About 10,000 people — descendants of 12 Indigenous tribes — make up the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation today. They like to call their land “God’s Country,” a place of near-divine beauty where sheer cliffs descend from dense timberlands and plunge into the Columbia River. Rugged alpine mountains bisect the reservation, opening onto windswept plains with stands of towering trees on its western edge. Junipers and huckleberries dot the woods along with other culturally significant plants.

The Colville Reservation is one of the many Indigenous tribal communities protected by its own tribal wildfire fighters with funding from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). In 2019, about 80% of tribal forests were managed in part or fully by tribal programs funded directly by the BIA. Tribal communities that lack their own programs can opt for direct management by the BIA.

However, these tribal wildfire fighters, who protect some of the nation’s most vulnerable communities, are stretched to their limits. Long-term federal land mismanagement and climate change have caused the number and intensity of reservation fires to soar. About 7% of the 4 million acres of tribal lands in the country burned between 2010 and 2020.

Wildfire-fighting programs across the nation all struggle with low pay, funding and recruitment. But on tribal lands, the pressure is even more acute.

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