Located in the Oregon Coast Range between Eugene Oregon and the Pacific Ocean, Siuslaw National Forest is known for its highly productive, moist conifer forests. By the time the national forest was established in the early 1900s, Indigenous People had been displaced from their ancestral homelands for at least 50-70 years. Given how quickly Douglas-fir and other conifers grow in western Oregon, evidence of widespread cultural burning was rapidly erased from contemporary landscapes. However, aerial photographs and general land survey office photographs taken in the 1930s and 1940s such as the Windy Peak fire lookout panorama (shown here) reveal mosaics of open bald ridges, with patches of young conifer forests that were beginning to establish in the absence of cultural burning. These photographs corroborate oral tradition from the Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Peoples with descriptions of regular burning practices and open forests in these highly productive landscapes. Ethnographers visited this area in the early 1920s including these accounts from interviews with Tribes by Harrington:

“The Indians used to keep all the brush of all the Siuslaw country burned down so that there was no retarding underbrush and deer were visible from afar…” and “When I was a boy, you could ride on horseback from Yachats to the head of Indian Creek, cutting across over the mountain, without ever getting off, the Indians kept it all burnt off.” (Harrington 1942 [23]:34b; [24]:750b).

Recent reconstructions of fire scar records from the western Oregon Cascades further corroborate multiple lines of evidence of frequent burning within western Oregon landscapes and that old forests dominated by Douglas-fir, western hemlock, Sitka spruce, and western redcedar often developed within frequent fire regimes. These lines of evidence run counter to dominant paradigms in forest ecology and management for this area, which once assumed that fire was infrequent and generally characterized by rare and large, stand-replacement events. Following growing concerns over widespread logging, much of the Siuslaw National Forest was designated as late-successional reserves through the Northwest Forest Plan in an effort to protect and enhance old forest habitat for northern spotted owl, marbled murrelet, and Coho Salmon. The late-successional reserve management designation precludes most management activities on those lands, especially those management activities that could be used to restore and maintain a diverse and resilient mix of forest conditions. Closed-canopy forests now dominate Siuslaw National Forest, and bald ridges and early successional habitats are exceptionally rare.

The Northwest Forest Plan is currently under review for potential adaptations to climate change. A key consideration within highly productive forest landscapes of western Oregon is how future stewardship can acknowledge the long history of ecocultural stewardship, in which late-successional habitats of the past coexisted with frequent cultural burning. As ancestral lands of the Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw peoples, forests were historically maintained with widespread cultural burning. Assumptions that old forests have developed in the absence of human stewardship are no longer valid, given the strength of Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science evidence.

Contributors: Colin Beck and Susan Prichard