Day 13

July 20^th

Today with met with Rob Mallory, Clint Desautel and Lance they all work with Colville Forestry. We visited several logging sites, treatment sites and beautiful Twin Lake on the Colville reservation. Lance discussed how a treatment can take up to 2 months for 35 acres but that it varies also. Clint discussed the importance of fires and how pre-settlement that native peoples were using fire and that it was always apart of the ecosystem here on the Colville Reservation. Clint said something that I thought was profound and he said – ‘You can go as far as you want and long as you’re constantly learning.’ Lance also shared with us that the Colville tribe only allows for tribal members to gather traditional foods and that there are natural resource officers who monitor these locations of gathering and they can issue fines and confiscate berries, roots etc. from trespassers. They also shared that there is 3000+ Elk on the Colville Reservation. Clint and Lance both shared that they thought the biggest challenge facing them in their professions with their homelands on the Colville Reservation was the task of cleaning up the forests and returning they to how they were in pre-historic times. They mentioned elders wanting this also and how they would like to pass on to future generations a better forest than when they first came to it. I also learned that larger trees are harder for mills to work with and that they prefer to work with smaller trees. We learned a little bit about NIPA documents and about plot points that occur when starting a logging site. I was very impressed to learn that the Colville Tribe is looking ahead 120 years and that a rotation of trees is plotted out in that span of time here. A tree will go from a seedling and they a fully grown tree and this process will repeat every 120 years.