news story / By Heidi Walters

Midnight Reg Runaround

Forest rule would make even granny basket weavers go get a permit

(Feb. 5, 2009)  Around this time of year, the basket weavers up around Orleans are gathering and cleaning willow root from the river exposed by the water’s rise and fall. In March and April, they’ll go for the willow sticks. In the summertime, there’s bear grass and maidenhair fern. Each season, they’ll gather only what they need to make their baskets for the year, and leave enough for the next year. And the next.

Renee Stauffer is a Karuk basket weaver. Her mother is a basket weaver. Her great-grandmother was a basket weaver. Her grandmother, however, was not a basket weaver — at age 6 she was sent off to government school in Riverside, and the cultural continuum was broken; but even then, says Stauffer, her great-grandma sent baskets to Riverside for her daughter to sell to raise living expenses.

A Hoopa/Yurok weaver makes an acorn cooking basket from hazel sticks and spruce roots (which swell when wet to make a waterproof basket for cooking). Photo by Jennifer Kalt

GALLERY >

Now another U.S. government intervention threatens to interrupt the Stauffers’ basket weaving tradition, as well as similar traditions of other families: a new rule saying people who gather materials from ancestral lands to make baskets, sustain themselves, practice medicine and conduct ceremonies must get a permit to do so. However, a mad scramble during inauguration week by opponents to the new rule, including basket weaver advocate and local botanist Jen Kalt of McKinleyville, might just possibly have saved the day.

The Sale and Disposal of Special Forest Products and Forest Botanical Products Final Rule is one of those “midnight rules” pushed through by the Bush Administration as it headed out the back door. The rule sets regulations on the harvest and sale of “special” forest products from National Forest Service lands, such as mushrooms, grasses and twigs, seeds and berries, cones, nuts and flowers.

The rule was officially proposed in October 2007. The final rule was published in the Federal Register Dec. 29, 2008, and was supposed to take effect this Jan. 28. But opponents convinced Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to delay the final rule’s implementation until March 30, giving the public until March 2 to comment on it.

“In keeping with President Obama’s recent pledge for a more transparent and inclusive government that works for the people, this extension will afford the public an opportunity to participate in the rulemaking process,” Vilsack said in a Jan. 28 news release. “This rule is especially important to American Indians and Alaska Natives and we want to make sure that they, and other stakeholders, have an opportunity to have their voices heard.”

Vilsack likely was influenced by a letter he got Jan. 26 from Nick Rahall, chairman of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Natural Resources, in which Rahall said he was concerned that the final rule “raises serious questions of law and Indian policy.”

Kalt, a resource protection associate for the California Indian Basket Weavers Association, says she doesn’t know who contacted Rahall to get him to write that letter. She said a lot of people were rushing around trying to halt the rule’s implementation.

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