy that wants to make sure the forest is intact,” says Miller. “We look at it as a multiple-use forest. We’re going to be doing activities that benefit all of the resources. Each one is important and it’s given its due weight.”

Those resources, according to Miller, include old cultural sites such as remnants of ancestral villages and graves. The tribes have found several and recorded their locations. Forest resources also include healthy wildlife, plants and rivers that can support salmon—a traditional food of the Klamath Tribes. Members of the tribes haven’t lost hope that someday the salmon will return.

The tribes hope the public will be able to enjoy the forest after the changeover. People will still be able to camp, fish and hunt with Klamath Reservation permits. Tribal members would like to see the mule deer population, now about 3,000, recover to historic levels of around 50,000.

“The change is going to be for the better, I believe,” says Miller. “In the long run, the people who come out to the reservation are going to have a more enjoyable stay.”

His department is drawing up a thirty-year plan for the proposed new reservation. The goal: sustained yield each decade, but not in timber volume. The tribes intend to cut trees for thinning purposes only. Those trees will be sold to local mills.

“We’re talking about sustained yield of the trees, a sustained yield of the vegetation and a sustained yield of the other resources,” he says.

Another major plan is to remove Winema roads. Miller says the tribes want to reduce the 7,000 miles of Forest Service roads inside the former reservation to about 600 miles—the amount at termination in 1954. The plan is to plant bitter brush in the roadbeds. This work, essentially to undo what the Forest Service has done, doesn’t anger the Klamath people, according to Miller.

“It isn’t a burden to us,” Miller says. “It’s a nurturing.”

Chuck Graham is tight-lipped about the possible loss of a large chunk of the Winema National Forest to the Klamath Tribes.

“You can’t envision changeover until you know what the change is going to be,” he says.

Though the land deal is still in the negotiation stage, Foreman doesn’t want to bargain water rights for land. Though the tribes hope to use their future reservation for some tribal businesses, the tribes’ main goal is to heal the land.

“It’s going to be managed for the ecosystem rather than managed for the money,” Foreman says.

The tribes are well aware that future forest management, whatever its goal, will take more staffing—and money. Miller is confident that his permanent staff of fifteen employees (one-third the size of the Chiloquin Ranger District staff) will be ready for a changeover. Eventually, though, Miller foresees the Natural Resources Department staff doubling in size. Tribal biologists, who Miller insists have led the scientific charge in the Klamath Basin, are especially ready to put their skills to work analyzing a large piece of land. What his department lacks, he says, are forestry experts. He foresees a changeover period of three to ten years, during which Forest Service employees will keep their jobs, likely as tribal advisers. Afterward, they could choose to switch to full-time tribal employees. Like Ragan, Miller doesn’t want federal employees to lose their jobs. Even so, he thinks federal staffing is much too large.

“We’ve always said we could manage it with a little less people than they could,” says Miller.

Still, the tribes want to consider their own people when a new reservation comes. Miller says the tribes have assessed their human resources and have found that some tribal members are educated in forestry but are living elsewhere. Some have indicated they would come home to help manage a new reservation if jobs existed that met their qualifications. Still, the tribes see job creation outside the tribal rolls stemming from the new reservation, including the large crews the tribes will need to plant bitter brush to cover the roads.

“If it happens, I think it’s going to heal the basin,” says Miller. “I think it’s going to go a long way in healing the feelings of people.”

Many tribal members believe that with a new reservation, the Klamath Tribes can help restore their land, their culture and the headwaters of the Klamath Basin. The latter could help restore trust within the community. As long as no one takes too much water and as long as the rivers are healthy, there should be enough water to go around, the tribes say.

Though several have offered, Foreman says the tribes haven’t accepted outside help from environmental groups for their land restoration project. He says the tribes’ stand on environmental protection predates any environmental group in the country.

Despite the political hurdles they’ve had to face—and will need to navigate in the coming months—tribal members are thrilled that a new reservation could soon be theirs. For them, a land base is long overdue. It’s also an opportunity to leave a positive legacy for future generations. Says Foreman, “We’ve got a saying in the tribe: When you heal the land, you heal the people.”

In December 2002, the Winema and the Fremont national forests officially merged into the Winema-Fremont National Forest. The merge was three years in the making, a result of downsized federal budgets. Together, the forests make up a full hydrologic system. If the tribes take more than half of the Winema, the new combined forest would be cut into several pieces. FM