The Watch Fire scorched 2,162 acres across the San Carlos Apache Reservation, before it has since been fully contained. This destructive force of nature prompted the tribe to declare a state of emergency last week.
It’s considered to be the tribe’s worst fire in three decades, destroying at least 36 structures, including 21 homes. FEMA is assessing damages now.
Gov. Katie Hobbs traveled to the 1.8 million-acre reservation, on Thursday, to brief with San Carlos Apache Tribal Chairman Terry Rambler, San Carlos Apache Tribal Chief of Police Elliot Sneezy, State Forester Tom Torres and Arizona Division of Emergency Management Director Gabe Levine.
This is the latest reminder of what a bad fire looks like in Arizona. It’s also a reason why this tribe and the U.S. Forest Service have been trying to reduce the frequency of these wildfires by working together.
Forest Service burn boss Dane Johnson oversees crews torching along U.S. 60 — where it cuts through the Tonto National Forest — about 25 miles northeast of Globe. This is the state’s largest national forest, and ninth-largest nationwide. It was established in 1905 to help protect the watersheds of the Salt and Verde rivers.
“We’re treating part of that watershed with fire to reduce the probability of any catastrophic wildfires during our peak season,” said Johnson, “so we have firefighters out here conducting some burning operations.”
It’s late April, and they’re burning 531 acres. Then, they’ll go on to aid San Carlos Apache tribal crews with a prescribed fire on bordering reservation lands, next to the Forest Service’s roadside burn unit.
That fire season, Johnson referred to, is relatively short. It typically lasts between May and mid-July. Each year, an average of 330 wildfires occur within the Tonto National Forest during the last decade or so.
But it also yields about 350,000 acre-feet of water annually. Six major reservoirs within the Tonto National Forest can collectively store more than 2 million acre-feet.
These joint activities between the Forest Service and San Carlos Apache Tribe are meant to improve forest health and preserve precious riparian areas by removing dry grasses, mostly Curly Mesquite, but there’s also lots of timber.
“And that’s what we’re really looking at treating today, is that juniper and oak,” Johnson said. “That’s what gonna drive catastrophic wildfires, so if we can get into here and the conditions are right, we’re kinda reducing the fuels.”
But this collaboration couldn’t legally occur until two decades ago. This project was possible because Congress authorized the Tribal Forest Protection Act, or TFPA, in 2004.
Essentially, this act paved the way for the Forest Service to collaborate with federally-recognized tribes to conduct cross-boundary restoration work on national forest and neighboring reservation lands.
Last August, the Tonto, Coronado and Apache-Sitgreaves national forests signed an agreement with the San Carlos Apache Tribe.
Since then, they’ve treated roughly 35,000 acres.
This sprawling 3-million-acre landscape is a top priority for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, part of a decade-long strategy to confront the nation’s wildfire crisis.
About $400 million from the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has been set aside for 21 priority landscapes across the West to help reduce wildfire risk for some 550 communities, 2,500 miles of power lines and 1,800 watersheds.
Roughly $32 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is being spent in eastern Arizona. Of that, the San Carlos Apache TFPA was allocated $24 million to fund fuel reduction treatments across all lands, but tribal crews will get only $2 million.
“So fire does not actually care about our political imaginary lines we draw on a map. It readily moves through them,” said Globe District Ranger Adam Bromley, who explained there’s a shared responsibility. “Our job now is to maintain fire within that ecosystem.”
“That’s very different from the Western approach, for the last century, that’s been almost exclusively dictated by suppression as the primary goal,” Intertribal Timber Council President Cody Desautel said. “There was always a recognition that the tribes have a place in managing a healthy ecosystem, and fire is a big part of that.”
Founded in 1976, the nonprofit council works closely with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, academics and the private sector to balance the economic and ecological value that forests, soil, water and wildlife provide to Indigenous communities.
Arizona’s Hualapai Tribe and San Carlos Apache Tribe are among the council’s 50-plus active members. Desautel is also executive director of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in the state of Washington.
Management approaches matter.
Desautel rattled off a list of reasons why a good fire offers a lot of benefits to tribes, including “clean water, clean air, habitat for big game, access to cultural plants and protection of spiritual places.” He stressed all of these are incentives for tribes to consider co-stewardship agreements, like how the San Carlos Apaches did.
“Our relationship with the Forest Service is as good as I’ve ever seen in my career, and that was the intention of the Tribal Forest Protection Act,” Desautel said. “It was unmanaged federal land next to tribal land, and fires coming off of Forest Service ground and doing significant resource damage. So we’ve come a long way.”
Public Law 93-638 also grants federally-recognized tribes the legal authority to contract with the U.S. government to operate programs through such agreements.
Kurt Davis is deputy supervisor for the Coronado National Forest.
“But in the role of the TFPA, I am the point of contact for the agreement itself,” Davis said. “Now we’re looked at as one, instead a boundary, a line in the sand to say, ‘This is U.S. Forest Service, and this is San Carlos.’”
It wasn’t always that way. Apaches and the U.S. Army ensued in an armed struggle for two decades. The end of that 19th century conflict led to the forced removal of Apaches and Yavapais from future national forest lands.
It also formed the San Carlos and Fort Apache reservations, now home to the San Carlos Apache Tribe and Mountain Mountain Apache Tribe, respectively.
“We’re really setting the stage for future generations to come,” Davis said. “How can we reduce catastrophic fire that could affect the ecosystem where we could possibly lose food sources, infrastructure, watershed quality, which threatens either underrepresented communities, urban interface or structures, depending on how you look at it.”
He shared that his team is still figuring out how to accomplish that with the tribe.
“This is a model that can be utilized in a lot of different places,” Davis said. “We finally get to see their traditional knowledge of how the landscape was at one point in time managed, and how to combine those two, to have successful outcomes.”
One way tribes have been traditionally managing lands for thousands of years is by letting naturally-occurring fires burn, like those ignited by lightning strikes, rather than suppressing them.
“Our prescribed burn practices are different than the government,” San Carlos Apache Tribe forest manager Cassie Moses said. “Here, we want to see fire play its natural role as all of these ecosystems. Historically, that’s what the Native Americans did.”
She’s a Northern Arizona University forestry graduate and has been directly reporting to the tribal chairman and tribal council on behalf of the TFPA since she assumed her role last July.
“Right now, the only challenge we are having is communication,” Moses said. “Some people attend meetings, some people don’t. We go, and it’s like repetitive information, because people who were not there last meeting were not caught up.”
Then there’s red tape. Moses shared her tribe’s approval process for projects, funding and resources, takes much longer than the Forest Service.
For example, a prescribed burn plan would undergo initial review by an interdisciplinary team. It then goes onto the Natural Resources Committee, followed by the tribal council. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is next.
“If it is approved, the project is good. If not, it gets sent back to the tribe,” Moses explained, “and then it will have to go through that entire process again.”
Despite bureaucracy and breakdowns in communication, she still believes her tribe is better off co-managing these lands: “Not every day you see government-to-government relationships happening. This is a good example to other tribes that this is something their tribe can benefit from.”
