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Since President Joe Biden took office, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack have signed off on nearly two dozen Tribal co-stewardship agreements with another 60 agreements involving 45 Tribes in various stages of review, according to reporting by HuffPost.
The Interior and Agriculture departments launched this effort in November 2021 with a joint secretarial order directing relevant agencies to make sure their decisions on public lands fulfill trust obligations with Tribes (the Commerce department signed onto the order a year later in November 2022). The order specifically requires that co-stewardship efforts be discussed in individual employee performance reviews for tens of thousands of federal employees to ensure its directives trickle down to the day-to-day activities of each agency. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and the Bureau of Indian Affairs have since produced their own co-stewardship guidance documents.
“The history of federal public lands cannot be separated from the history of Tribes,” said Monte Mills, a law professor and director of the Native American Law Center at the Washington University School of Law. “At its core, this is about justice and restoring the rightful, in my view, place of Tribal voices and their connection to these landscapes. To have Tribal folks weighing in on decisions on how lands should be managed benefits landscapes and benefits all of us,” he said.
Importantly, there are distinctions between co-management, where Tribes share legal authority with the federal government to make decisions affecting the land or the species on it, and co-stewardship, where they collaborate on activities like forest thinning. Bears Ears National Monument in Utah is likely the most prominent example of a Tribal co-stewardship agreement: The BLM, Forest Service, and five Tribes jointly oversee the federal lands within the monument's 1.36 million-acre boundaries.
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Our lawmakers have their own constitutional duty to steward the health of our natural resources. Montanans elected them because of their promises to defend, uphold, and protect our constitutional rights, including to a 'clean and healthful environment.' Anything to the contrary, and they should expect to be held accountable.”
