The Federal Trust Responsibility and Treaty Protected Resources on Ceded Public Lands: A Huckleberry Case Study

Graduation date: 2009Non-timber forest products (NTFPs) are an important aspect of the forest that has often been overlooked. NTFPs have been especially important to Native American people because of their subsistence, cultural, and economic values. As a result of their economic value, there have been an increased number of people harvesting NTFPs on public lands. In the Pacific Northwest, many Native American tribes have reserved treaty rights that guarantee that they can hunt fish and gather in usual and accustomed places. Many of these traditional food-gathering areas lie on what is now national forest land. As demand for NTFPs on public lands has increased, the U.S. Forest Service must find a way to reconcile its federal trust responsibility to the tribes with their responsibility to manage national forest lands for the general public. The research has focused on the ways in which the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) has gone about creating and implementing policies to fulfill the Trust responsibilities to the Tribes. Two case studies of treaty protected huckleberry harvests were conducted with two groups of Tribes and the associated National Forests where they exercise their treaty protected rights. The research involves an assessment of these policies and their implementation using two public policy frameworks: social construction and institutional rational choice. The majority of Forest Service offices in the Pacific Northwest have relied on informal agreements with the tribes to balance these responsibilities. Little formal policy has been created or implemented to manage user conflicts, and problems continue to plague NTFP management. These findings indicate that the USFS and the tribes need to find new ways of developing NTFP management policies that will satisfy tribal needs