When firefighting resources are thin, reservations are left to burn
It’s an understatement to say that 2015 was a devastating year for wildfires in the Pacific Northwest.
Unusually warm and dry weather had our state in emergency drought since May. Conditions were ripe for fires to spread rapidly – and that’s exactly what happened this summer. The fires were so large that teams from all over the U.S., Canada, and even Australia flew in to help. As of September, more than one million acres of land burned in Washington.
But lost in the coverage of flames converging on multimillion dollar houses was the fact that much of what burned was tribal land.
Earlier this month I visited the Yakama Nation alongside a group of University of Washington graduate students. From Signal Peak, a lookout point atop a windy hill in the center of the tribe’s closed reservation area, I could see smoke swirling up from the treeline at the foot of Mount Adams. The fire, which began in August, had already burned 41,000 acres of the Yakama tribe’s forest. And it was still smouldering away.
Part of the problem was that resources that could have been fighting fires on the reservation were sent off to places like Chelan, peppered with expensive summer vacation homes, according to Phil Rigdon, president of the Intertribal Timber Council and superintendent of the Yakama Nation’s Department of Natural Resources.
“The priority went to homes that none of my [Yakama] members can afford to purchase… Who is taking the burden of the fire? It ends up being us because our tribe chose not to have those types of developments in our forested area,” said Rigdon.
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