news story / By Heidi Walters

Battle of Orleans

Karuk tribal members and their supporters lock down logging in Six Rivers National Forest

(Dec. 24, 2009)  When the logger from Mark Crawford Logging showed up at the dirt Forest Service spur off Red Cap Road in Orleans at 6:30 a.m. last Wednesday, he encountered the unwelcoming party.

They’d been waiting for him since 4 a.m. — an “ad hoc group of Klamath Basin residents from all walks of life … Indians, non-natives, mothers, fathers, workers, hippies, youth, and elders,” as the news release they sent out later that day declared.

Blockaders made a little adjustment to some signs. Photo by Ken Malcomson

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They called themselves the Klamath Justice Coalition. They’d chainsawed up the slash pile left by the logging crew and used it to build a thin fire across the road. They’d parked their vehicles in another line across the road. And then they’d arranged themselves into a third, human body line of defense across the road, near the fire. And they’d hung out drinking coffee until he showed up.

“He said, ‘Well, I’m going to go up and get two loads. That’s all. Just two loads,’” recalled Chook-Chook Hillman, who helped organize the blockade, later that day. “And we said, ‘No, you’re not.’ And he said, ‘Well, it looks like I’m not going to work today. I’ve got some phone calls to make.’ And he left. He was nice about it.”

Afterward, the coalition lobbed its news release, and Karuk Tribe spokesman Craig Tucker sent out one as well. They said the tribe, the Orleans/Somes Bar Fire Safe Council and other community groups, along with several environmental organizations, had just slogged through a three-year collaboration process with Six Rivers National Forest, under the Healthy Forest Restoration Act. They’d finally crafted the Orleans Community Fuels Reduction (OCFR) plan, which would reduce fire hazards on 2,700 acres of the Orleans District, allow commercial logging on about a thousand of those and enhance Karuk cultural sites in the Panamnik World Renewal Ceremonial District.

But now, they said, the Forest Service had blown it.

The charges: The logging company wasn’t following the agreed-upon guidelines for protecting cultural sites in the district — in fact, those guidelines hadn’t even made it into the contract, which the tribe would have known if it had a chance to see the thing before it went out to bid, they said. They said the company was taking out bigger fir trees and deliberately damaging more hardwoods in order to sell them as firewood. They said inappropriate equipment was being used in delicate areas. And they said the multi-party monitoring the tribe wanted hadn’t taken place.

Ancient spiritual trails, which Karuk medicine men still take from the river to the mountains during the World Renewal ceremony, had been impacted: A bulldozer had been driven across one of the trails, and logs had been decked too close to it, said Bill Tripp, eco-cultural resources specialist for the Karuk.

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