The Camp 8 Stand

The current team of foresters, scientists and researchers at the CFC is hoping to burn the 20-acre, lightly-managed half of Camp 8. Kyle Gill, the CFC’s Forest Manager, and Lane Johnson, the CFC’s Research Forester, are leading forces behind this push. Today, Lane and Kyle see the reintroduction of fire into Camp 8 as a multifaceted response with ecological, historical and social implications. Returning fire to the Stand would make it more resilient to climate change while checking mesophication; it would provide further research potential on old-growth red pines, themselves a scarcity with much left to teach us; it would, most importantly, acknowledge the long history of Ojibwe cultural burning on what is now University land while providing for further cross-cultural engagement and collaboration. For Lane and Kyle, who are well aware of the risks that accompany prescribed burning, the good in bringing fire back to the Stand far outweighs the potential complications.&nbsp;

Why is this happening? What’s causing these historical ecosystems to so rapidly shift to something new? Why are the red pines of Camp 8, after centuries spent thriving on this landscape, now in danger of disappearing?

In a Forest Service paper titled “<a href="https://www.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/pubs/40238" target="_blank">The Demise of Fire and Mesophication of Forests in the Eastern United States</a>,” scientists Gregory Nowacki and Marc Adams warn,

While it is difficult to irrefutably prove without site specific historical or ethnographic documentation, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that area Ojibwe were intentionally setting many of the fires that burned through Camp 8, most likely in order to maximize blueberry production, a staple crop which they depended on during the long winters. Dr. Larson – the UW-Platteville dendrochronologist – finds it “highly unlikely” that lightning, which is almost always followed by immense, wetting rains in this region of Minnesota, could be the sole cause of the frequent fires on Camp 8. The CFC’s 1928 Management Plant further supports Dr. Larson’s assertion. Under a section titled “History of Past Fires,” the main causes of fires are listed as

Despite Indian agent efforts to contain Ojibwes on reservations and to undermine community networks, Ojibwe people continued to exercise their treaty rights, traveling to familiar places off-reservation to pick and sell berries and to socialize in berry camps…As a form of gathering, berrying was central to the traditional economies of Ojibwe people. However, it took on new importance under the conditions of colonialism that Ojibwes faced following the treaties. By transforming berrying into a number of different livelihoods, Ojibwes withstood Indian agents’ pressure to farm and navigated the capitalist market in ways that served their own interests. In the process, this labor became a vehicle through which Ojibwes sustained and built community and articulated their sense of identity.

“The next Camp 8 will not reproduce itself,” Eli recognizes. 

“it is not just the land that is broken, but our relationship to it. Reciprocal restoration encompasses repair of both ecosystem and cultural services while fostering renewed relationships of respect, responsibility, and reciprocity. All flourishing is mutual.”&nbsp;

“The reality is that in the business-as-usual forest management scenario across the region, we won’t have new Camp 8s [or naturally seeded, fire-maintained stands of trees] and the legacy of frequent historical fire that we see in our remaining old growth that are widely treasured…will continue to fade with time, eventually disappear, and the ecological and cultural stories these sites hold will be completely lost, and eventually, forgotten.”&nbsp;

Prologue: The University of Minnesota’s Cloquet Forestry Center &amp; the Camp 8 Stand

Come visit the Camp 8 Stand. Look up at these immense, fire scarred old-growth red pines. Touch their scarlet and orange and brown-plated bark; listen to the wind as it moves through them. They’ve stood as witnesses to so much over the last 200 years. This coming spring, perhaps they’ll see a little more – perhaps it’ll be a figure, maybe Lane, maybe Kyle, maybe one of the firefighters participating in the TREX. Perhaps this figure will be carrying fire, lighting the ground carefully, tending slowly to their broad bases. Perhaps, from their height, they’ll see the fire glowing – a shine of bright firelight restored to this place which has known fire for so, so long.

Of course, what they were seeing in the Stand now was far from what Trygg and early Euro-American land surveyors had marked on their maps. In the place of open, evenly spaced red pines with grasses and low shrubs, the Camp 8 they were studying was thick with underbrush and more shade-tolerant species such as red maple and paper birch. Clearly, fire was no longer playing the role it once had in maintaining Camp 8. Examining the Trygg and land surveyor maps, the students came to another notable realization: less than 2 miles away from Camp 8, dark triangles indicated the site of a historical Ojibwe village.

Ron Severs, a retired CFC Forest Manager with a 40-year tenure at the Center, describes the old-growth red pines of Camp 8 as ancient and primeval. He talks about the reactions he’s witnessed from various groups who’ve visited Camp 8 over the years: reverence for these red pines – how big they are – paired with fear ­­– how small I am.

The impact of fire exclusion over the last century has been profound, both ecologically and culturally, in the Great Lakes region. The Euro-American mindset of fire exclusion has prevented the type of cultural burning historically practiced by the Ojibwe and other Indigenous Peoples, leading to a disruption and suppression of culture as well as to serious ecological ramifications, such as mesophication. The number of available blueberries on Camp 8 pales in comparison to what the Stand, maintained by fire, would be able to produce.

The answer may very well surprise you. Strange as it may seem to many of us, this process of mesophication is, in large part, the result of fire – or more accurately, the exclusion of fire from our landscapes.

ACKNOWLEDGING THE CFC’S HISTORY OF LAND ACQUISITION

A special thanks to the <a href="https://trygglandoffice.com/trygg-historical-maps/" target="_blank">Trygg Land Office</a> for their permission to use their Trygg Historical Map.

“I think it’s just the plain right and moral thing to do to recognize that they were beneficiaries of an action that [was] harmful to our tribe and our homeland and to work to rectify it.”

&nbsp;The mesophication of Camp 8 and other historical old-growth stands in the Great Lakes region – celebrated sites like Itasca State Park, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and Voyageurs National Park – are raising vital questions about land management and our role as environmental stewards. Without human intervention, places like these – once populated by red pines – may completely convert to shade-tolerant, fire-sensitive sciophytes during mesophication. After over two centuries of dominance, Camp 8’s aging red pines are likely to be replaced by more shade-tolerant species like red maple and paper birch, as well as by other species considered to be mesophiers.

Part Three: The Future of Camp 8 – And a Look Beyond

Over the next few years, the University of Minnesota purchased additional acres, as well as receiving another land donation from the Northern Lumber Company. The trees on these donated lands, however, were not included, and both timber companies actively clear-cut much of the red and white pine on them. In 1911, Samuel Green asked the University to help him reserve certain stands by paying the timber companies the value of the stands’ trees, thereby assuring their protection. One hundred and nine years ago, a young Camp 8 was selected to be one of these reserved stands, many of its red pines not even 100-years-old at the time it was reserved.

While shade-tolerant sciophytes are currently advantaged in our overgrown, shady forests, introducing fire into these systems changes everything. Not only does fire have the capability to open up the canopy while clearing brush and leaf litter from the forest floor – letting sun-filter down to the eagerly waiting heliophytes – it also allows certain fire-adapted species, like red pine, to exert their own competitive edge over fire-sensitive sciophytes.

What matters is fusing creative and novel silvicultural approaches with Traditional Ecological Knowledge, allowing for and recognizing “different ways of knowing” as we manage this new stand beneath the mounting pressures of mesophication, fire exclusion, climate change and other problem factors.

A special thanks to Christian Nelson (Fond du Lac Resource Management Forester) and Shannon Kesner (Fond du Lac Resource Management Wetland Specialist) for reviewing this article.

Ron is talking about the two prescribed burns he initiated on 20 acres of Camp 8 in 1992 and 2002 which, along with mechanical thinning in 1984 and 2009, were the only attempts to manage the Stand since it was “reserved” in 1911. Ron, seeing that the “hands off” approach to Camp 8 was not sustainable if the larger goal was to maintain the Stand’s ecological and historical integrity, had decided to lightly manage just under half of the stand. In this way, he hoped to maintain some of the Stand’s 1900s appearance and composition while providing researchers with the opportunity to study the gently-managed half in comparison with the other wholly-unmanaged half.

THE REMOVAL OF FIRE FROM AMERICAN LANDSCAPES

A lot has changed since the CFC’s inception – shifts in land management ideals and a greater emphasis on biological diversity can be seen in the contemporary, multiyear research projects carried out by professors, graduate students and foresters at the CFC today. The CFC has also turned increasingly outwards over the decades, engaging locally through outreach initiatives like the Forestry Adventure Days, nationally through natural resources trainings like the National Advanced Silviculture Program, and even globally by hosting conferences such as the International Union of Forest Research Organizations. Today, the CFC blends outreach, engagement and education with key and necessary research and experiments.

A special thanks to Vern Northrup (Fond du Lac Elder and BIA Fire Operations Specialist), Damon Panek (Apostle Islands Park Ranger &amp; Ojibwe Cultural Specialist), Al Alm (retired CFC Director of Operations), Ron Severs (retired CFC Director of Operations &amp; Forest Manager), Andy David (current CFC Director of Operations), John Blanchard (retired CFC Forestry Technician), Chuck Kramer (retired CFC Forestry Technician), Evan Larson (Assistant Professor of Geography, UW-Platteville), Mike Schrage (Fond du Lac Wildlife Biologist), Kyle Gill (CFC Forest Manager), Eli Sagor (Associate Extension Professor) and Lane Johnson (CFC Research Forester) for generously offering their thoughts and time to speak about the ecology, history and culture surrounding Camp 8.

During this process of mesophication, shade-tolerant species – known as sciophytes – and other versatile species which can persist in both shaded and open forests – like the paper birch and red maple taking over in Camp 8 – are able to endure in increasingly overgrown forests where the shade-intolerant species – the sun-loving heliophytes such as red pine – are not. This isn’t a phenomenon specific to Camp 8; in fact, all across the United States, foresters and natural resource managers are watching as mesophication converts their forests from sun-loving heliophytes to shade-tolerant sciophytes.

Yet, no document – neither a land acknowledgement or a memorandum of understanding – can undo our American history of settler colonialism or absolve the many of us who have benefited from this system of power. What they could offer at the CFC, however, are both recognition and commitment. A public land acknowledgement holds the promise of becoming a verbal memorial, openly recognizing the CFC’s location on lands originally reserved for the Fond du Lac Band. A memorandum of understanding formalizes the relationship between the Fond du Lac Band and the University, creating an institutionally enshrined process for increased engagement, interaction and collaboration between the Band and the CFC that will reach far beyond today. Both the land acknowledgement and memorandum of understanding, far from offering tidy, exonerating conclusions to the CFC’s past, could really be part of a larger process of growth and change.

Wouldn’t it be wise to actively steward one of these vanishing places? Doesn’t it make sense to acknowledge the Ojibwe’s historical role as land stewards while also returning fire to a fire-dependent ecosystem?

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CLOQUET FORESTRY CENTER

Another action undertaken by CFC staff in recent years has been to communicate more broadly that the buildings and grounds of the CFC are available as event spaces for the Fond du Lac community. Currently, educational programs such as the <a href="http://ojibwemotaadidaa.weebly.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Ojibwemotaadidaa Omaa Gidakiiminaang</a>’s Ojibwe Immersion Academy Weekend Cohort, an Ojibwemowin language camp led by Ojibwe elder-first speakers and faculty at the Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, as well as Gidakiimanaaniwigamig or “Climate Strong,” a program that partners with groups like <a href="https://www.noaa.gov/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">NOAA</a>&nbsp;to study the cultural and community impacts of climate change while fostering tribal youth leadership, are held at the CFC.

A special thanks to <a href="https://connormcmanus.com/" target="_blank">Connor McManus</a>, Dylan Van Boxtel, Lane Johnson, Clare Boerigter and Eli Sagor for contemporary photos of the CFC and Camp 8 Stand.

As the authors of the article “<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10745-010-9325-3" target="_blank">Fire, Agency and Scale in the Creation of Aboriginal Cultural Landscapes</a>” emphasize,

In an article titled “<a href="https://theconversation.com/ive-started-acknowledging-the-people-who-lived-on-this-land-first-and-you-should-too-118496" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">I’ve Started Acknowledging the People Who Lived on this Land First – And You Should Too</a>,” Chip Colwell defines these land acknowledgements as&nbsp;verbal memorials, as “a concrete step to bring forgotten histories into present consciousness,” with the caveat, of course, that they’re accompanied by some form of meaningful action. At the CFC, one example of such action can be seen in the current collaboration between the Fond du Lac Band and the CFC in the construction of the&nbsp;Ganawenjigewin&nbsp;Trail – “We Build a Bridge” – a joint project which, upon its completion, will physically link the CFC and Fond du Lac tribal headquarters across wetlands and Otter Creek.

But using fire made Ron uneasy, and with some reason. A few days after lighting the ’92 prescribed burn, John Blanchard, another former forester with over three decades at the CFC, recalled that the fire, despite appearing quite dead, had flared back up. They had succeeded in catching this re-ignition with almost no complications, but still, Ron didn’t imagine he’d ever forget the voice on the telephone telling him,

To acknowledge and celebrate the historical truth of cultural fire, Damon organized a traditional feast on Stockton Island prior to the prescribed burn, with members of Lake Superior Ojibwe bands from all across the region in attendance. While Damon does hope that these fires will return blueberries “as big as grapes” to Stockton Island – and, eventually, to other islands in the Apostle Islands as well – these ecological outcomes are secondary to the restoration of fire as a cultural Ojibwe practice. Through conversations with members of the Red Cliff Band, many of whose ancestors lived on the Apostle Islands, Damon discovered only one elder, well into his eighties, who still remembered voyaging to Stockton as a young boy to burn for blueberries. The time to act, Damon realized, was now, before the tradition of cultural burning – prohibited by Euro-American colonizers for over a century – was lost from memory.

After 200 or more years of witness, many of these trees are now at the terminus of their life cycles – a somber reality made even bleaker by the realization that it’s red maple, paper birch and hazel brush which are poised to take over in their absence, not a new generation of patiently waiting young red pine. This ecological turnover – in the case of Camp 8, from a red pine-dominant stand to one populated primarily by hardwoods – is called mesophication.

The pre-European settlement fire regimes map was created by James K. Brown and Jane Kapler Smith for their Forest Service paper “<a href="https://www.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/pubs/4554" target="_blank">Wildland Fire in Ecosystems: Effects of Fire on Flora and Fauna</a>.” The vegetation and fire regime maps were created by Gregory J. Nowacki and Marc D. Abrams for their Forest Service paper “<a href="https://www.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/pubs/40238" target="_blank">The Demise of Fire and the Mesophication of Forests in the Eastern United States</a>.”

A special thanks to AmberBeth VanNingeno and the Minnesota DNR for their permission to use the photo of the <a href="https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/snas/detail.html?id=sna01063" target="_blank">Lost 40 SNA</a>.

	Humans, it seems, not lighting, were the frequent fire starters in the area.

But that doesn’t mean that stands like Camp 8 – stands of old-growth managed by cultural prescribed fire, stands that provoke us and teach us – can’t be nurtured on our landscapes. For Eli, the heart of Camp 8 is the “story of how we relate to this forest, how we work with it to ensure that it’s healthy and resilient and vigorous.” Eli wants to restore the relationships and processes that have been at work in the Camp 8 Stand over the last decade. And he believes we can. 

The location of the CFC on the Fond du Lac Reservation remains contentious, a reality known to the people who work there. In a 2013 Pine Journal article titled “<a href="https://www.pinejournal.com/sports/2022644-forestry-center-band-connect-over-land-dispute" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Forestry Center, Band Connect Over Land Dispute</a>,” Karen Diver, Tribal Chairwoman from 2007 to 2015, proposed an eventual long-term solution which included the Band reacquiring the CFC’s land and leasing it back to the University. According to former Chairwoman Diver,

“Fire management has a moral dimension.”

According to Lane Johnson, the CFC’s Research Forester, the time to act – or perhaps more accurately, react – is now.

&nbsp;In the Age of the Anthropocene we, as humans, have shaped, manipulated, extracted and touched almost all aspects of our environment. Given the drastic ways in which we’ve altered our landscapes – especially the exclusion of cultural fire in the case of Camp 8 – means that doing nothing on these landscapes is as active a choice as managing them would be. The world that created the old-growth red pines of Camp 8 no longer exists. If we want old-growth, fire-maintained ecosystems like this in today’s world – lofty, primeval trees with open understories that allow light to filter down to the forest floor – it’s up to us to help restore these processes, using fire as Indigenous Peoples once did – and still do – as we work to recreate the conditions that first allowed these systems to thrive.

According to Dr. Larson, Camp 8 “absolutely represents the [past] landscape.” 

Many of Camp 8’s red pines – scarred at the base by dark fire scars, their high limbs marvelously twisted in elaborate showings of sinuosity – are at least 200 years old. One particularly impressive specimen – a grand red pine called the “Sequoia” or the “Grandmother” – dates back to before 1734, making this Grandmother red pine nearly 300 years old.

Over the years, public access to the CFC has been a point of tension. After a period in the early aughts during which the CFC was closed to public access in order to protect active research projects from unintentional disturbance, the CFC’s forest roads have again been opened for non-motorized, recreational use. This includes gathering, a particularly significant cultural activity for many Fond du Lac Band members. The CFC’s current policy asks gatherers to notify CFC staff of their activities by requesting a gathering permit, a process put in place in the hopes of limiting unintentional negative impact on areas of active research. Kyle Gill, CFC Forest Manager, is currently at work formalizing the CFC’s gathering policy to adhere to the <a href="http://www.fdlrez.com/government/ords/02-92(1854)CededTerritoryConservationCode.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Fond du Lac Band Ceded Territory Conservation Code</a>.&nbsp;This Code outlines “an orderly system for tribal control and regulation of hunting, fishing, gathering, trapping and resources management…” which promotes “…public health and safety and the conservation and management of fish, wildlife, natural resources and plant populations.” Aligning the CFC gathering policy with this Code would lead to an adjustment of the current CFC permit process, with Band members only required to request a permit when gathering for commercial purposes, while no permit would be needed by Band members when gathering for personal purposes.

In the fall of 2017, in a landmark moment, the National Park Service and members of various Ojibwe bands from Minnesota and Wisconsin together returned cultural burning to Stockton Island, one of the twenty-two <a href="https://www.nps.gov/apis/index.htm" target="_blank">Apostle Islands</a> in Lake Superior. In Ojibwe, the name for Stockton Island – Wii-saa-ko-day-wa-ning – “talks directly to what took place here,” explains Lac du Flambeau member Valliere in Miisaniinawind’s “<a href="https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Miisaniinawind---This-is-Who-We-Are.html?soid=1120194249571&amp;aid=g-WyDRwGQuQ#LETTER.BLOCK7" target="_blank">Keeping the Fire Alive</a>.”

RETURNING CULTURAL FIRE TO OUR LANDSCAPES: THE STOCKTON ISLAND EXAMPLE

According to John Anderton, in his article “Native American, Fire-Maintained Blueberry Patches in the Coastal Pine Forests of the Northern Great Lakes,” the last landscape burning by Great Lakes Ojibwe to maximize blueberry production took place in 1930. After centuries of cultural burning to manage the landscape for blueberries and other uses, this central traditional practice has been, with some exceptions, effectively stopped, first by European colonization and now by contemporary land management policies.

In 1911, just two years after the establishment of the Cloquet Forestry Center, founder Samuel Green designated a 44-acre stand of red pines to be left alone as a reserve. This “reserve” status saved the red pines of Camp 8 – so named for a nearby logging camp – from being harvested as timber, a common fate which befell almost all of the red pine in northern Minnesota, with notable exceptions including stands within Itasca State Park and the Lost 40.

A special thanks to the Minnesota Historical Society for their permission to use the “<a href="http://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display?irn=10681333&amp;return=count%3D25%26q%3Dindian%2520camp%2520at%2520berry%2520banks%26tab%3Dresearch_items" target="_blank">Indian Camp at Berry Banks</a>” photo.

In “<a href="https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Miisaniinawind---This-is-Who-We-Are.html?soid=1120194249571&amp;aid=g-WyDRwGQuQ#LETTER.BLOCK7" target="_blank">Keeping the Fire Alive</a>,” an article which appears in Missaniinawind, the “Hub of the Ojibwe Nation,” Lac du Flambeau Band member Leon “Boycee” Valliere explains,

And while these larger institutional changes have yet to be resolved, the scientists and foresters at the CFC have been working towards meaningful action through recognition, engagement and collaboration with the Fond du Lac Band. Kyle Gill, the CFC’s Forest Manager, will often welcome visitors to the CFC by addressing its history of land acquirement and discussing the impact of the Treaty of La Pointe. Kyle would like the University of Minnesota and the Fond du Lac Band to work together to write a memorandum of understanding for the CFC, a formal document which would serve as an institutional act of recognition of Fond du Lac and University relations. He is also interested in a University land acknowledgement for the CFC. According to the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.lspirg.org/knowtheland/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">LSPIRG non-profit</a>, which has launched the Know the Land Territories Campaign, a land acknowledgement is a document which recognizes

The University of Minnesota’s Cloquet Forestry Center (CFC) – founded in 1909 by Samuel Green, the Head of the University’s School of Forestry – is an educational and experimental forest which serves students, scientists, foresters and, through them, the larger community. One of the <a href="https://cfc.cfans.umn.edu/about/history" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">oldest university-run forests</a> of its kind, the CFC is an intensely managed forest in the Great Lakes region. Located 25 miles west of the western end of Lake Superior, the 3,400-acre CFC is located on the reserved lands of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa on the unceded territory of the Great Lakes Anishinaabeg. Serving as an early site for seminal research on tree seedlings and methods for reforestation, the CFC’s nursery was producing 1 million seedlings annually by 1917.

In “<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226214585_Restoration_and_Reciprocity_The_Contributions_of_Traditional_Ecological_Knowledge" target="_blank">Restoration and Reciprocity</a>,” Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that the process of reciprocal restoration – of mutual flourishing between peoples and the ecosystems which surround them – is often achieved through a return to traditional land management, itself prompting a “[r]evitalization of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, language and culture.”

In 1909, Samuel Green – the Head of the University of Minnesota’s Forestry School who had been advocating for an experimental forest from as early as 1886 – was finally able to convince the St. Louis River Mercantile Company to purchase and donate roughly 2,000 acres of land to the University – land that had once belonged to the Fond du Lac Band before the Dawes and Nelson Acts.

The opportunity to return fire to the Camp 8 Stand – especially through a TREX emphasizing the cultural role of fire – is an exciting prospect which Lane, Kyle and others at the CFC have long hoped for. Yet for Lane, even the exciting prospect of returning fire to Camp 8 cannot stop him from looking past the Stand. What will a stand of old-growth trees look like in the coming decades? After all, even the return of fire will not keep Camp 8’s old-growth red pines from succumbing to their limited life cycles.

The CFC’s current team hopes to see fire returned to Camp 8 – and, as plans continue to unfold, it is looking more and more as though they will. Working with <a href="https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/who-we-are/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">The Nature Conservancy</a>, a global environmental non-profit, the CFC is helping organize a <a href="https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2019/08/23/prescribed-fire-training-exchanges" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (TREX)</a> in conjunction with the Fond du Lac Band, Leech Lake Band, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Forest Service, Minnesota DNR, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and others. With an emphasis on cultural fire, including presentations and discussions, this TREX will provide firefighters with prescribed burning training on diverse landscapes within Minnesota this coming spring. On the CFC, one of the sites slated to be burned is, of course, Camp 8. Hoping to lay the groundwork for potential cross-land fire management in the future, Lane and Kyle have reached out to the Fond du Lac On-Reservation Conservation Committee to open a dialogue about this prescribed burning on the Center. They would like to share a draft of the prescribed burning plans, which are currently being composed by the <a href="https://foreststewardsguild.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Forest Stewards Guild</a>, as a neighbor notification that they hope will lead to continued dialogue around collaborative resource stewardship.

This question – where will the next Camp 8 stand be? – has taken hold of Lane. Will there be another? It’s a potentially grim question, as the era that produced Camp 8 – one in which a fire regime of frequent low- to moderate-intensity fires was able to occur – is no longer the era we live in now and hasn’t been for over a hundred years.

﻿“For thousands of years, the Native Americans used fire as a tool. They managed their environment with fire. They’ve recorded over 700 uses the Native Americans had for fire, for what they wanted to get done: hunting, berries, managing the trees themselves.”

“We have the tools to write that story [of the next Camp 8]. We at the CFC have the capacity to do that – at least the next few chapters.”

“smokers, picnickers, brush burning, and railroads...” with lightning and incendiarism “omitted because they are not important here.”

Before the arrival of European colonizers, Indigenous Peoples were actively stewarding their surroundings. The act of prescribed burning was one common management technique. In an article in <a href="https://www.pinejournal.com/community/4493207-1918-fires-reservation-burns-ojibwe-benefit-history-fire" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Cloquet’s&nbsp;Pine Journal</a>, Vern Northrup, a retired Bureau of Indian Affairs Fire Operations Specialist and an Elder of the Fond du Lac Band, within whose reservation the CFC resides, talks about Indigenous Peoples’ long history with fire.

In a chapter titled “<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226214585_Restoration_and_Reciprocity_The_Contributions_of_Traditional_Ecological_Knowledge" target="_blank">Restoration and Reciprocity</a>” in the book Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about the related idea of reciprocal restoration, that

The Story of the Cloquet Forestry Center’s Old-Growth Red Pines

start

The scientists and foresters working at the Cloquet Forestry Center have had to grapple with the Center’s own murky past. The CFC sits on the <a href="http://fdlrez.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Fond du Lac Reservation</a> or Nagaajiwanaang in Ojibwe, meaning “Where the Water Stops” in English translation. The Fond du Lac Reservation, along with many other reservations in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, was created by the <a href="http://www.1854treatyauthority.org/images/TREATY.TEXT.final.webpublish.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">1854 Treaty of La Pointe</a>. In this treaty, a number of Ojibwe bands – the Fond du Lac, Lac du Flambeau, La Pointe, Ontonagon, L’Anse, Lac Vieux Desert, Grand Portage, La Courte Oreilles, Bois Forte and Mississippi Bands – agreed under duress to allow Euro-Americans use of land and resources within their ancestral territories while reserving specific lands for sole use by their band members. Over the course of the next 80 years, however, lands under tribal ownership were continually reduced as Euro-Americans sought to <a href="http://www.mnopedia.org/event/treaty-la-pointe-1854" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">access and exploit the natural resources </a><a href="https://www.mnopedia.org/event/treaty-la-pointe-1854" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">in these areas.</a>

It is by far the most iconic site on the Cloquet Forestry Center – students conducting field research, visiting foresters, schoolkids on buses and local community members have all come, and keep coming, to stand beneath these ancient trees.

Part One: The Mesophication of Camp 8

Before the arrival of European colonizers, the Ojibwe of the Great Lakes region practiced subsistence living, moving to different areas throughout the year to hunt, fish, tend and gather. Blueberries – which would be gathered in late summer, dried and stored for winter – were a dietary staple for the Ojibwe, described in 1938 by Florina Denomie, an Ojibwe Elder of the Bad River Band in Wisconsin, as “<a href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469617299/seasons-of-change/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">[o]ne of the leading industries</a>.” Year after year, families would return to the same berry patches to pick for weeks on end. The elder women of the groups, charged as lead stewards, would oversee berrying efforts while tending to the patches.

Returning fire to Stockton Island is an act of ecological restoration, which is defined as “<a href="https://www.ser-rrc.org/what-is-ecological-restoration/" target="_blank">the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed</a>.” It is also recognized as a way to “<a href="https://www.ser.org/default.aspx" target="_blank">re-establish an ecologically healthy relationship between nature and culture</a>.”

RECONSTRUCTING CAMP 8’S FIRE HISTORY<h3></h3>

Part Two: Cultural Burning and the ‘Moral Dimension’ to Fire Management&nbsp;

The restoration of cultural fire on Stockton Island can serve as a model for land management agencies – a guide for how to successfully engage and collaborate with the Indigenous Peoples who, for centuries, stewarded American landscapes. Learning from this model, the CFC has the opportunity to push for increased engagement and collaboration with the Fond du Lac Band while at the same time opening the restoration of fire in Camp 8 to a deeper, far more culturally significant meaning, one that surpasses burning for purely ecological reasons.

“I imagine a place where I could take students and family when I’m in my 60s and show them a 90 year old stand…that resembles what Camp 8 looked like when it was set aside by the University in 1910 for research, education, recreation,” Lane says. “Some place where we could gather and taste wild blueberries, chokecherry, raspberry and gaze across a scenic forested viewshed that is not choked with balsam and hazel undergrowth.”

“Plant communities are undergoing rapid compositional and structural changes, some with no ecological antecedent. Stand-levels species richness is declining, and will decline further, as numerous fire-adapted plants are replaced by a limited set of shade-tolerant, fire sensitive species.”

A number of landscapes across the United States, including many of those in the Great Lakes region, were tended and maintained by fire. Historical fire – sometimes set intentionally by Indigenous Peoples, sometimes naturally ignited – greatly shaped various ecosystems, often playing a defining role in determining which plants and trees would prosper. For those species which were able to adapt to the presence of fire – species like Pinus resinosa, Camp 8’s red pine – these burns became key in their ability to thrive.

During this time, the Fond du Lac – the Wayekwaa-gichigamiing Gichigamiwininiwag in Ojibwemowin or “Lake Superior Men at the Far End of the Great Lake”– moved from their historical home in what is current-day Duluth to where their reservation is today, 20 miles west of Duluth and roughly 15 miles upriver from the mouth of the St. Louis River.

By 1935, the Forest Service’s “10 a.m.” rule mandated that every fire should be put out by 10 a.m. the day following the initial smoke report – an aggressive, nation-wide attempt to remove fire from the landscape. Yet, by actively seeking to remove fire from the ecosystems around them, these new inhabitants failed to recognize that many of these landscapes were either fire-adapted or even fire-dependent.

Chuck Kramer, another forester with more than four decades at the CFC, says the Stand “gets into your blood.”

Returning fire to Camp 8 means more than combating mesophication; it means more than restoring historical patterns of fire to the Stand. Just as it is on Stockton Island, returning fire to Camp 8 is an acknowledgement of the Ojibwe peoples who lived on this land long before those of us of European ancestry. Fire, in a sense, means mutual flourishing – a restoration of culture and of a fire-dependent ecosystem. Borrowing again from Colwell, a fire-maintained Camp 8 would be able to stand as a visual memorial, as “a concrete step to bring forgotten histories into present consciousness.”

Species which can prosper in the shade – but have few defenses against fire – are beginning to dominate and alter various ecosystems, causing an ecological turnover never before seen.

In 2017, Dr. Evan Larson – a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville who specializes in dendrochronology, the scientific method of dating tree rings&nbsp;– brought a class of students to Camp 8 to reconstruct the Stand’s fire history. By sampling stumps and taking partial cross-sections from standing dead trees known as snags, Dr. Larson’s students, particularly a young researcher named Adam Donaldson, uncovered data that suggested that surface fires – fires that did not climb into the canopy – burned through Camp 8 roughly every 7 to 10 years in a frequent pattern. Consulting public land surveyor maps from the mid-1800s as well as <a href="https://trygglandoffice.com/trygg-historical-maps/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Trygg Historical Maps</a> – a series of maps developed by J. William Trygg which render pre-colonization landscapes and Native American cultural sites in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa - the students discovered that, near the place of current-day Camp 8, references were made to a hay field or pine barrens.

Returning fire to Stockton Island is a prime example of this concept of mutual flourishing: restoring cultural burning is a restoration too of Ojibwe tradition. Restoring cultural burning is a restoration of berrying, with all of its social and spiritual layers, as well as a return of fire to a historically fire-maintained ecosystem. Restoring cultural burning is, in a deep sense, acknowledging the historical – yet often underappreciated– truth that the Ojibwe and other Indigenous Peoples thoughtfully stewarded this land long before European colonizers arrived.

Eli Sagor, a University of Minnesota Extension professor who manages the Sustainable Forests Education Cooperative at the CFC, isn’t sure we’ll ever have another Camp 8 again, if another Camp 8 is narrowly defined as a naturally seeded stand that traces its origin to a foundational fire event like the old-growth red pines in Camp 8, most of which seeded after a catastrophic fire in the early 1800s. But, for Eli, the most vital component of Camp 8 is not its origin story.

THE CULTURAL USE OF PRESCRIBED FIRE BY THE GREAT LAKES OJIBWE

Do we bring fire back to Camp 8 in an attempt to restore historical conditions? Or do we let the Stand, as we know it, go?

“Wii-saa-ko-day-wun means, “The Place That Has Been Burned.” The Ojibwe people who inhabited these islands – they were managing this island via the use of fire.”

Listening sessions or knowledge exchanges are another way in which the people working at the CFC hope to deepen their engagement with the Fond du Lac Band. Forest Manager Kyle Gill initiated one such session in 2016, inviting Fond du Lac Resource Management staff to the CFC to discuss management approaches relating to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/firewise/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Firewise</a>&nbsp;practices. Dr. Larson, the dendrochronolgist who studied fire in Camp 8 with his students, engaged in two similar exchanges in 2017 and 2018, sharing data findings with the Fond du Lac Resource Management staff and at a public presentation open to the Fond du Lac community during the <a href="http://archsynth.org/people,-fire,-and-pines-.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">People, Fire, and Pines in the Border Lakes Region of North America</a> meeting.

The U.S. policy of full suppression of wildfires – attempting to put out every fire, no matter its size or location – has its roots in the turn of the 20th century. Around this time, a number of catastrophic fires ripped across landscapes newly-altered by Euro-American colonizers. In 1894, just 60 miles from the CFC, the Hinckley Fire claimed 418 lives, making it the <a href="https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Research/Data-research-and-tools/US-Fire-Problem/Catastrophic-multiple-death-fires/Deadliest-fires-and-explosions-in-US-history" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">third deadliest wildfire</a> in U.S. history. Less than 5 miles from the CFC, the 1918 Cloquet Fire took 559 lives and remains the <a href="https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Research/Data-research-and-tools/US-Fire-Problem/Catastrophic-multiple-death-fires/Deadliest-fires-and-explosions-in-US-history" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">second deadliest wildfire</a> in U.S. history. Fire, for many of these colonizers, signaled death and destruction.

Restoring fire to Camp 8 in the spring isn’t an easy or forever fix. The Stand’s old-growth red pines will, as all these things go, eventually die, and Camp 8 will experience rebirth – either as a young red pine stand or as a mezified stand of hardwoods. What the Stand can do, however, is serve as an example of active, thoughtful land stewardship; it can stand as a visual memorial to the culturally meaningful uses of fire by the Ojibwe; it can provide crucial knowledge as a living laboratory, as Andy David, the CFC’s Director of Operations, likes to say, which can teach us about old-growth and the impacts of climate change.

A special thanks to Kyle Gill for drone footage of the Stand.

Across the Great Lakes region, the Ojibwe used fire to manage the landscape. In an article titled “Native American, Fire-Maintained Blueberry Patches in the Coastal Pine Forest of the Northern Great Lakes,” author John Anderton writes that

What matters is building a relationship, a history with this new stand, of finding “broad, diverse ways of relating people to forests.”

“the unique and enduring relationship that exists between Indigenous Peoples and their traditional territories.”

&nbsp;Today, however, the fire-adaptations of red pines – and a whole host of other fire-friendly species – no longer really matter. Across the United States, we’ve excluded or suppressed low- to moderate-intensity fires from most of our ecosystems; the wildfires that now rip across our landscapes are often high-intensity blazes, destructive and sometimes deadly. And so, without the presence of historical burns to maintain these previously fire-adapted landscapes, we see the creeping process of mesophication.

“most, if not all, of the coastal pine forests in the northern Great Lakes were subject to deliberate controlled burning by Native American cultural groups.”

But just as the CFC has changed since its foundation over a century ago, so too has the Camp 8 Stand. While some management steps have been taken over the years to maintain the Stand’s early-1900s composition, today’s Camp 8 appears drastically different from the Stand that Samuel Green set aside in 1911. In the place of sweet fern, wintergreen, honeysuckle and blueberry bushes – the once-dominant groundcover – Camp 8 is now overgrown with dense hazel. Instead of an open understory, punctuated in places by the broad bodies of rising red pines, the current Camp 8 is choked with the saplings of red maple, paper birch and balsam fir – a radical change from its earlier, oft-remarked upon “park-like” appearance. As the Stand’s current cohort of old-growth red pines approach the end of their life cycles, it’s becoming increasingly clear that without human intervention, this reserve of red pines will almost certainly disappear.

What matters is having a stand of big, old-growth trees that inspire wonder in the people who come to see them.

&nbsp;Besides forming a key part of the Ojibwe diet, blueberries and the act of berrying also served as “<a href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469617299/seasons-of-change/" target="_blank">a form of labor that linked Ojibwes throughout the region</a>.” According to Chantal Norrgard, author of <a href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469617299/seasons-of-change/" target="_blank">Seasons of Change: Labor, Treaty Rights and Ojibwe Nationhood</a>, berrying developed as a form of colonial resistance in the wake of European colonization in the 1900s, with berries serving as “facilitators of community networks.”

A special thanks to the Forest History Society for the use of this <a href="http://prestohost26.inmagic.com/Presto/content/Detail.aspx?ctID=YzRmOGVlNDAtMmY0YS00YjI2LTk2ZjYtZjgzMmJlNDk1OWY2&amp;rID=ODE1NA==&amp;qrs=RmFsc2U=&amp;q=KENsb3F1ZXQp&amp;qcf=YzRmOGVlNDAtMmY0YS00YjI2LTk2ZjYtZjgzMmJlNDk1OWY2&amp;ph=VHJ1ZQ==&amp;bckToL=VHJ1ZQ==&amp;rrtc=VHJ1ZQ==" target="_blank">1929 Camp 8 photo</a>.

Clare Boerigter is graduate student in the University of Minnesota’s Creative Writing Master of Fine Arts Program. She specializes in Creative Nonfiction and often writes about the environment as well as her experiences as a wildland firefighter for the Forest Service. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript about wildfires. For more of her writing, visit <a href="https://clareboerigter.wordpress.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">clareboerigter.com</a>.

The Cloquet Forestry Center is part of the University of Minnesota’s College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences (CFANS). Funding for this piece was generously provided by CFANS’ <a href="https://silvlib.cfans.umn.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Great Lakes Silviculture Library</a> and by the Cloquet Forestry Center’s Forest Management Timber Account.﻿

Considered a “<a href="https://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/tree/pinres/all.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">postfire pioneer species</a>,” red pines germinate best when their seeds can grow in the bare mineral soil exposed by fires. And it’s not just red pine seedlings that benefit from fire. Mature red pines – trees that are roughly 20 to 40 years old – have developed a number of coping mechanisms which allow them to survive, and even thrive, in frequent, low- to moderate-intensity fires. Their signature red-plated bark is thick, shielding the tree’s living core, known as cambium, from the fire’s scorching heat. Red pines have also developed a technique known as “self-pruning,” which means that they shed their lower limbs as they grow, making it difficult for surface fires to scale them via these ladder fuels. This often prevents fire from burning into their canopy – a serious, high-fatality event for trees known as a crown fire.

Mature red pines are also adapted to defend themselves postfire, when a number of ailments will commonly befall fire weakened trees, frequently accessing them through the charred openings at their bases known as fire scars. However, red pines have adapted to protect themselves, particularly against “wood destroying” fungi. In a 1938 study on the CFC, scientist A.F. Verrall examined a number of the CFC’s “<a href="https://academic.oup.com/jof/article-abstract/36/12/1231/4719582" target="_blank">heavily wounded</a>,” yet miraculously fungus-free, red pines. Through his work, Verrall realized that these red pines, by flooding their vulnerable fire scars with waterproofing resin, were effectively sealing out these wood destroyers. While other trees succumbed to these fatal fungi, red pines, rinsing their wounds in red-gold resin, did not.

“When you strike that match,” Ron Severs, the former Forest Manager of the CFC, acknowledges, “someone will be held responsible.”

CULTURAL BURNING TO MAXIMIZE BLUEBERRY GROWTH

Where, Lane wants to know, will this next Camp 8 Stand be?

&nbsp;The old-growth red pines which make Camp 8 so distinct, which inspire so much awe in visitors to the Stand, are slowly beginning to die. 

“Native people have been using prescribed burning methods for centuries. Fire was used in an advantageous way that would take out certain types of plant species – basically clearing the ground – which in that fire process would produce nutrients, which in turn would accelerate the growth of desired species. The number one desired species was blueberries.”

Damon Panek, the Apostle Islands Park Ranger and Ojibwe Cultural Specialist who spearheaded this project, emphasizes the importance of fire in Ojibwe culture – and the key role that tribal engagement by land agencies can have in restoring it on our landscapes. Many of the trained firefighters helping to return fire to Stockton Island – such as Fond du Lac Band Elder Vern Northrup, who commenced the 2017 burn by lighting the first match – are the great-grandsons and granddaughters of the Ojibwe who historically burned these landscapes.

A special thanks to the University of Minnesota University Archives (<a href="https://umedia.lib.umn.edu/search?facets%5Bcollection_name_s%5D%5B%5D=Cloquet+Forestry+Center+Records" target="_blank">UMedia﻿</a>) for historical photos of the CFC and Camp 8.

Further land abuses occurred across the United States with the passing of the Dawes Act of 1887. The Dawes Act allowed the U.S. President to divide communally owned reservations into private allotments, selling off the “excess” land to Euro-American colonizers and resulting in the eventual loss of 100 million acres of reservation land across America. In Minnesota just two years later, the <a href="https://www.doi.gov/ocl/hearings/112/HR1272_030112" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Nelson Act of 1889</a> attempted to pressure all Ojibwe bands in the state to relinquish their reserved lands and move to the newly established White Earth Reservation. Although many Ojibwe were able to successfully resist the Nelson Act, the Fond du Lac Band, as well as the Winnebagoshish, Leech Lake, Cass Lake, Mille Lacs, Bois Forte, Grand Portage, White Oak Point, Sandy Lake and Snake River bands were all affected by it.