Students dig deep to study ecology

THOMAS PATTERSON / Statesman Journal Malanie Pailzote and other members of the science club at Chemawa Indian School spent several days at Jawbone Flats in the Opal Creek Wilderness, learning about the native watershed and planting trees to restore the area.

Project takes them to the Opal Creek Wilderness

TARA MCLAIN
Statesman Journal
October 13, 2004

JAWBONE FLATS -- The forest would have crept in to reclaim the bed of crushed rock.

Red alder trees eventually would have sprouted in the clearing, even without the help of 23 American Indian teens.

But with hundreds of saplings and buckets of nitrogen-rich soil, the students and other forest stewards initiated the reforestation Saturday.

"This is faster, and it gives them experience in applied science," Dennis Martinez, a professional forester, said as Chemawa Indian School students picked at the hard ground.

With a grant from the National Forest Foundation and coordination from Ecotrust, the project teaches the students about native plant ecology.

The small but determined Malanie Pailzote hoisted a garden hoe up and down. She raked hard at the earth, scraping up rocks.

Craig Jacobson, with Ecotrust, saw the effort and brought over a thick breaking bar. He noticed a gourd-sized rock that the girl already had excavated.

"That's all we keep digging up," said Malanie, a White River Apache and a Chemawa sophomore.

Sweat beaded on Jacobson's forehead as he plunged the bar again and again into the ground.

Dirt loosened, and Malanie and Heather Gobert, a Blackfeet from Montana, pulled at the rocks, forming the pair's sixth foot-deep hole that morning.

Malanie took up a sapling, removed the plastic bucket and gently separated the root ball. The teens set the fragile tree in the rocky pit and surrounded it with dark, fluffy compost.

They mixed in soil dug from the bases of alders in the surrounding forest. It already is enriched with mycorrhizal fungi. The microbes act as extensions of plant roots, seeking moisture and nutrients to draw into the tree. The fungi allow plants to live more successfully in man-made or poor environments.

"It's kind of medicine for the forest," said Martinez, a Tohono O'odham and chairman of the Indigenous Peoples' Restoration Network.

As the girls tucked the tree in, Malanie noticed Heather's dirt-covered hands. "Now you are a blackhands, not a Blackfeet," she said.

The clearing is a pock in the 35,000-acre Opal Creek Wilderness.

It was created decades ago by the Starvation Mill, which crushed rock and ore from the nearby Ruby mines until 1989, said Steve Wise, development director for Friends of Opal Creek.

Grasses cling to the rocky soil, and small alder trees grow along the perimeter. But the concretelike ground does not yet contain enough nutrients to support cedars, firs or ferns.

The Friends of Opal Creek organization owns the 15 acres of the Jawbone Flats village, including the clearing.

The Friends also care for 35,000 acres of Opal Creek Wilderness through education and stewardship programs.

The trees planted by the Chemawa students will be monitored and cared for by other visitors, including schoolchildren.

Wise said that Friends of Opal Creek also frequently works with American Indian tribes and groups to learn from one another.

In the case of members of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, it allows them to reconnect to native lands.

"In so many cases, particularly in the Opal Creek area, people have been separated from their ancestral areas," Wise said.

During a rainy lunch break, Wise told the students the story of the Santiam Kalapooyas and Santiam Molallas, two tribes that agreed to live together in the canyon if it meant the United States government wouldn't relocate them to other side of the Cascades.

In the end, the government moved them anyway, to the Grand Ronde valley with other small tribes.

The Chemawa students come from tribes ranging from Alaska to Arizona to South Dakota. Most hadn't heard the history of the Grand Ronde before, but it was similar to the stories they had heard and lived.

Many Chemawa students come to the Salem boarding school to find opportunities that they can't get in reservation schools.

It serves as a reform school, an alternative school or a prep school, depending on what a student wants out of it.

For Jackie and Sara Santos, it offers experiences that they rarely would have encountered on the Rincon Indian Reservation in Southern California.

Jackie is president of the school's chapter of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society. She wants to study environmental law. Sara is interested in psychology.

"These things I do here because it helps people and it helps the Earth," Sara said.

The sisters returned to carving holes in the hostile ground.

With care from others, the alders will shoot toward the sky. They will bring nutrients into the earth, helping the forest reclaim the clearing.



tmclain@StatesmanJournal.com or (503) 399-6705

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Reprinted with permission of the Statesman Journal