Exploiters or Stewards of Nature?

High above the fog-draped Pacific, amid alder groves and redwoods, a group of Indian tribes has been working to make the land look like it did 150 years ago, before their ancestors were driven out and before the timber companies showed up.

The Indians have been at it for a decade, raising money to buy the property, 50 miles north of Mendocino, then obliterating roads and clearing out streams that were choked with the debris from abandoned farms and logging camps.

The result will be the Intertribal Sinkyone Wilderness Park--the first in the nation created by a coalition of tribes. Its 3,900 acres of steep forested ridges and narrow valleys plunge down to isolated black sand beaches.

Such a project once would have fit perfectly into an idealized image of Indians held by many Americans--as the Earth’s noble aboriginal guardians.

These days, however, perceptions of Indians’ relationship to the land are changing.

So even as members of the 11 tribes of the Sinkyone Wilderness Council plant trees, pick berries or watch for salmon to return to the streams, some non-Indian neighbors are skeptical. They suspect that it’s just a matter of time before the access road is paved, a parking lot is built and the bright lights of a gambling hall flood the forest.

“Where are you going to put the casino?” asked a young white man who pulled up in a pickup at the southern end of the wilderness.

Stepping out of his Jeep to face his questioner, Hawk Rosales, the director of the Sinkyone Wilderness Council, forced a smile and quietly replied that the only buildings will be a nursery for native plants and a caretaker’s cabin.

It’s not just casinos that are forcing tribal leaders to defend their treatment of the environment. As many Indian communities strive to profit from untapped resources, traditional perceptions are fading into a backdrop of strip malls, sawmills, ski resorts, landfills and proposed nuclear waste dumps.

“The stereotyped image of Indians as conservationists--epitomized by the TV portrayal of a mournful Indian with a tear rolling down his face standing on the banks of a polluted river--cannot be applied in the modern sense,” said Rosita Whorl, an Alaskan Tlingit Indian who has written extensively about the relationship of Indians to nature.

“Today, a starkly contrasting picture is emerging that casts native people as resource developers seeking only to attain profits irrespective of the effects on the environment.”

A number of tribes have found themselves at odds with environmental groups, government wildlife experts--and often with their own people--over conservation issues.

Indians have clear-cut spruce forests in Alaska, slaughtered elk and bighorn sheep on Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation, lobbied to hunt gray whales off the Washington coast, and defied the Endangered Species Act in Arizona.

Of course, the reality has never been as simple as the romantic conception of all Indians as protectors of nature.

“There has always been a tension between our need for resources and our religious feelings about nature,” Whorl said.

In various Indian cultures, she noted, nature is a force for both good and evil. Her own Tlingits believe that helpful spirits dwell in the forests, but so does kooshdakaa, an otter man who casts spells over humans and tries to lure them into his world.

Sometimes, the same wild creature can become a symbol of good and evil. An example is the spotted owl, the winged icon of the conservation movement.

“Some people say that when the owl comes to the house they kill it and burn it because it brings bad news,” said Mike Davis, a member of the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona. “Others say the owl is a spiritual messenger and should be respected.”

Though laws to protect creatures like the owl have divided society at large into warring camps, even more is at stake in Native American territories. That is because Indians have substantial sovereignty over their lands. Reservations are exempt from state and local civil regulations--including zoning controls. And although they are subject to federal authority, tribal leaders often contest the reach of Congress’ environmental laws.

Frequently, Indians fight among themselves over policies protecting wildlife and the environment, especially as opportunities for financial gain arise.

In Alaska, oil drilling pits coastal Inuits against inland Athabascans. The Inuits would benefit most from the oil, while the Athabascans fear that the drilling, which would take place on caribou calving grounds, would threaten a huge herd that they depend on for sustenance.

Proposals to build nuclear waste dumps have divided Mescalero Apaches in New Mexico and Goshutes in Utah.

Disputes over logging old-growth forests in the Chuska Mountains of Arizona and New Mexico have set Navajo against Navajo on the nation’s largest reservation.

“We are seeing a clash of viewpoints between tribal leaders who feel compelled to generate jobs and revenue and more traditional-minded people who think that the protection of nature and animal life is more important,” said Ron Allen, president of the National Congress of American Indians.

“You certainly can find tribes who are willing to trade off environmental integrity for jobs or revenue. You can find situations where tribal business ventures are not being as sensitive to the land as outsiders are required to be when they do business on reservations.”

It is easy to understand the pressures for development. Unemployment approaches 50% and per capita annual income is below $5,000 on many reservations. At the same time, these lands harbor one-third of the low-sulfur coal in the western United States and two-thirds of the nation’s untapped uranium, not to mention substantial forests, fish stocks and vacant land.

More than 100 proposals for commercial landfills and toxic waste dumps have been made to tribal leaders nationwide in recent years, and 16 tribes have been approached by government agencies looking for remote places to bury radioactive waste, according to Winona LaDuke, a Chippewa activist who writes about environmental issues.

In Alaska, the native share of the state’s valuable timber harvest exceeds 60%. The impact on the land sometimes has been devastating, provoking sorrow and anger even among natives who share in the profits.

In the village of Hoonah in southeast Alaska, residents point to the surrounding hillsides, skinned by vast clear-cuts of spruce forests that have laid bare traditional hunting grounds. It is little consolation that the logging is being carried out by native corporations, with the profits going to native people throughout the state.

“The reason we live here is because we love the lifestyle, and to take that away from us is criminal,” said Floyd Peterson, who is part Tlingitand receives a dividend each year for about $500 from the native corporation responsible for the logging.

“That’s half a tree,” Peterson said, referring to the amount of his check. “I told ‘em, ‘Keep my tree.’ ”

On the Navajo reservation in New Mexico, a proposed uranium mine is pitting potential royalty recipients against those who recall the brutal legacy of cancer from an earlier era of uranium mining.

The tribe’s Uranium Education Center estimates that 1,700 miners were stricken between the late 1940s and the early 1970s. Now the tribe is trying to enforce a moratorium on mining until the industry can show it will not do harm.

A Texas-based company is trying to convince the tribe of the safety of a new process that injects a chemical solution deep into a uranium-bearing aquifer, separates the ore and extracts it. Miners would not be exposed to the toxic dust the way they were when they carted the stuff out of holes in the ground in wheelbarrows. But there is concern about the water in the aquifer.

“The issue has got our family torn in half,” said Tom Arviso Jr., editorial director of the Navajo Times. “I think it is an abuse of the land, and especially the drinking water, that would jeopardize the health of future generations, all in the interest of a quick buck.

“I have an uncle, however, who is an educated man who thinks the mine is a good idea. He puts the opposition down as ignorance. But others in the family speak against him in public forums, and the whole thing has gotten very ugly.”

Ancestral Lands in National Parks

Environmental sensitivities come into play not only on established reservations, but when tribes attempt to extend their holdings--sometimes to regain control of ancestral lands in national parks.

Officials at Death Valley National Park are resisting efforts by the Timbisha Shoshone, a tribe with virtually no land, to create a reservation within the park.

Fewer than 100 tribal members still live in Death Valley, most having left in the 1930s after the park was created and traditional hunting and harvesting practices were prohibited.

Three years ago, the Timbisha announced that they wanted to take back several hundred thousand acres, resume traditional activities and build tourist accommodations.

The National Park Service sees joint sovereignty of Death Valley as unacceptable, given the differences over hunting, use of scarce water and the aesthetics of the development sought by the tribe.

In Florida’s Everglades National Park, federal officials similarly are seeking to block the Miccosukee Indians’ bid to build more housing along the park’s northern boundary, worried that it would impede natural water flows necessary to the Everglades’ survival.

Such power struggles are aggravated by the uncertainty surrounding the application of federal environmental laws on Indian land.

Tribes argue that their sovereignty takes precedence unless Congress, in drafting a particular law, has stated otherwise. But many laws are imprecise, prompting disputes over which should prevail, the will of the tribe or a federal statute.

Last year, tribes challenged the government’s right to impose the Endangered Species Act on Indian land and to limit their ability to cut down trees and build roads or commercial facilities in areas where there are rare plants and animals.

Formal defiance of the act began when the White Mountain Apaches in Arizona said federal agents attempting to enforce it would be barred from entering the reservation, which is home to several threatened plants and animals. Tribal officials feared that large areas of the reservation would be put off limits, curtailing operation of a sawmill, a ski area and the tribe’s cattle business.

In a controversial compromise ruling last summer, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt refused to waive the act or place reservations off limits to wildlife protection agents. But he allowed tribes to devise their own strategies for dealing with endangered species on reservations.

“Babbitt went belly up,” said Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group based in Tucson. “He gave the tribes carte blanche to develop in places where plants and animals are going extinct.”

Worse, said Suckling, the government acquiesced to the Apaches’ refusal to disclose their conservation plan.

“It’s none of their business,” a tribal spokesman said. “What matters is that the tribe is taking better care of the wildlife than the government does.”

He has a point.

Twenty years ago, the tribe took over supervision of elk after successfully challenging the state’s jurisdiction over hunting on the reservation. The Indians then dramatically decreased the amount of hunting allowed and increased the price of hunting permits.

As hunting pressure declined, the herd grew, especially the population of large bull elk. By 1995, hunters were paying thousands of dollars for a chance to shoot one elk, and the tribe was reporting annual revenue from the permits close to $1 million--while gaining an international reputation for wildlife management.

The Apache are not the only tribe to successfully link conservation with economic self-interest.

The Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission in Olympia, Wash., has become a model of the study of fish health and genetics. And in Idaho, Nez Perce Indians are running the U.S. Interior Department’s program to reintroduce the gray wolf.

Charles Stringer, an attorney for the White Mountain Apache, said the main lesson is that Indians can be trusted to respect the environment when given control over it.

“The non-Indian community needs to just relax and let the process happen,” he said.

“They [Indians] will make mistakes along the way. But they’ll take better care of the land in the long run because they have a permanent stake in it.”

Yet it’s hard to ignore the blight on many tribal lands, whether from mining, dumping, logging or the junked cars and roadside refuse common to rural poverty anywhere.

So the Indians in Northern California are taking special precautions on the park by the Pacific that they will formally dedicate this spring.

The Sinkyone Wilderness has emotional meaning for the 11 tribes working to restore it. The area was the scene of massacres and kidnappings of Indians when white settlers and soldiers wrested control of it in the mid-1800s. Then the loggers came and cut out the heart of the forest--giant redwoods and Douglas firs.

By the time logging giant Georgia Pacific sold the property in 1986 to the California State Coastal Conservancy, much of the Sinkyone was a landscape of stumps, scraggly second-growth forest, memories and ruins, including traces of Indian burial grounds.

It took the coalition of tribes another 10 years to raise the money for a park that will, as much as possible, replicate the wilderness as it once was.

With help from the Lannan Foundation, a privately endowed philanthropic organization in Santa Fe, N.M., the Intertribal Sinkyone Council acquired the site from the conservancy for $1.4 million.

Under the plan crafted by the tribal council, there will be campsites and, eventually, trails linking the park to adjacent state and federal wilderness areas and the area’s beaches, which are on government land.

Non-Indians will be able to visit, but may have to pay a fee.

To those skeptical about what may become of the site, the Indians are offering more than their word.

The council has given a conservation “easement” to a local non-Indian group, the Pacific Forest Trust. A kind of environmental insurance policy, the easement gives the group authority to block any attempt by a future tribal council to alter the land.

The council members thought the easement was a good idea given the conflicting attitudes toward the environment among Indians today, said director Hawk Rosales.

“We have no idea what the conservation values of the council will be 100 years from now,” he said.

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Times staff writer Kim Murphy contributed to this story.