Support Reforestation Across the Indigenous West

 This summer, Trees, Water & People signed a five-year agreement with Santa Fe National Forest to collaborate with both Tribal and non-Tribal agencies on watershed-scale restoration and post-fire resilience in the East Jemez Mountains of New Mexico.

Planting trees is a fundamental and gratifying part of our work. If we’ve learned anything from nurturing trees in occasionally unforgiving climates, it’s that growth and healing require time, patience, and relationships. Trees need each other to develop their complex network of survival, and people and trees depend on each other for the same. 

While our partnering Indigenous and Tribal communities hold a diverse set of beliefs, many of our Indigenous partners have the living and ancestral knowledge of how to implement these principles. Our work is rooted in following the leadership of those who practice sacred and ancient knowledge of these landscapes. We strive to support their work and are committed to developing long-term stewardship projects to not only engage in post-fire restoration, but to promote the cultural and scientific knowledge inherent in stewardship work. 

This summer, TWP and Santa Fe National Forest (SFNF) finalized a five-year agreement to plan, implement, and monitor collaborative post-fire restoration on the ancestral Puebloan lands adjacent to Bandelier National Monument. This agreement allows TWP and its partners access to steward these public lands by employing large-scale, long-term restoration activities. TWP is partnering with Pueblos, SFNF, and other non-Tribal organizations to holistically remediate fire-disturbed landscapes and support cultural knowledge practice/revitalization. Activities will include native species planting, invasive species removal, surface fuels reduction, soil base reinforcement, and streambank rehabilitation. 

Additionally, we are planning the annual 2025 New Mexico Tribal Forest & Fire Summit where reforestation and fire prevention work across New Mexico will be showcased. The Summit will highlight Indigenous and Puebloan epistemologies, practices, achievements, and challenges. Non-Indigenous participants and agencies will share similar knowledge to promote cross-cultural exchange, while maintaining that this Summit is designed to center the needs and challenges for Indigenous and Tribal communities in conservation.  

This fall, TWP is partnering with the Pueblo of Jemez to plant 6,000 Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir seedlings on the Pueblo’s lands. We are honored by the trust and relationship built with our partners from the Pueblo of Jemez and will continue to engage in reforestation efforts at the request of the Pueblo. 

Our work takes place in a larger ecological framework with many moving parts: people’s relationship to land, watershed restoration, fire prevention, climate change, political volatility, etc. We aim to have better conversations with the forest by tending to the complex network of parts that allow for a seedling to survive, not just planting trees and waiting for the forest to regrow. Our seedlings need a community of people, streams, medicinal and cultural fires, and a whole lot of listening.

We are honored to follow the community leaders who have been listening and caring for this forest since time immemorial.And we're grateful for your continued support of this important work to replenish Tribal lands and protect Tribal livelihoods.

Links:

• Trees, Water & People - Indigenous Lands Program

Success in the arena of reforestation is counted in years, and oftentimes decades. Those of us who have worked to help communities conserve forests, watersheds, and biodiversity on Tribal lands have learned so much about patience, adaptation, and respect: a respect for the lands and their ever-changing microclimates, and a respect for the traditional ways of sustainable land management that have helped Indigenous livelihoods thrive for many generations. 

This week, Trees, Water & People (TWP) was honored to deliver 16,000 plants to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to begin a new generation of forest on the Oglala Lakota lands. These culturally significant plants – 5,000 ponderosa pine, 5,000 cottonwood, 3,000 chokecherry, and 3,000 currant plants – will grow up with the Oglala Lakota youth, and help restore lands depleted by drought, forest fire, and overgrazing, so that the next generation might thrive and preserve the traditional ways of this community. This month, thanks to the generosity of TWP’s supporters, local crews will plant all 16,000 plants. The work brings hope and possibility that with time, these new plants will restore significant biodiversity to the forests and deepen the roots of the community’s culture and its connection to the lands.

In the meantime, this summer is a time for field work with our Tribal partners to the South: the Jemez, Kewa (Santo Domingo), and Cochiti Pueblos of New Mexico. TWP’s work on land management and restoration projects for these communities is both big and small: from reinstalling fencing lost in recent the recent megafires throughout New Mexico, to recruiting and hiring community members for reforestation work, to planning large-scale land restoration designed to protect and enhance the Rio Grande watershed upon which our Tribal partners depend.  Planting efforts are currently being scheduled for Fall 2024 where projects will be taking place on Tribal trust lands and ancestral lands (public lands). 

While this work may take a generation or more to see impact, TWP knows that it is the small gestures, in the scope of a larger goal for reforestation throughout the Southwest, that build together for a generational stronghold for the Indigenous communities most impacted by climate change. The smallest seedling – whether it’s an individual tree or a single donation – is all the drive that TWP needs for this conservation work that’s built to last many lifetimes.

Links:

• Trees, Water & People Indigenous Lands Program