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Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
In a win for tribes, Forest Service halts commercial huckleberry picking in forest
Josephine WoolingtonHigh Country News The U.S. Forest Service announced Monday that it will temporarily prohibit commercial picking of huckleberries this summer in Gifford Pinchot National Forest in southwestern Washington. Commercially picked berries have fueled an entire huckleberry industry, flavoring ice cream, sodas, pies, jams, vodkas and wines – at the expense of Yakama Nation tribal members, as detailed in High Country News' March feature. 'Huckleberries are a vital cultural and ecological resource, and we must ensure their sustainability for generations to come,' Johanna Kovarik, Gifford Pinchot's forest supervisor, said in a written statement. 'This change allows us to work more closely with tribal governments, and local stakeholders and law enforcement to improve management while reducing conflicts.' The announcement comes after years of complaints from members of the Ḱamíłpa Band of the Yakama Nation about the agency's commercial program. Gifford Pinchot is the only national forest that allows large-scale commercial harvest of huckleberries, which are a traditional food for the Yakama Nation and other Pacific Northwest Indigenous peoples. Members of the Yakama Nation have reserved rights under their 1855 treaty with the U.S. government to harvest huckleberries in Gifford Pinchot National Forest. 'Our elders, I think, are smiling about this,' said Trina Sherwood, a 60-year-old Ḱamíłpa member and food gatherer. 'It's like a dream come true,' said Elaine Harvey, 48, who is Sherwood's niece and also a food gatherer from the Ḱamíłpa Band. Harvey and others in her family have pushed the Forest Service to ban commercial picking for years, which she said has infringed on tribal members' treaty rights to harvest. Both Harvey and Sherwood hope that the Forest Service will permanently prohibit commercial harvesting. Federal officials will conduct an assessment and consult with tribes this year before making any long-term changes to the commercial program. Forest Service officials were not immediately available for an interview. Most commercial pickers descend from Vietnamese and Cambodian families who came to the U.S. in the 1970s and found work picking huckleberries for low wages. Pickers sell berries directly to individual commercial huckleberry buyers, who are often small business owners or contractors for wild food companies, like Mikuni Wild Harvest, a Canadian corporation with a distribution center in Tacoma. Those companies then sell to private customers, chefs, wineries and other companies that create huckleberry products. Tillamook Creamery, according to a Forest Service official, buys berries harvested from Gifford Pinchot for the company's huckleberry ice cream. In its press release, the Forest Service said that commercial pickers take 50,000 to 70,000 gallons of berries from the forest each year. Huckleberries grow only in the mountains and have resisted Western scientists' decades-long attempts to cultivate their genes to grow them on farms. That's why the berries fetch a high price — up to $200 a gallon. Commercial pickers pay either $60 for a two-week permit with a 40-gallon limit, or $105 for a seasonal permit with a 70-gallon limit. Gifford Pinchot sold 928 permits last season, totaling $83,445 in revenue. During annual meetings with Forest Service officials, Harvey and other Yakama Nation leaders have said that commercial pickers leave few berries for tribal members. They threaten elders, who are mostly women, by blocking roads, picking closely off the same bush and bringing dogs to the fields. Some also damage the shrubs, using illegal rakes to quickly strip berries from the bushes. Tribal members have observed commercial pickers harvesting berries before the commercial season begins in mid-August and encroaching on areas reserved for exclusive tribal harvest. 'We've always explained it, year after year, that the situation is getting worse,' Harvey said of meetings with agency officials. 'There was always the question of, 'Why do we have to have commercial harvest?'' In the past, Sherwood could harvest four to six gallons of berries per day. But with the increase in commercial pickers, she's lucky if she can pick one-and-a-half gallons for herself. 'It just has really changed the landscape with all this commercial picking,' she said. 'I go back to places where I used to see berries in abundance, and it's all just taken away.'The Forest Service cited 'sustainability concerns, enforcement challenges and escalating conflicts among harvesters,' as reasons for not issuing commercial permits this season but did not specifically mention the program's impact on Yakama Nation members' treaty rights to gather. Drought, habitat loss and invasive species, such as the spotted winged drosophila, a small fruit fly whose larvae have been found inside huckleberries, are also among the agency's cited concerns. Harvey and Sherwood want to see more Forest Service officers within the fields this summer to enforce the ban and protect tribal pickers who may face intimidation or harassment from those who oppose the temporary commercial closure. But the Forest Service has struggled to adequately patrol the fields for years, citing a lack of funding. And as the Trump administration has slashed the federal workforce, including Forest Service employees, Harvey worries that the agency won't be able to increase patrols. 'Hopefully people will be safe this summer,' she said. Harvey was part of a volunteer federal committee appointed under the Biden administration that developed amendments to the Northwest Forest Plan, many of which center on cultural resource management. In those committee meetings, Harvey regularly brought up the impacts that Gifford Pinchot's commercial huckleberry program has had on her community. 'I think that's when the real push came,' Harvey said, and Forest Service officials started to listen. But federal officials told committee members earlier this month that the agency will likely disband the group. With fewer federal employees, Harvey is concerned about how that will affect the temporary commercial harvesting ban and the Forest Service's ability to complete the Northwest Forest Plan update. Sherwood is proud of the efforts over the years by her family, including her niece Elaine Harvey, to advocate for the protection of huckleberries. 'It's always been instilled in us, by our elders, our mothers, our grandmothers,' Sherwood said of speaking up for traditional foods. 'We're very protective of our resources.' The Ḱamíłpa Band has a long history of defending their treaty rights to gather huckleberries and other traditional foods that have been threatened by Forest Service mismanagement. Ḱamíłpa Chief atway William Yallup established what's known as the Handshake Agreement in 1932, which reserved part of the berry fields in Gifford Pinchot for exclusive tribal harvest. Nearly 50 years later, Sherwood's family pushed the Forest Service in the 1980s to allow the Ḱamíłpa Band to reestablish a traditional huckleberry feast in the fields to commence berry season, in late July or early August. Her brother and Ḱamíłpa Chief, atway Fred Ike Sr., worked with Cielo Chief atway Howard Jim, along with elders, including Sherwood's parents, Moses Dick Sr. and Elsie Billy Dick, to host an annual feast. 'We wanted to revitalize that history and recognize it and make sure our presence was known,' Sherwood said. She now helps organize the feast with Harvey and other family members, gathering berries and enough food to feed the longhouse for a few days. Her grandmother, atway Susie Walsey Billy, lived for weeks at Sawtooth Mountain in Gifford Pinchot during huckleberry season. 'They'd stay there until it snowed,' Sherwood said. 'I think about that a lot, and that's what's pushed me forward.' Harvey, as well as Ḱamíłpa Chief Bronsco Jim Jr. and Yakama Nation Tribal Council member Jeremy Takala, will discuss the commercial huckleberry program and the Forest Service's latest change at an event hosted by High Country News and the Native Arts + Cultures Foundation on April 9 in Portland, Oregon.
Yahoo
01-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
In Montana, a new map flipped 12 red seats
This article was originally published by High Country News. Gabriel FurshongHigh Country News In May 2023, Shelly Fyant was driving through Missoula, Montana, when Scott McNeil, who directs legislative races for the state Democratic party, called to ask if she would consider running for House District 91. Just a few months earlier, Montana's bipartisan redistricting commission had approved a new map for the state's 150 legislative districts, and the district where Fyant lived was now more culturally diverse and politically complicated. The old district had been solidly blue, but it was confined to a single county, with most of its constituents clustered in the liberal college town of Missoula. The new district was many times larger, mainly rural, and a lot more competitive: It stretched from North Missoula across three counties. Nearly 20% of its constituents were Indigenous residents of the Flathead Reservation, where Fyant also lives as an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Fyant, who turned 67 this year, initially had mixed feelings; her bid for a third term on the reservation's Tribal Council ended with a bruising loss in 2021, and her eight years of public service had taken a toll. Whoever represented HD91 would have to work across tribal and state jurisdictions, collaborate with three different county commissions, and spend lots of windshield time crisscrossing the 60-mile-long district. But lately, her confidence had returned. 'Heck, I've led a sovereign nation through a pandemic,' she said to herself. 'I can do this!' So she knocked on doors across the district, from tiny reservation towns just six blocks long to woodsy precincts full of expensive Missoula bungalows, explaining her priorities: affordable health care, quality education, and environmental protection. On Election Day, 18 months later, she outperformed Kamala Harris by almost 3 points, earning enough Trump voters to win handily and contributing to a local Democratic resurgence in Montana. The party flipped 12 Republican-held seats in the state Legislature, the second most in the country after Wisconsin, where Democrats tallied 14 new seats. At first glance, these two states have little in common. Montana is a red state that President Donald Trump won by 20 points, and Wisconsin is a purple state where he eked out a victory by less than 1 percent. Yet they are the only states where Democrats made double-digit gains in state chambers. They are also two of the three states where the party broke Republican supermajorities. (North Carolina is the third.) As Democrats across the country count their losses and squabble over the causes of a Republican trifecta in Washington D.C., they would be wise to consider the root cause of these legislative rallies: fair maps drawn by nonpartisan and bipartisan institutions. In the future, the balance of power in state legislatures will depend not only on the strength of candidates hoping to enter the halls of government but whether partisan lawmakers are allowed to continue fitting the locks. Drawing the lines The U.S. The Constitution requires states to redraw electoral boundaries every 10 years, based on new census data, to ensure voters have equal representation in Congress and state legislatures. Legal standards for this process differ widely by state, but most require decision-makers to ensure the district's contiguity, consider its compactness, and avoid arbitrarily dividing communities of interest, like tribal nations, counties and school districts. In many states, however, the legislature still controls this process, and partisan politicians often gerrymander boundaries. During this last round of redistricting, state legislatures drew electoral boundaries in 23 red states, nine blue states, and one purple state: Maine. Of the remaining 17 states, courts drew boundaries in eight states, while bipartisan commissions handled five other states, and independent commissions tackled boundaries in the remaining four states. Montana has the oldest bipartisan commission in the country, composed of two commissioners from each major party and a chairperson selected by the nonpartisan state Supreme Court. From 2019 to 2022, the commission held live-streamed and digitally recorded meetings on 49 separate days, gathering nearly 8,000 written and oral comments on congressional redistricting and more than 1,600 on legislative redistricting. Ultimately, Maylinn Smith, the chairwoman and former director of the Margery Hunter Brown Indian Law Clinic at the University of Montana, supported Republican commissioners on the boundaries of Montana's new congressional district but sided with Democrats on the state legislative map. Of the five goals the commission established to guide these decisions, Kendra Miller, a Democratic commissioner, said the most important was not to 'unduly favor a political party.' To achieve this goal, she argued for boundaries that could reasonably enable proportionality between the vote share of statewide candidates for each party and the number of seats the parties held in the Legislature. 'In 2022, Democrats got 40 percent of the statewide vote but our (old) maps produced a Republican supermajority in the State Legislature, so it was totally disproportionate,' she explained. In November 2024, Democrats won eight additional seats in the House and four in the Senate to reach 40 percent of seats in each chamber, a number that precisely matches the average vote share earned by Democrats who ran for statewide office this year. 'There's no way that anyone could argue this map unduly favors either party,' Miller said. 'You can quibble over this line or that line, but you can't argue that we violated that goal.' Republicans, though, are determined to quibble. 'Frankly, I don't consider the commission to be bipartisan because our state Supreme Court has historically been populated by Democrats,' Jeff Essman, a former legislator and one of two Republican members of the Redistricting Commission, told me. 'It's fundamentally a political decision,' he said. 'Fairness and independence, that's academic. I hear about it in media outlets and high-minded 501(c)(3)s, but when I talk to voters, they just want their team to win.' When asked what process he would prefer, he said, 'Put it back in the State Legislature.' Wisconsin shows how that process usually plays out. The state's Republican lawmakers flourished after drawing legislative maps in 2011 and 2021 that reduced the proportionality between Democrats' statewide vote share and legislative seats. The 2021 gerrymander was so extreme that some voters lived in areas completely disconnected from the rest of their district, prompting the state Supreme Court to order a new map. This map — drawn by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature, mainly because they preferred it over a map drawn by the courts — ended 20 years of gerrymandered districts last February. 'When it comes to gerrymandering, Republicans have no shame. At least that's how it has been in the state of Wisconsin,' Dianne Hesselbein, Wisconsin Senate Minority Leader, told me. 'We saw years that our Sen. Tammy Baldwin won by a landslide and we didn't pick up any seats (in the state Legislature).' Legislative control of redistricting has produced similar results across the nation, particularly in red states. All 13 states that received a 'D' or 'F' from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project during the 2020 redistricting cycle allow legislators to draw their own districts as well as congressional districts. Republicans controlled redistricting in ten of these states, including North Carolina and Wisconsin where courts struck down legislator drawn maps as partisan gerrymanders. But Colorado and Michigan created independent commissions in 2018, and both states recently drew A-grade maps, according to Princeton. 'Last best place' On Dec. 27, I met Fyant at a coffee shop near the edge of her district in northeast Missoula. Gray clouds billowed above Lower Rattlesnake Creek, which tumbles into the Clark Fork River a few blocks away. Whether House District 91 would include this scenic section of the city was a serious point of contention throughout the redistricting process. Republican commissioners argued the new district wasn't compact and said Missoulians had little in common with the Bitterroot Salish and Kootenai people living more than an hour's drive north. Democrats countered that tribal members and rural residents often commute to Missoula for work and multi-county, urban-rural districts were impossible to avoid in a large rural state like Montana. Ultimately, Smith, the commission chair and deciding vote, backed the Democratic argument. When I asked Fyant for her take on whether her district and the larger legislative map were fairly drawn, she offered two answers. First, she emphasized the need for proportionality, not only between statewide party identification and the makeup of the House and Senate but also between Indigenous voters and representatives in the state Legislature. 'I don't think you can chunk up districts and make it absolutely fair,' she said. 'But you can make the larger scheme fair. When it's done, who's at the table?' Indigenous lawmakers now occupy 8 percent of Montana's legislative seats in a state where 7 percent of the population is Indigenous. Fyant's second response took a much broader and decidedly apolitical view. 'Part of our original instructions from the Creator was to speak for those who cannot,' she said, gesturing north toward the Upper Rattlesnake neighborhood, where houses eventually give way to the 95,000-acre Rattlesnake Recreation and Wilderness Areas and a 67,000-acre Tribal Wilderness Area. The conservation lands within her district support vast elk herds and at least three animals protected under the Endangered Species Act: grizzly bear, Canada lynx and bull trout. 'We need to protect the 'last best place,'' she said, using one of Montana's well-known nicknames. 'That includes rural character, clean water, clean air, this beautiful natural environment that brings us together. In the grander scheme of things, it's all one community of interest.' Gabriel Furshong writes from Helena, Montana. A correspondent at Montana Quarterly, his reporting and narrative nonfiction have appeared in The Nation, Yes! Magazine, Tahoma Review, and elsewhere. A widely published poet, his small collection 'Around the Country A Chasm' was a finalist for the 2023 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest.
