Portrait of a Prairie

About a decade ago, ecologist Joe Hostler set out to better understand how Yurok lands have changed over time in an effort to protect them into the future.

What he learned helped lay the groundwork for the tribe’s first foray into grasslands restoration at a project currently underway on 60-acres of a site known as Steven’s Prairie, a remote area about an hour’s drive from Klamath at the southern base of Red Mountain.

As the Community and Ecosystems Division manager in the tribe’s Environmental Department, Hostler says much of his work focuses on research related to “connecting people to the environment and how that benefits our mental health and well-being.”

By interviewing tribal elders, with some sharing knowledge passed down from their grandparents, Hostler says he was able to gather “a snapshot of what the ecology and what the mountains and the rivers and the ocean and the whole Yurok territory used to look like once upon a time, when the environment was in a healthier state.”

And in those discussions, Hostler says, he heard the same thing over and over again: “When I was younger, there were a lot more open spaces, there were bigger meadows and the forest wasn’t so overgrown.'”

Right around the same time, he notes, the tribe was beginning its now ongoing efforts, rooted in the Yurok Constitution, to reclaim, restore and culturally manage ancestral territory lost after 1850 to U.S. government-sanctioned land theft amid other atrocities inflicted on Native peoples throughout the region.

“Proactively, I was thinking, ‘We are getting these lands back and I’m interested in restoring these lands,” he says.

With a visual symphony of flora supporting a rich abundance of wildlife, prairies have played an integral role in the lives of the Yurok and other Native peoples since time immemorial, providing prime areas for hunting game and gathering plants for food, medicine and the materials needed for a wide range of uses, including basket weaving.

And, just as the land provided for them, the Yurok people cared for the land, using cultural burning to manage and protect the vast open spaces and, by extension, the diverse array of plants and animals that depended on them.

That role of caretaker was interrupted following first contact, Hostler says. Some 170 years later, with elders directing him “to work on bringing the meadows back,” Hostler says he began trying to quantify not only how large those prairies were in the past but what was still left of them.

Using the earliest aerial photos of Yurok lands available, digitally stitched together by the tribe’s GIS department, Hostler says he was able to overlay those with modern images. Through that process, he says he determined that only 1 percent of 3,500 acres of meadows that existed on Yurok lands in the 1940s still remains, noting “even that was fewer than what would historically have been there at contact in the 1850s.”

“With genocide and colonization, tribal people weren’t able to burn the land and so, as there was no disturbance, the trees just kept growing, the conifers grew into meadows. And then, Smokey the Bear happened in the early 1900s and so all fires were put out, and that just created this cascade of overgrowth,” he says.

Still, Hostler says, the research gave him an idea of the “benchmark of what we are striving to achieve for restoration.”

Now, after years of planning, the first steps toward bringing back the vital ecosystem are underway at Steven’s Prairie, with the Yurok Tribe’s Fisheries, Wildlife, Watershed Restoration and Roads, Environmental, Cultural, Forestry and Fire departments all playing roles in transforming the landscape back to its natural state.

The major undertaking started during the summer with the removal of 400 trees, according to the tribe, mostly Douglas-firs that had been planted as part of a logging operation. Many of the extricated trees are now being used to help create salmon and steelhead habitat in the nearby Blue Creek watershed, a primary tributary of the Klamath River.

After the groundwork was done to clear the 60 acres, a massive reseeding effort began earlier this year, with the hand-sowing of 900 pounds of native grasses, plants and herbs, including blue wild rye, Indian potato and showy milkweed.

The ultimate goal of the project, Yurok Wildlife Director Tiana Williams-Claussen says in an announcement of the milestone, “is to restore the meadows and prairies to increase plant diversity and abundance that will provide habitat and food for wildlife from insects to elk.”

“Where our wildlife thrives, we thrive, as members of the same ecological community,” she says.

Several tribal department heads also noted the importance of the moment.

“In the 25-plus years that I’ve been involved in watershed restoration, this project is the most satisfying,” Yurok Watershed and Roads Department Director Richard Nelson says in the release. “We are creating habitat that will benefit all native wildlife and our community for many generations to come.”

Along similar lines, Fire Department Division Chief Blaine McKinnon says, “These are lands our ancestors burned hundreds of years ago. I would love to come back out here one day to hunt with my son and be able to say I had a part in restoring that prairie to bring back elk and bring back deer to this area.”

The prairie, Williams-Claussen says in an interview with the Journal, is named for a tribal family who once called the land home. During the planning process, she says was able to bring one of the elders who used to live there out to talk about the site and how it was traditionally used and cared for, noting that even decades later there was still evidence of their time there, including “what was a clearly a maintained hazel patch.”

“You can see this was a managed land and it just needs some love and care to get it back in shape,” she says.

While historically prairies have played an important role for tribal people, the complex and often underappreciated ecosystems — at least in a Western eye’s view — also take on a new meaning in a world facing environmental stressors from the effects of climate change, Williams-Claussen says.

“Prairies are even more important in this day and age,” she says. “They will provide, for example, a natural fuel break. So if a big fire comes … it gets to the prairie, it slows down due to the decrease in fuels and it acts as a natural fuel break. For example, we might be focused on getting prairies around our villages and things like that, so we can have more protection there.”

And, she notes, the areas basically act like nature’s sponge.

“Prairies are also a really great way to help tend our water resources because, especially when they’ve been reinvested with deep-rooted native plants, they will hold onto water, which they collect in the wet or the cold times, and then rerelease them into our riparian zone, our creeks and the like, as needed during the drier seasons,” she says, noting that prairies that have been grown over with trees are going to use “a lot more water just for their own needs and then that’s not making it to the rest of the system.”

Another aspect, one Williams-Claussen says she wishes she knew more about, is how prairie lands are actually carbon sinks.

“We always think about having as many trees as we can for carbon sequestration, and that’s certainly a part of it, but prairies themselves, more evidence is saying, are incredibly important to that, as well,” she says. “So having them will help decrease our carbon footprints.”

“I love prairies,” she adds. “They are great.”

Although Hostler identified a number of potential locations for the initial restoration project, he says Steven’s Prairie stood out as the starting point for a number of reasons, most importantly because it was on the verge of being lost.

“At some point, if the meadows are too small, then you lose that community of plants and animals that also frequent there and so Steven’s was on that tipping point,” he says. “It was almost to a point where if we didn’t do some restoration, we were going to lose the meadow plants and the birds and all the things that utilize meadows. … We were like, ‘If we act now, we can save it. But, if we wait and wait and wait, we’ll lose that ecosystem,’ in a sense.”

Part of the reason elk are no longer found on tribal lands, he says, as an example, “is we’ve lost most of our meadows.” With projects like Steven’s Prairie, Hostler says, they hope to change that.

“We’re trying to create the habitat for them to come back to Yurok territory and our long-term goal is to create a network of meadows on the reservation and within our territory so that we can have travel coordinators for the wildlife,” he says. “So that’s the long-term goal, but Steven’s is our first spot with the intent of creating an elk refuge and so once we create the habitat then, hopefully, we can introduce elk one way or another.”

Before the clearing began, Hostler says, Steven’s Prairie basically looked like “overgrown Christmas tree farm” due to the logging company that previously owned the land planting trees in the former open space, noting the practice of converting prairies to timber land is another reason for the loss of the vital habitat.

“Because the trees were growing in a meadow, they grow outward instead of upward,” Hostler says. “In a forest, a Douglas-fir would grow upward and the branches would be up higher. Whereas if it’s in the open, it can just grow all the way down to the ground and outward like a bush. And so they shade out all the grass and everything underneath it.

“If you get a community of those, they shade out everything underneath and you don’t have anything but just a bush of Douglas-fir branches because, consecutively, it’s a tree and another tree and another tree, so it’s just kind of a dead zone underneath, for plant life anyway. In a meadow there’s a diversity of flowers and herbs and all kinds of things that grow. They are very biologically diverse hotspots. When the conifers shade those out … we lose that biodiversity.”

But, he says, there were still enough pockets of remnant grass areas left at Steven’s Prairie to enable the tribe to gather seeds, which were then sent to a nursery to be propagated and sent back to the tribe for use in the restoration project.

“So we get the grandkids or the kids of the grass that we collected the grass seed from and then we’ll replant those later on,” Hostler says. “So genetically, it should be the same or very similar grass from that area, and that’s also a pretty awesome part of it as well.”

Among the many rewarding aspects of the project, he notes, was how it brought together a wide swath of tribal departments and staff members, all bringing their own expertise, to make the restoration a reality.

“I envisioned this years ago and it’s awesome to see it coming together now, and I’m thankful so many other people see that vision, as well, and we’ve all contributed in our own ways and have been able to collaborate and work together,” Hostler says.

And, he notes, the project was not just an interdepartmental effort but an intergenerational one, with high school students and recent graduates in a tribal program helping on the tree removal as part of a heavy equipment training program. Throughout, Hostler says he was able to talk to many of the trainees about his work.

“So, that was pretty fulfilling in itself, as well,” he says.

While many of the elders Hostler originally interviewed are now gone, he says he’s proud of the work being done at Steven’s Prairie to take “care of the land the way it historically had been as Yurok people.”

And even in these early stages, Hostler says, he sees the difference.

“After we started removing the trees, there was more deer activity, a lot of wildlife; the birds are congregated now … so the environment is noticing the change, as well,” he says. “I assume in the spring it’s going to rebound even more and we should be able to get not only the plants but also the other animals as well to come back.

“We shaped these landscapes and now we are trying to get them back to what it should be,” Hostler says.

Kimberly Wear is the Journal’s digital editor. Reach her at
(707) 442-1400, extension 323, or kim@northcoastjournal.com.

This article appears in Portrait of a Prairie.