By Mary Stuever

Towers and turrets. Courtyards with archways. Stairways to massive doors. Buildings rumored to have secret passages. Years of tradition amidst the ivy covered walls. I am reminded of the Hogwarts School of Wizardry and I keep looking for Harry Potter. My host describes the “Residential College” system followed by Yale University undergraduates, and I wonder if the colleges are named Slytherin and Griffindor, and where is the Quidditch field? We laugh, but recognize that the same English institutions that inspired the famous children’s series have also influenced the American “Ivy League” universities. Underlying our banter, underlying the purpose of our visit, underlying the mission of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (F&ES) is strong sense of global connections. 

My boss, Paul DeClay Jr., and I were guest speakers at the Yale Forest Forum Leadership Seminar hosted by the Global Institute of Sustainable Forestry. Paul is the Tribal Forest Manager for the White Mountain Apache Tribe and one of ten tribal members who have earned a bachelor’s degree in forestry. The tribal lands, located in east central Arizona, span 1.6 million acres and stretch from 2,000 feet elevation at the Salt River to almost 11,000 feet at the summit of Mt. Baldy. Approximately one third of the area is forest, one third is woodland, and the rest is grassland or desert shrub. It is a forester’s paradise. 

Tribal Forest Manager Paul DeClay, Jr. (left), visiting Yale School of Forestry.

The Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (F&ES) is the oldest forestry school in America. Now one of 11 professional schools at Yale, the program only offers graduate degrees. Yale F&ES serves as a pre-eminent think tank in the realm of conservation, with a strong global focus. We were guests because the school also has the vision of embracing domestic diversity. Last spring we hosted a group of graduate students from Munich, Germany, and Yale on a tour of our forests on the Fort Apache Reservation. In March we visited them on a New Haven, Connecticut hill that rises on the east end of the Yale campus. 

Representing the White Mountain Apache Tribe, we have many stories to share. Our aggressive forest management programs include supplying the tribal sawmill with timber, protecting reservation and adjacent communities through intensive fuel treatments, and providing aesthetic forests through intensive uneven-aged management that then host thousands of visitors each summer. In addition, we have been actively responding to an extremely large and catastrophic fire that impacted a third of the reservation’s forest and woodlands in 2002. As a part of our rehabilitation efforts on the Rodeo-Chediski burn, we operate five greenhouses and have planted over a million and a half ponderosa pine seedlings.  

Yale faculty and students peppered us with questions. In addition to the luncheon presentation we were guest speakers in several classes. We attended a seminar by another native visitor, Holly Youngbear-Tibbets, Dean of Outreach and the Sustainable Development Institute, College of Menominee Nation, Keshena,Wisconsin. That afternoon the three of us participated in a well-attended roundtable discussion focused on forest management in “Indian Country.” We filled the rest of our two-day visit with one-on-one discussions with members of the Yale staff, faculty and students.  

One message we came away with is that our daily struggles with self-determination issues and the challenge of developing tribally-directed forestry programs are common to indigenous people throughout the world. As Yale ramps up their participation in native forestry, we look forward to the professional support and mutual learning that Yale F&ES has promoted worldwide. 

The Yale visit challenges us to raise the bar for White Mountain Apache Tribal members. Not only do we need more tribal members pursuing bachelor’s degrees, but to prepare for the complex environmental issues facing the reservation, we need some students to pursue post-graduate degrees as well.  

Wandering among the Yale buildings on our last night in town, I was still thinking of Harry Potter and wizards and the sense of tradition that emanates from long established institutions. I found the famed “Skull and Bones” tomb that is rumored to house Geronimo’s skull, allegedly stolen from his grave as an early 20^th century prank. I smiled at the thought of Apache foresters, possibly even Geronimo’s relatives, earning Yale degrees and building a tradition of global respect for native communities.

This article first appeared in The Forester’s Log, a syndicated monthly column published in newspapers and magazines primarily in the American West. Mary Stuever is the Burn Area Emergency Rehabilitation Coordinator for the White Mountain Apache Tribe.