Image: The ‘Land of the Menominee’ marker along the Wolf River on the Menominee Tribe’s reservation, in Keshena, Wisconsin. Photography by Petr Krejci

Stewards of The Forest: Stories of the people behind the diverse naturally regenerated hardwood forests of the eastern United States

Tribal knowledge meets ecological science 

Three years out of graduate school, McKaylee Duquain has a domain to be proud of. On her computer screen in a small office on the reservation of the Menominee indigenous community in Wisconsin, she surveys almost a hundred-thousand hectares of some of the best and most biodiverse hardwood forest in America – sustainably harvested for more than 150 years by her tribe, according to both tribal tradition and modern ecological knowhow. 

“I’m the one in charge of the logging schedule,” she says. “Everything comes across my desk. I decide what areas are going to be cut, and which trees.” 

Each year, McKaylee’s team survey thousands of hectares of forest, according to a cycle dictated by the speed of growth of each species. Her computer inputs drone and satellite imagery of the forest.  But many of her team’s choices depend on gumboots and hard sweat as much as on pixels from the sky. After initial aerial surveys, they individually mark the old or sick trees for harvesting, sparing everything with a diameter less than 25cm. “I can’t tell a tree’s diameter from above yet. We go out in the forest and field check everything.” 

Brought up with tribal forest traditions and schooled at the conservation sciences program in the University of Minnesota, McKaylee bestrides the worlds of old and new forestry, and is as happy discussing the cultural lore of her tribe’s clan system -- based on five animals of the forest: bear, wolf, moose, crane and eagle -- as the new mythologies of the Harry Potter movies.

She likens her 15-year cycle for surveying and harvesting the Menominee Forest to the moving staircase from Hogwarts Castle, with the forest constantly changing but fundamentally staying the same. “It always comes full circle,” she says. Trees are constantly cut and supplied to the tribe’s sawmill, but the forest prospers. It has more trees, more timber and more diversity of trees and other species than ever. 

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The largest Indian reservation east of the Mississippi, covering 94,000 hectares, is more than 90% covered in maple and aspen, birch and hemlock, red oak and white pine, ash and basswood, set in a wider landscape of fields west of Lake Michigan. 

Seen from space, it is a giant green mass surrounded by farmland. While 19th-century European settlers almost entirely cleared the landscape of trees, the Menominee, who gained legal control of land along the Wolf River in southern Wisconsin in the 1850s, remained true to their goal of maintaining their forest.

Back then, Chief Oshkosh codified how to manage their forest sustainably but profitably. He told his lumberjacks: “Start with the rising sun and work towards the setting sun, but take only the mature trees, the sick trees, and the trees that have fallen. When you reach the end of the reservation, turn and cut from the setting sun to the rising sun, and the trees will last forever.”   

Arguably, it was the U.S.’ first sustainably managed forest of the modern era. Oshkosh’s ethos, so pithily expressed, was “a new form of forest management that stood in stark contrast to the cut-and-run harvesting occurring through the rest of Wisconsin and the United States,” says Michael Dockry, who researches Indigenous natural resource management at the University of Minnesota, and is a former academic advisor to McKaylee. 

Oshkosh’s words are engraved on a plaque that McKaylee passes every morning on her way into her office. The ethos is essentially unchanged today, says McKaylee’s boss, forest manager Ron Waukau.  “Basically, we are taking tribal knowledge and blending it with today’s ecological science.”  

Around a quarter of the forest is left alone because it is swampland, contains sacred sites such as burial mounds or is set aside for wolf dens or other wildlife refuges. The rest has become a standard-bearer for sustainable logging that is increasingly studied by foresters from the U.S. and round the world. 

But the Menominee Forest remains almost unique in the Eastern U.S. for having never been clear-felled. The oldest trees in most of the region are around 100 years old, dating from when clear-cutting ended. But in the Menominee Forest, many of its billion or more trees are more than twice that age, growing more than 60 metres high.

The Menominee currently take around 8 million board-feet of hardwood lumber from the forest each year to supply its sawmill and markets for everything from domestic furniture to basketball courts.  But this cutting rate is reckoned to be only a third of the annual forest growth. 

That is in part because Ron and McKaylee are in charge. “We make our decision on what is cut according to what is best for the forest – not the sawmill,” says Ron. “This is a resource I have worked on for thirty years, my whole adult life. I see the improvement.” And he is thinking ahead. “In a hundred years’ time, somebody will be sitting in my spot, managing the forest. What we leave them is key for us.”

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Not all the forest is as healthy as he would like. Climate change is bringing more storms. A blast in June 2022 consigned trees equivalent to more than a year’s typical harvest to the forest floor in 20 minutes. In the following nine months, Ron’s foresters dropped their planned logging schedule and switched to salvaging the downed timber.

And there are invasive pests. The emerald ash borer, an Asian insect, has been spreading across the U.S. for two decades and finally reached the Menominee reservation in late 2022. “What worries me most is the combination of climate changes and invasive species,” says McKaylee. “Our goal is to have as biodiverse a forest as we can, so it will be able to adapt to any future threats.”

So far, that strategy is working, both ecologically and economically. The Forest Stewardship Council, the gold-standard for sustainable forestry, which certified the reservation soon after its formation in 1993, classes most of the Menominee Forest as of “high conservation value” where “naturally occurring species exist in natural patterns.”

And the loggers’ output is in high demand, says Patrick McBride of the Pennsylvania lumber company MacDonald & Owen, which buys most of the output from the Menominee’s sawmill. Thanks to decades of cherishing the best trees, “the ‘old and sick’ lumber they harvest is now better than the best from most everyone else,” he says. The logs are wider, longer and less diseased. He pays a premium price for them.   

The forest and sawmill employ many of the reservation’s 3500 or so inhabitants, and lumber sales account for around half of its economic activity, mostly through Menominee Tribal Enterprises, a commercial entity with a sustainability ethos, whose board members are regularly elected by the tribe. 

The newly installed president, Michael Skenadore, says his current priorities are investing in the sawmill, which has not been revamped since the 1980s, and improving employment conditions to stem a slow loss of young tribal members who prefer working in the reservation’s other main concern, the casino.

He also discussed plans to boost profits by selling carbon credits generated by the forest’s accumulating timber. Industry calculators consulted for this blog suggest the reservation is capturing more than 30,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air each year, which would currently be worth more than $50,000 on the voluntary market.

But the tribe has decided against that for now. In any case, it would always be a means to an end. Culturally, spiritually, economically and ecologically, says McKaylee, the forest and its survival for future generations comes first and last for the Menominee.