On a 4-day trip in the Tongass, Alaskan Youth Stewards searched for trees that might be transformed into totem poles or dugout canoes. The search is part of a regionwide revitalization of carving and other cultural wood practices. (from highcountrynews)
The sun sets through the Tongass National Forest; loggers have clear-cut half the forest’s old-growth trees. During the 20th century, federal management often prioritized timber interests over the needs of Alaska Native communities, and high-value cedar trees were logged and exported. Forging stronger relationships among tribal governments, federal agencies, land managers and local youth is a first step toward improving overall management practices.
The crew was exploring the Tongass National Forest, the largest national forest in the United States and the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world. At 16.7 million acres, it stretches across more than a thousand islands and encompasses 32 communities in Southeast Alaska. The forest sequesters carbon, provides drinking water and hydropower for thousands of people, and supports large fish and wildlife populations.
Over the last several centuries, Russians, Europeans and Americans colonized the region, and between 1902 and 1909, the U.S. government established the national forest on Lingít, Haida and Tsimshian homelands. The logging industry boomed a few decades later, with the first large-scale mills built in the 1950s.
After letting her fellow crew members smell the core, Mills carefully placed it in a protective container to be shipped to the College of Wooster Tree Ring Lab, in Ohio. Scientists will analyze it to better understand the decline of yellow cedar in Alaska and Canada, and how much of it is driven by climate change.
Allison Mills shows her grandfather, Edward Thomas , president emeritus of the Tlingit and Haida Central Council, a core that she collected from a cedar tree. Mills, whose father works with Sealaska, was eager to share her new skills with the family members who inspired her desire to work in forestry. As an aspiring land and resource manager, Mills may one day make decisions about this forest that help sustain it, and the cultural practices it supports, into the future.
After breaking camp, the crew traveled to the town of Klawock and met with Jon Rowan Jr. , a Pueblo and Lingít carver and teacher, to get an idea of the possible fate of the trees they cataloged. Still in their muddy camp clothes, they gathered around a half-carved log inside Rowan’s carving shed, a large shop filled with loud rock music, the scent of cedar and piles of wood shavings.
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