31,000 Acres at the Front of a Movement

Chuck Loring knows all the good spots for finding dropped moose antlers. It’s part passion and part professional. He spends whatever free time he can packing his snowmobile into the bed of his truck and hauling it out to the Penobscot tribal trust land in north central Maine, where he works as the tribe’s director of natural resources. 

Sometimes, Loring’s 4-year-old daughter, River, will join, her tiny toddler head dwarfed by a big, bulbous helmet. When the conditions are right, the snowmobile makes it easier to cut across this otherwise quiet wilderness. On this March visit, though, the snow is too light and too fresh for the snowmobile. Anything too heavy sink inches deep in powder. Undisturbed by the recent storm, ash and pine trees tower over snowy banks and logging roads. It’s hard to understand how someone could be so familiar with the paths of this remote forestland, where the freshly fallen snow absorbs any sound. The silence and the absence of tire tracks impart a sense that this land is the domain of the moose and the ash trees more than that of any human.

But Loring now stands at the forefront of a project that suggests even a domain as wild as this one can be shared, to the mutual benefit of both the land and the humans who live nearby. Many view a massive land return he is leading as a proof of concept in unrestricted, Native-led conservation.

The nonprofit Trust for Public Land is set to return 31,000 acres purchased from a timber investor in Maine to Penobscot tribal management. It will be the largest return of its kind to an Indigenous tribe in U.S. history, without any easements or other restrictions.

It’s a piece of a bigger shift in conservation thinking; rather than putting a premium on pristine and untouched wilderness—as centuries of conservationists have—multiple environmental organizations are acknowledging that tribal stewardship benefits the land as well as Indigenous sovereignty, even when it chafes against traditional conservation models.

“There’s something happening in land trusts and conservation groups more generally, not only nationally, but internationally, where Indigenous-led efforts are being seen more and more as the kind of special sauce around what makes conservation better and lasts longer and have greater impact,” said Darren Ranco, a professor of anthropology at the University of Maine and a Penobscot citizen. 

Ranco looks how you might imagine an academic in the wilds of Maine: bespectacled and wearing forest-green flannel when we talked. He lives outside Orono with his family and three toy-sized rescue dogs and seems boundlessly upbeat, and friendly, for someone who spends his days studying colonialism and environmental destruction.

Conservation groups are catching on to the dual benefits of sovereignty and environmental protection. More than 420,000 acres have been returned nationally to tribal management over the past 20 years, according to a tally conducted by Sierra magazine. A range of methods have been used: outright land title purchases, donations from private landowners, transfers from land conservancies or government returns.

Many land returns place stipulations on how tribes will manage the land: the California nonprofit Wildlands Conservancy, for instance, purchased a $2.5 million ranch and is deeding it to a coalition of five tribes (Hopi, Navajo, Uintah and Ouray Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, and Zuni), with the stipulation that they cannot develop the land or use it for any economic gain. This kind of “mitigated sovereignty” is a considered step less than the full control many tribes seek, even if it does align with the aims of the five-tribe coalition.

Yet most data show that there isn’t a need for conservation directives on Indigenous land in order to achieve conservation outcomes, Ranco explained. For generations, Indigenous people have fostered understandings of, and relationships with, the land they inhabit. These connections underscore the importance of sovereignty, as well as the fact that tribes may just be the best stewards of the land. 

A now-classic 2019 study found that Indigenous-managed lands have greater biodiversity than protected areas in Brazil, Canada and Australia. Similarly, a 2020 report found that Indigenous-managed lands hold 36 percent of the world’s intact forests, and those lands have had a lower rate of deforestation than the global average since 2000. That’s crucial because preserving forests is not only essential to ecosystem conservation but also to mitigating carbon emissions and climate change.

On land already managed by the Penobscot, acoustic surveys have revealed that the forest is home to more tricolor bats and little brown bats than neighboring areas in Maine. Both populations are threatened by a fungal disease known as white-nose syndrome. 

“These Indigenous partners shouldn’t have to prove why their stewardship is better, but the proof is happening. It’s out there,” said Brett Ciccotelli, the tribal land recovery manager with First Light, a nonprofit aimed at connecting Maine’s tribes and conservation organizations.

The Trust for Public Land’s 31,000-acre return without restriction recognizes that special relationship. “Bigger changes are coming with the conservation groups and others recognizing that it’s not just getting that land protected by an easement or something. But really, if you want to do work with the tribes, you need to be deeper into understanding what that means in terms of sovereignty and management of that land,” said Cris Stainbrook, the president of the Indian Lands Tenure Foundation, a nonprofit focused on the recovery and return of Indigenous lands.

When he heard of the massive transfer in Maine, Stainbrook felt “this will be one of those tests of what [restrictions] get put on it before it gets transferred to the tribes.” It’s an experiment on whether conservation organizations can fundraise at such a massive scale without adding restrictions on land use. 

The Trust for Public Land ”took a huge risk,” Ciccotelli said. “They stepped up and said, ‘We understand that land return to the Penobscot Nation is only land return if that land is unrestricted.’ Land back isn’t necessarily conservation, it’s about sovereignty, and about self-determination. And it happens to also be about Indigenous stewardship, which is good for everybody.”

“Hopefully [it will be] a model for other projects across the country and to demonstrate that doing something at this scale is possible,” said Betsy Cook, the Maine state director for the Trust for Public Land.

The first step in the landmark Maine transaction came in December 2022 when the Trust for Public Land bought the 31,000-acre lot from a timber investment management company. A year later, the group announced its intent to transfer it to the Penobscot. In the coming years, the trust and the tribe will fundraise to pay off the $32 million in loans the trust took out to purchase the land. Once the loans are paid off, the trust will hand ownership and management over to the Penobscot.

The land sits in north central Maine, near the town of Millinocket, close to Baxter State Park and the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument. It falls along the east branch of the Penobscot River; tribal members call it the Wáhsehtəkʷ project, which is Penobscot for east branch. The forest is home to moose, bears, wood turtles, wetlands and 53 miles of streams that are vital habitats and spawning grounds for alewife and endangered Atlantic Salmon. The place practically bursts with conservation potential.

Within such a large swath of forest, there’s still so much for Loring and his team to survey and understand. Yet he already sees the opportunity for conservation gains, especially in the waterways that connect to the Penobscot River and its historic Atlantic Salmon habitat. 

Take Soldier’s Field Brook, for instance. The stream sits in a meadow at the bottom of a gravelly esker. Rocks sift to the bottom and form a gravel riverbed, a perfect spawning ground for salmon migrating north from the ocean. Protecting and enhancing good spawning habitats like this one is crucial to help surviving populations of the fish, which have become endangered due to river dams and warming oceans. The Wáhsehtəkʷ land is filled with streams like this, Loring said.

Managing the surrounding woodlands is another priority to Loring, whose background is in forestry. While the tribe does harvest lumber as an income source on some of its other land, it’s on a different scale—and with different priorities—from the industrial timber company that owned the east branch parcel previously. 

“We’re a land-rich tribe, not a money-rich tribe,” Loring said. He doesn’t expect to collect timber from this land for at least another 15 to 20 years. “We are looking at a big period of regrowth.”

Loring said the tribe’s logging practices are pro-environment. He plans for a broader diversity of trees, rather than just ones that are economically valuable for logging. When they do log, the tribe cuts fewer trees and limits logging to areas far from stream beds, to leave more structure to hold the stream in place.

The Penobscot consider themselves a riverine tribe—their reservation sits on an island in the middle of the river that shares the tribe’s name—but trees also hold deep cultural importance. In the tribe’s creation story, the larger-than-life folk hero Gluskabe shot an arrow into an ash tree, and out sprang all the Wabanaki people, a confederation of five tribes that includes the Penobscot. To this day, the tribe uses the bark of brown ash to make baskets, which people often use when hunting.

The way Loring and many Penobscot talk about their environment reflects this origin: The people and the land spring from the same source. There is no human/nature dichotomy, but rather one consistent exchange between relations. The Penobscot River, for instance, is an enrolled tribal member, and Chief Kirk Francis refers to it with human pronouns.

This is part of why Ranco, the anthropologist, believes the tribe will be such good stewards of the Wáhsehtəkʷ parcel. “It’s just a whole other system of framing what it means to be in, from, and caretake a place,” he said.

Nature does not need to be separate from humans to be conserved, Ranco argues. It’s a view that sharply contrasts with the traditional ideology of a European conservation movement, which was built on the premise that nature should be set aside, pristine and untouched by human influence. That idea was used by the U.S. government and white settlers as a justification for the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Native Americans who were removed from their homelands, some of which were then turned into national parks. 

Humans have actually enhanced biological diversity over the past 12,000 years, according to a study in which Ranco was a co-author—that is, people enhanced it until about 500 years ago, when European models of land management began to dominate.

The problem is not the mere presence of humans on biologically rich lands, but how they use and regard those lands. “The idea that it shakes loose is the presumption that humans are the problem inherently. It is not the case, in terms of biodiversity,” Ranco said.

The Penobscot management of the east branch land will reflect such a philosophy. The tribe will keep trails for hiking and mountain biking open to the general public. People will be able to fish and hunt on the land. And, of course, to Loring’s delight, people can snowmobile on the trails. 

“It would just be a dream to go visit the land and see folks fishing in the waterways or out on a moose hunt or walking through the woods to reconnect with the land,” said Cook, who has been working closely with Loring on fundraising. So far, they’ve raised $7 million of the $32 million they will need to complete the transaction.

One reason the Trust for Public Land wanted to buy the land was so a road could be built through the parcel to give visitors easy access to the existing Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument from the south. Right now, visitors must circuitously wind around the park to enter on its eastern side. The national chair of the trust, Lucas St. Clair, played a key role in creating the Katahdin monument in 2016. 

The tribe expects to build a visitor center at this future entrance to the monument. The thought of a center interpreting Penobscot culture in the shadow of Maine’s highest peak, near the northern terminus of the historic Appalachian Trail, makes Ranco emotional. “The framework is one, that you’re entering a Wabanaki place,” he said. “You’re entering not just the rugged Maine woods, but you’re entering into thousands of years of relations between people and place. That is awe-inspiring.”

It’s development the tribe wouldn’t be able to do with a conservation easement. But that choice, at least theoretically, also leaves open the possibility of future development. As energy companies eye Maine as a hot spot for solar farms, the tribe could someday lease some of the land for solar panels. However, given the tribe’s history with the hydroelectric dams that clogged their beloved river and decimated salmon populations, Loring thinks it’s unlikely future generations would change course and do solar leases. “It’s hard to justify doing solar on land that will keep giving back to us,” he said.

What undergirds all of this is the fact that this land represents so much more to the tribe than the economic benefits it may offer. The east branch parcel is near the site of four Penobscot communities that thrived in the early 18th century. The history is murky and paperless, and during the 1800s, the towns were destroyed.

“Once you get up there and realize how amazing the lands are, you realize how crazy it was they were taken,” Loring said. He said they were one of the tribe’s last stands against European colonists, so he surmises they must have been important.

“They were our sacred sites; they were our holy lands,” Ranco added. It helps to explain why their return is so meaningful. “To think about now, our legacy of returning some of these lands for our descendants really reverses that and creates this huge opportunity for healing.”

The inclination may be to imagine this healing in broad, grand strokes, in keeping with the scale of the project and with its implications across Indian Country. But really, such healing can come in tiny isolated moments, too—like strapping 4-year-old River into her seat at the front of the snowmobile and showing her the secret clearing where the moose like to shed their antlers. There, she’ll find sheds as tall and wide as she is, and she’ll toddle across the same frozen ground that has been traversed by generations of Penobscot before her.