Ikxariyãtuuyship Integrated Fire Management Project

The Ikxariyátuuyship Integrated Fire Management Project on Offield Mountain includes 10,014 acres, 211 acres of which are held in trust by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and under the administrative jurisdiction of the Karuk Tribe. The remaining 9,793 acres are within the Ukonom Ranger District of the Klamath National Forest, which is now administered by the Orleans Ranger District of the Six Rivers National Forest. The Project area in entirety, lies within Karuk Tribal Lands. The project area is centered within the Karuk Tribe’s Aboriginal Territory and is located within the Katimiin Cultural Area. The term “Ikxariyátuuyship” is the true name for what is commonly referred to today as “Offield Mountain” and roughly translates to “spirit people mountain.” Ikxariyátuuyship is a significant cultural landscape where annual ceremonial and cultural burning once took place at larger scales than they do today. Through joint planning with the Karuk Tribe and other partners of the WKRP, this project will promote cultural focal species, human gathering activities, cultural practices, and place-based socio-ecological relationships, which are reliant upon a healthy ecosystem. 

Fire exclusion practices over the past century have impacted conditions conducive to maintaining the Indigenous fire regime. The high concentration and broad distribution of vegetative fuels in and around the project area is likely to promote high intensity flames that are difficult to contain, as has been seen in recent wildfires. The purpose of the Ikxariyátuuyship Project is to implement forest management activities on lands administered by the National Forest System and to ensure compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act for federal actions within portions of the recently transferred Sacred Lands area. The project would restore conditions conducive to revitalizing cultural burning of the Karuk Tribe, which itself is not a federally proposed action, but rather the treatments necessary to facilitate cultural burning conditions are proposed. Enabling the conduct of Indigenous management principles as a cultural standard and practice, and as outlined in the Karuk Tribe’s Eco-Cultural Resources Management Plan, will help restore biodiversity, as well as ecosystem process and function across the project landscape, reduce risk to the community from wildfires, and increase resilience to future fires.

For more information visit the USFS Project page LINK (to be provided soon)