On this gray morning, steady drizzle soaks the Lower Elwha Indian Reservation, a community perched along the northern edge of the Olympic Peninsula. Underneath an outdoor shelter, three men sit inside 1,800 pounds of western red cedar. They’re shaping it into a canoe that will hold twenty paddlers. A few minutes into today’s project, the mist turns to hard rain. The sound of water plunking on the roof of the canoe shelter mixes with the men’s rhythmic scraping, creating a staccato composition.

Head canoe carver and tribal artist Al Charles Jr. is one of the men crouched inside the forty-six-foot canoe, scraping the insides to make it lighter and faster for the Lower Elwha’s annual canoe journey. Every summer, peninsula tribes join with other coastal and island tribes from Canada to ply the waters of Puget Sound, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Pacific Ocean in canoes. The destination and length of the journey changes each year. For the Lower Elwha, the canoe journeys are about connection—to the earth, the water, the Creator and their tribal ancestors. The journeys also physically connect the Lower Elwha with other Pacific Northwest tribes sharing this cultural revival. For these tribes, a traditional, or “true,” cedar dugout is preferred over the fiberglass canoes that many tribes use.

“It’s been a positive for all the First Nations of the coast,” Charles says. “It really means a lot to us to have a true dugout, and it’s really important to other tribes in the area to have a true dugout. It’s as close as we can get to following our ancestors.”

But getting this close—possessing a giant red canoe cedar—wasn’t easy. The tribe’s 600-acre reservation sits on farmland on the Elwha River’s floodplain. The canoe tree the tribe wanted (as well as the tree they got) stood in the Olympic National Forest, part of the Lower Elwha’s usual and accustomed gathering places. Several tribes on the Olympic Peninsula have treaty rights to forest resources outside their reservations, so land managers here are aware that federal law allows tribes to gather forest products for cultural use.

It seemed simple. Until they asked for the tree they wanted.

“It was a learning tool for the Forest Service, an educational process,” says Francis Charles, a Lower Elwha tribal council member. “A long educational process.”

For two years, the tribe battled with the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture to cut an old-growth western red cedar. The root of the problem was scarcity; logging on the Olympic National Forest has left few big cedars standing. Department of Agriculture attorneys flew in from Washington, D.C., to try to help answer the question of whether the tribe’s treaty rights to cultural use of forest products superceded the environmental protection rules of the Northwest Forest Plan governing old growth. In the end, the old treaties—and a compromise—prevailed. In summer 2002, the Forest Service agreed to let the tribe cut its second-choice tree, located in an area deemed less ecologically sensitive than the place where the first tree stands.

End of story? Not quite. First, the Lower Elwha has not officially given up on its first-choice tree. A request for that cedar remains on file at the Olympic National Forest headquarters in Olympia. The tribe confirms it still wants the tree and says it will request more trees for future canoe building. Second, the fourteen other tribal communities on the peninsula watched the outcome of the Lower Elwha case carefully. Area tribes have filed five other requests for Olympic National Forest cedars for cultural use. Third, American Indian tribes from other parts of the country took notice and plan to use the case as a precedent for their battles over cultural use products on public lands.

Rod Mayte, a twenty-seven-year Forest Service veteran, is the person in Olympia who handles tribal requests on the Olympic National Forest. He’s a forester by training, but his current job deals almost exclusively with tribal issues. He remembers well the Lower Elwha canoe tree discussions, meetings and debates. The two-year quagmire, he says, resulted from differing perspectives about old-growth forest management, including how to protect wildlife and streams while honoring tribes’ treaty rights. “It was such a difficult question that people [in the agencies] didn’t want to answer it as a single entity,” he says.

Meanwhile, the Lower Elwha waited for their tree.

The temperate rain forest of the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state grows big cedars faster than almost anywhere else on earth. Early American Indians used the big trees for canoes to fish, hunt whales and visit and battle other tribes. For the fifteen tribes whose settlements and reservations rim the peninsula today, the canoe culture, minus the battles, is reviving after decades of absence.

For the Lower Elwha, cultural revival on all fronts remains in its birthing stages. For them, western red cedar is about more than canoes. The tree represents the history as well as the future of the tribe. Cedar is used in ceremony, homes and basketry. The Lower Elwha are lucky enough to have a skilled canoe carver among their members, and they are grateful to Al Charles Jr. for his work not only in carving the canoe but also in helping to bring the tribe’s youth back in touch with canoe culture.

The ideal size for an oceangoing dugout canoe is a ten-foot-diameter cedar, one that has grown at a lower elevation. According to tribal members, higher-elevation cedars have more defects. Lower-elevation cedars are more rare because logging has left few standing. The tribe asserts that it has had nothing to do with the environmental destruction in the national forest and shouldn’t be subject to what it deems “rigid” environmental rules dictating which trees at which locations can be cut.

The Lower Elwha, who have their own natural resources staff, say they aren’t blind to the realities surrounding environmental rules in the national forest. They know western red cedar is rare. They also want people to know they are good stewards of forested land, even though they don’t officially control it anymore.

“The tribe has no interest in jeopardizing existing stocks or species,” says John Miller, the tribe’s executive director. Council member Francis Charles adds, “If anybody can provide the safety for the resources, it’s the tribe.”

The Forest Service faces a poaching problem with scarce western red cedars. Theft of these giant trees exacerbates the acquisition process for tribes, and the Forest Service’s duty to preserve standing old-growth trees for wildlife and riparian protection is greater than ever. Every tree matters, especially trees in areas that are biologically sensitive.

“It’s hard for us to put dollar values on cultural resources,” Mayte says. “It’s also hard to put a dollar value on the biological importance of a standing tree. It’s just worth a lot more standing green than being stolen in the night.”

Nevertheless, the western red cedar the tribe wanted was a standing green tree. The Forest Service staff said the tree was too close to a river and too close to a road that was on their short list for decommissioning. It was marbled murrelet habitat. The Forest Service suggested several other trees at higher elevations, but none met the tribe’s requirements. Debate erupted over the tribe’s request; more trees and other locations were pursued. Finally, the Forest Service and the tribe found another tree that could be made into a canoe. One of the tribe’s natural resource technicians, a tribal member, discovered it on a drive through the forest. Suddenly, the young technician told the driver of the truck to stop. He hiked over to the tree.

“His grandfather was a carver and he had a sense of what he was looking for,” Miller says. Afterward, tribal elders judged the tree fit to become “Spirit of the Elwha,” the name for the canoe.

When the tribe decided the second-choice would suffice, the tribe paid for the cutting and removal of the tree.

“Tribes are pretty patient,” Miller says. “They’re used to things working slowly and being deprived their rights.”

Still, acquiring a standing tree for Spirit of the Elwha represents an important political victory for this small tribe. Its successful battle has implications for other tribes throughout the United States. Although an old-growth cedar isn’t the first cultural use product ever fought over, it is probably the largest.

“I think it was an educational process for all of us,” Mayte says, echoing the sentiments of tribal council member Francis Charles. “And it was precedent-setting.”

The effort to get Spirit of the Elwha—ultimately a success for American Indian rights—represents the growing power of tribes as they use their reserved rights in national forests. In many ways, this case reminded the Forest Service and other federal land management agencies how tribes have become more powerful. No longer bowing to the U.S. government, tribes are asserting sovereignty over their land and, now, over resources on public lands they once controlled. Rather than remaining on the receiving end of Forest Service policy, tribes are helping to shape it.

For the record, Miller says that the Forest Service was “very much in support of the tribe’s treaty rights and the ability to gather a cedar tree.”

A direct outcome of the Lower Elwha canoe fight is a new “programmatic” on the Olympic National Forest. The forest is planning for cultural use permits: for the next five years of the programmatic, Olympic Peninsula tribes may take up to twelve trees. But there’s a catch: the Forest Service must select the trees, and they won’t necessarily be standing trees. Blowdowns and confiscated trees from illegal activities will be included in the dozen.

“Our last recourse would be to look at a standing green tree,” says Mayte.

This doesn’t mean, however, that tribes can’t get a standing green tree, as the Elwha did. But Mayte says that the approval process will take one to two years, with no guarantees that the tree the tribe wants will be approved for cutting. Under the programmatic, however, tribes will likely get their tree in one to two months, says Mayte.

If the tribes agree, the six current requests at the Olympia headquarters could fall under the new programmatic, including the Quilute’s wish for four totem trees to use as supports for a gymnasium and a canoe cedar requested by the Quinault.

South of the Lower Elwha reservation lies the Olympic National Forest, quickly sloping up to the snowy peaks of Hurricane Ridge. These are the firs and cedars of Olympic National Park tucked further inside. The broken doughnut shape of the national forest resembles a life ring for the prized park in the middle. A century of logging has battered the edges of the life ring a bit, but it still has a few old-growth stands left. The same could be said for the fifteen tribes here, pushed to the edges of the peninsula, reduced in number and in size of territory. Still, the tribes have hung on to their culture and have kept their connection to the vast forested territories of their ancestors.

“In the Pacific Northwest, I’d have to say [the Olympic is] the lightning rod of cultural activities,” says Mayte.

Tribal cultural issues have historically been a part of the Forest Service’s day-to-day operations here. In the last two decades, relationships have been especially direct and active and, in most cases, positive. In the 1990 Land and Resource Management Plan for the Olympic National Forest, “American Indian Concerns, Values, and Treaty Rights” headlines one section in the record of decision. Most of the plan involves protecting the forest’s rivers for tribal fishing activities. But the document also addresses cultural uses of the forest and its resources: “The Selected Alternative emphasizes that treaty rights and fundamental opportunities relating to religious, ceremonial and traditional concerns will be fully protected and preserved. It recognizes Ö the central reverence and value held for western red cedar and salmon resources.”

Protection for tribal salmon resources grew a few years later, when in 1994 the Forest Service invited several peninsula tribes to help agency staff analyze the Soleduck River drainage for a widespread agency project to improve the salmon runs.

“We just made a conscious decision that the tribes on the Olympic Peninsula would be involved in watershed analysis with us,” says Mayte. “I think that helped elevate tribal issues on the Olympic Peninsula because that’s where we actually got engaged with the tribes with on-the-ground management.”

Since then, the Forest Service has met regularly with most tribes on the peninsula to discuss current and upcoming process as well as tribal concerns, including limiting general public access to mythical sites. Still, cultural use of forest products remains a key issue for American Indian communities, so much so that in 2002, the Quinault hosted a national conference for tribes on the topic.

“I think special forest products are an issue the tribes are raising to a national level,” says Mayte.

In the Forest Service, when issues with tribes crop up, by and large, land managers like Mayte—not those versed in tribal history, law, culture or treaties—must address the complexities of dealing with tribal governments. Often they must act quickly. Sometimes, they unknowingly offend tribes or make decisions counter to treaty law. But that is changing. It’s taken a long time, but each of the regional Forest Service offices now has one high-level staff member who deals exclusively in tribal relationships.

Placing one person in each region has taken ten years; the Southwest Region was the last office to get a tribal relations officer, in early 2003. These employees, not in any particular staff group, teach forest supervisors and other decision makers in their regions to understand tribes’ rights in the national forests. In some cases, they step in when issues get heated, rough or political. These Forest Service officials have a lot of ground to oversee and many tribes to consider. Although tribal relations officers are few in number, many bring a special perspective to the job: several are American Indians.

Les McConnell, part Yakama, Cherokee and Oklahoma Indian, is one of them. He works in the Pacific Northwest Regional Office in Portland, Oregon, and is the first of this relatively new group. After more than twelve years as a forester for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Warm Springs Tribe, McConnell joined the Forest Service as its first tribal relations officer more than ten years ago.

“We can gain from Indian Country,” he says.

In addition to handling the issues in the Pacific Northwest for the past ten years, McConnell has started a groundswell in the agency for improved relationships with tribal governments. In 1991, he wrote the Forest Service’s official Desk Guide to Tribal Government Relations, which has made its way to desks at the BLM and to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as well. He updated it for a second edition in 1998. He also developed and taught a graduate-level course on tribal relations tailored to Forest Service employees, administered through an accredited university. Travel for speaking engagements is a regular part of his job.

McConnell has been spreading the word from region to region that more people like him should be hired. Albeit slowly, the Forest Service has responded. One by one, regions have put their own Les McConnells on staff. McConnell’s goal is to begin to reverse the negative relationship tribes have historically had with the Forest Service, and vice versa. Still, much remains to be done—including institutional change and clarified federal laws. The latter is necessary because many Forest Service rules make no concessions for tribal treaty rights or cultural values.

“The philosophy, or cultural difference [of tribes], clashes with the rules,” explains McConnell.

In July 2002, in an effort to address tribal issues at the national level, the Forest Service allocated funds to set up a new national Office of Tribal Relations at agency headquarters in Washington, D.C. The office will house six staffers who will focus mostly on congressional work to smooth out government-to-government relations. This new office will also provide oversight of the eight regional tribal relations officers. So far, little progress has been made. More than a year later, the office sits almost empty, with just an administrative assistant. It still has no director. Without one, the assistant says, the other key staff members can’t be hired.

But the work goes on in the regions. McConnell says he likes to work behind the scenes. His counterparts in other regions, especially in the Southwest and Alaska, work directly with tribes in a more hands-on fashion. He says he’d rather train local land managers to deal fairly with tribes than put out individual fires across his region. With the Lower Elwha, however, McConnell made an exception. In sum, he supported the tribe as best he could throughout the negotiation process. To this day, he thinks the Lower Elwha shouldn’t have been made to wait two years for their canoe.

Perhaps the next canoe tree won’t take as long.