In this undated, supplied image, Kaiwin Clements, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs, holds freshly picked huckleberries in the shape of a heart.
Courtesy of Merle Kirk via Northwest Public Broadcasting
From jams and ice cream to syrups and lotions, huckleberries are a fruit that can be found in all sorts of Pacific Northwest commodities. But these berries are incredibly difficult to grow, preferring high elevations and acidic soil, making them hard to cultivate.
The U.S. Forest Service issues permits to commercially pick these berries, selling more than 900 permits last season. For tribes in the Pacific Northwest, these berries are a culturally important food that they say has become scarce over the years with growing competition from pickers, which they argue infringe on treaty rights.
Josephine Woolington is a freelance journalist and author based in Portland who reported on this issue for High Country News. Elaine Harvey is a Ḱamíłpa band member, one of the 14 tribes and bands that comprise the Yakama Nation, and was featured in the story. They both join us to share more on the commercialization of huckleberries.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to huckleberries. The small, dark purple berries in the blueberry family have been managed and harvested by Native people in the Northwest since time immemorial. The U.S. government vowed to protect Native access to these berries 170 years ago … but it hasn’t. Treaty-protected berries have been decimated by fire suppression, fenced off as private land and massively harvested by commercial pickers.
The Portland-based journalist Josephine Woolington wrote about this recently in High Country News. She joins us now, along with one of the people she profiled. Elaine Harvey is a member of the Ḱamíłpa Band, one of the 14 bands that comprise the Yakama Nation. Welcome to you both.
Josephine Woolington: Thank you so much for having us.
Elaine Harvey: Yes, thank you.
Miller: Elaine Harvey, first – what are your memories of huckleberry picking when you were growing up?
Harvey: My memories of picking huckleberries have always been family oriented with my grandmother and other relatives, and we would go up and we camp. We pick and harvest berries throughout the summer. We traveled and we located different berry patches, and it was always a really good feeling to be up in the forest, connecting with the land, collecting, connecting with the forest and just being with all the relatives.
Miller: What do huckleberries mean for Native peoples in the Mid-Columbia Basin?
Harvey: Huckleberries are known to us as wíwnu in our language. And to our people and in this area, the Plateau tribes, we hold it in high regard. It’s one of our sacred foods that we utilize in all our ceremonies. We use huckleberries for subsistence, and it’s been a really integral part of our life, our culture, our history. It’s one of our First Foods that we recognize as tribal people. Some of the other First Foods include the salmon, the deer, the many different species. And then at the end of the year is the berry species, and the huckleberry is one of our main berry species that we try to gather for the winter months and all the ceremonies that we have throughout the year.
Miller: Josephine, how did Native people manage the land to encourage plentiful huckleberry harvests over centuries or millennia?
Woolington: Yeah, so the Ḱamíłpa Band of the Yakama Nation, in addition to many other Pacific Northwest Indigenous peoples, set regular burns every year in the fields. And what those burns do and did was clear the fields of trees and also enrich the soil. The huckleberry, like all flowering plants, needs enough sunlight and water to blossom and produce fruit, and when they don’t have enough sunlight when the trees are filling in those once open fields, they don’t produce any fruits.
Miller: What was supposed to be protected in terms of, among other things, access to cultural resources in a treaty in 1855?
Woolington: Elaine could speak to that probably better than me. But the U.S. government promised to protect access to the foods that Elaine mentioned, like huckleberries, and protecting access means making sure that they’re available too. So without fire on the landscape, we’ve seen huckleberries disappear from those treaty-protected fields.
Miller: Elaine, it’s striking just how far back some, some of the language that we hear today goes. Josephine found a quote from a tribal leader from Celilo, who told Forest Service officials in 1929, “Today, white men are commercializing our berries.”A few years later, a different chief said, “Whites, as thick as the needles on the firs, have driven our women from the berry fields.” That was almost 100 years ago. How did the Forest Service respond to those concerns?
Harvey: Thanks for that question. Yes, one of our chiefs along the Columbia River, his name was Chief William Yallup … And this was post-Depression time. The pressure was on the tribes who are up there gathering berries. He, and other chiefs and leaders, approached the forester and told them, hey, we got this problem here. Our tribal people have this reserved right to gather berries. So as a result of the meeting, the forest supervisor and our Chief William, they did the Handshake Agreement, which is known and observed. You can see signs on the Indian Heaven Wilderness where a certain number of acres, a few thousand acres, are reserved for tribal use, for camping, for picking berries. And then on the other side of the road, because there’s a road that kind of divides is open for anybody else to pick.
But that’s just one area that was reserved for the tribe. And then there are other areas … Throughout the years, we’ve been meeting with the Forest Service and identified four other areas for tribal use, only picking. But even though we have these tribal use areas, the commercial harvesters, they still just come in and they do not follow the laws or the signs. They actually tear the signs down, that there’s no commercial harvest.
So, we’re kind of dealing with that 100 years later. As you mentioned, I do recall the Chiefs, Tommy Thompson and others, bringing up these important issues to the Forest Service. And it’s like, now we’re in 2024, we met with the Forest Service. It’s the same issue we’re bringing to the table.
Miller: Josephine, is it possible to estimate the loss of access to huckleberry patches for Native tribes in the Northwest since white people arrived?
Woolington: Yeah, the acreage can be hard to estimate. But numbers that I found were that the fields that Elaine is talking about, called the Sawtooth Fields in and around Indian Heaven Wilderness, used to be 12,000 acres, at least. Now, they’re about 1,500 acres, but of that, it’s just 182 acres of open berry fields.
Miller: One of the dark ironies embedded in your article, Josephine, is that in the mid-90s, some of the wilderness areas were designated … the kind of thing that, I don’t know, white, environmentally-focused progressives see as a good sign, good for everybody. But you note that as part of that designation, it meant that trees couldn’t be cut down, which meant that the way these berry fields or almost like parklands had been maintained for millennia could no longer be practiced. And that was a direct result of that version of conservation of wilderness designation.
Woolington: Right. Yeah, we think that trees are good. And when you go up to Indian Heaven, it’s a forest, but you see the huckleberry understory. So you can see the story of the landscape, what once was. And now, yeah, the non-Native perspective of what a wilderness should be means that people are not a part of that, and that has led to the Ḱamíłpa Band not being able to access their treaty protected rights to gather huckleberries.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for how the commercial system works today? And I really do mean system – pickers, to buyers in parking lots, to large-scale food companies. How does this all work?
Woolington: Yeah, so it was confusing to try to figure that out. But it’s anyone who’s picking berries in Gifford Pinchot National Forest, which I should mention is the only national forest that allows this large-scale commercial harvest of berries. No other national forests allow it – Mt. Hood doesn’t, Idaho Panhandle National Forests don’t. So this is just specific to Gifford Pinchot.
Anyone accessing or harvesting berries for non-commercial use needs a permit. And the commercial pickers also are supposed to get a permit. Those permits cost $60 for a two-week period with a 40-gallon limit. You can also get a seasonal permit for $105 with a 70-gallon limit. And then what happens is the pickers go out and pick every day, and then they go and sell to buyers who are often in the town of Randle. They set up tents during the huckleberry season and they buy directly from the pickers.
This was all unregulated for many years, until the Yakama Nation pushed the state of Washington to adopt a law that required huckleberry buyers to receive the permits from the pickers and they had to notate how many berries they bought. Then once the buyers buy those berries … And we’re talking hundreds of gallons of berries. One buyer who I talked to in August had 780 pounds of huckleberries in a freezer, which is worth about $20,000. So, those buyers are individuals. They’re small business owners, usually working as contractors for larger wild food companies like Northwest Wild Foods, Cascade Organic, Fresh & Wild. And those food companies then sell huckleberries, kind of like wholesale in bulk, or sell to other businesses who then make huckleberry products … like Tillamook, for example. A Forest Service official told me that he believes that Tillamook gets huckleberries from Gifford Pinchot.
Miller: Elaine, you were part of a federal advisory committee that met with U.S. Forest Service folks to provide consultation on potential amendments to the Northwest Forest Plan. What came from those meetings?
Harvey: Yes, I was on the Northwest Forest Plan Amendment Federal Advisory Committee and I was on a few of the committees. On one of the committees that focused on the amendment, one of the issues was tribal inclusion, and that was because in the ‘94 Forest Plan, they did not include the tribes in that original plan.
So, tribal inclusion included recommendations in the current draft EIS that specify that tribes will have access to their traditional foods and medicines, that tribes can create MOUs with the Forest Service to be co-stewards of huckleberry habitat or basket weaving materials, those plants. There’s different sections in the amendment where we had recommendations. And one was for the tribe to request the Forest Service to end commercial harvest, for example, during huckleberry season, if the tribes felt like their rights were being infringed upon.
That is one recommendation in the Forest Plan that I feel that’s really important, because it’s like the tribes that are the ones carrying the burden – the loss of huckleberry habitat, the loss of being able to be in the forest. And it’s like, when we’re up there, we’re just competing with the commercial pickers. And another section in the amendment is for the Forest Service to allow cultural burning, so the tribes would be able to cultural burn for important species such as huckleberries, or meadow systems could be still gathered at different roots and plants from areas. But without fire in the landscape, we’ve totally lost so much acreage of huckleberry habitat, but also important meadow systems, and the meadow systems have an important function in the forest as well.
Miller: Do you think the Forest Service is going to take any of these amendments and actually put them in the final plan? Are they listening to you?
Harvey: I believe, based on all these … I’ve been working with the Forest Service on this, as well as other tribal members from different tribes because there’s five tribal members on the federal advisory committee. We’ve been receiving positive feedback from the Forest Service on these recommendations. As well, we had to vote and agree upon, amongst 22 of the fellow federal advisory committees members, on these issues. So I believe we are making some way and we’re hoping that the tribes, because there’s 80 affected tribes of the Northwest Forest Plan, will submit comment letters to support these recommendations.
Yeah, I do believe we’re getting support. And right now, a lot of our recommendations did make it into the draft EIS. The final EIS will be in process after March 17, which is next week.
Miller: Elaine Harvey and Josephine Woolington, thanks very much.
Harvey: Thank you so much.
Woolington: Thank you.
Miller: Elaine Harvey is a Ḱamíłpa Band member, one of the 14 bands that comprise the Yakama Nation. Josephine Woolington is a freelance journalist and author based in Portland.
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