American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Like other tribes in the United States, the Yurok of northwestern California have been dispossessed of most of their indigenous territory (figure 1). The majority is now owned by timber corporations or is part of national parks and forests. Although the Yurok Reservation includes a contiguous area of fifty-six thousand acres along the Klamath River, in 1995 only scattered parcels, comprising less than five thousand acres of the reservation, are under some semblance of tribal ownership, with the rest mostly in non-Indian hands. Historically, despite the granting of a reservation and allotments to Yurok people, control of reservation and allotment natural resources has been withheld from them under the auspices of scientific forest management. Landscape change resulting from the displacement of indigenous management regimes has been a major factor in divesting the Yurok people of natural resources, land, and indigenous lifeways. The direct effect of federal Indian land tenure policy on Indian lifeways has long been recognized, but the role of ecological change resulting from suppression of tribal control of natural resources has received less attention. This paper is an analysis of the replacement of Yurok forest management regimes with Euro-American “science-based” forestry programs—the shift from a forest for people to a forest for trees—and its role in the loss of Yurok ownership of and access to culturally and economically important natural resources.