Indigenous Youth Lead the Way in Conservation and Career Growth

Share

Link copied!

The National Forest Foundation (NFF) engages young people across the United States to develop the next generation of community leaders and stewards of our public lands. A diverse array of students participate in wide-ranging conservation programs in America’s National Forests. All NFF programs offer unique opportunities for young people to experience National Forests in their communities, reconnect with their cultural and traditional values and participate in forest stewardship activities.

The NFF’s Mission Mountains Youth Crew Program (MMYC) exposes youth living on the Flathead Reservation in Western Montana to career pathways in natural resources and helps build a bridge to college through a summer job program. MMYC provides Indigenous youth with opportunities to learn life skills, hands-on experiences in outdoor careers and cultural connections. Crew members complete stewardship projects, gain backcountry skills, engage in community service, learn about regional natural resources and build networks to help achieve their goals.

The Mission Mountains are ancestral lands of the Bitterroot Salish and Pend d’Oreille and contain many heritage sites of historic significance to the Tribes. In 2021, NFF ran a pilot of the MMYC program with a crew of six high school students from local schools and two student crew leads from the Salish Kootenai College. The crew worked in and around the Mission Mountains for seven weeks, completing stewardship activities with both the Flathead National Forest and the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes (CSKT). Since then, the crew size has increased from six to eight and NFF has added two weeks to the program, making for a nine-week program. One of these additional weeks includes leadership training, first aid certification and more. The second added week is a week-long trek in the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation recently awarded NFF a $20,000 grant to support the MMYC program. The grant will support the program’s goal of cultivating Indigenous youth land and wildlife stewards who are energized about their future. This aligns with the foundation’s Youth Development work, which scales alternative pathways to economic mobility for young people, with a particular interest in Indigenous youth in Montana.

All activities during the MMYC program take place on CSKT ancestral lands and crew members are CSKT tribal members or descendants. The crew experiences diverse career pathways and works alongside CSKT and Forest Service specialists who represent water science, wildlife management and outdoor recreation disciplines. MMYC recruits crew members from high schools on the Reservation and has adopted CSKT’s “Tribal Preference” hiring method. This method gives preference first to CSKT-enrolled tribal members, second to descendants, third to members of other tribes and lastly to non-tribal members.

“We see this program as an opportunity to build up the next generation of conservation stewards and, ultimately, as a means towards including more native voices and perspectives in the conservation field,” said Marlee Ostheimer, northern region program manager, National Forest Foundation. “We hope that by exposing youth to these different career and networking opportunities, MMYC helps create bridges to careers in natural resources with both the Tribe and the Forest Service. And by partnering with the Salish Kootenai College, we also hope that the program helps build bridges to higher education after high school.”

In addition to learning about natural resource careers, crew members learn the history of how people managed the land and resources. Led by a tribal member and Salish Kootenai College instructor, this program component teaches youth how the land and resources were used as food and medicine and to make tools, clothes and other material items. 

As the MMYC program continues to grow, it serves as an exemplary model for youth engagement in other regions of the country. The foundation is proud to support the MMYC program and the drive to ensure that our public lands are protected for years to come while young leaders develop professional skills that last a lifetime.