After Idaho Legislature nearly derailed entire operation, Tribe faced racist questions on whether it was capable of repopulating Lower 48
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second installment of Howl, a five-part written series and podcast season produced in partnership between the Idaho Capital Sun, States Newsroom and Boise State Public Radio.
Long before the American government removed them both from their ancestral homelands, wolves and Native Americans coexisted side-by-side for centuries.
Those connections run deep for Shannon Wheeler, the chairman of the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee.
Wheeler remembers growing up as a boy, hearing elder members of the Nez Perce Tribe tell stories about wolves.One story involves a young boy talking with his grandfather.
“They were talking and the grandfather told him that each of us have a wolf inside of us.
We actually have two wolves inside of us. One's a good wolf, and one's a bad wolf.
And they're constantly fighting one another. And the grandson asked him, ‘Well, Grandpa, which wolf wins?' And he says, ‘Whichever one you feed the most will win,'” Wheeler said.
The story of the two wolves is one that Wheeler carries with him to this day.
“We're able to utilize that lesson and our teachings to our younger ones coming up as we continue to try to grow our people and to fit into part of a world that is outside of who we are and outside of our culture and so we need those strengths,” Wheeler said. “We need to know that we're feeding the good wolf inside of us so that we are that strong.”In addition to the stories, some members of the Nez Perce Tribe develop even deeper spiritual connections with wolves.
“What I can tell you from my position as the Tribal chairman is the wolf has always played a significant part in who we are as people, based on even the names of our people,” Wheeler said. “Many of our people have gone out for wéyekins … A wéyekin is something where you go and fast and you get your animal spirit, and it'll come to you. And sometimes it's a himíin, it's a wolf. Himíin is the name for us for wolf.”
Nearly 70 years after the U.S. government drove the wolf population to near extinction in the U.S. Rocky Mountains, that spiritual connection is what led tribal members to work to bring the himíin back to Idaho, Yellowstone National Park and the West. This is the story of how the Nez Perce pulled off a task no one else wanted – and why they're still fighting for wolves today.
An opportunity by the Creator to occupy this land
For thousands of years the Nez Perce Tribe has lived, hunted, fished and traded in what are now parts of Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Montana and Wyoming.
Over time, members of the Nez Perce Tribe developed a deep connection to the land and animals, said Allen Pinkham, a member of the Nez Perce Tribe who was born in 1938.
“To us, we are given the opportunity by the Creator to occupy this land that we're at right now and then we're supposed to take care of the land and all the species that we utilize because it's a life source,” Pinkham said. “It's an opportunity to believe and have faith in your Creator. That's what we do, and we're supposed to take care of everything else, because it provides and sustains life for ourselves.”
Today, the Nez Perce is a federally recognized tribe that has about 3,500 members and governs the Nez Perce Reservation that is located in north-central Idaho. The Tribe's headquarters is located in the town of Lapwai, Idaho, and the reservation sits on a fraction of the Nez Perces ancestral territory. Lapwai is a working-class town nestled in a valley and the reservation is a mix of grassland, forested mountains and rural communities anchored by the Clearwater River.
An 1855 treaty between the Nez Perce Tribe and the U.S. government set aside about 7.5 million acres of land for the tribe.
But after gold was discovered on the reservation, additional treaties shrunk its size to less than a tenth of what it was. It's now about 770,000 acres
The Idaho Legislature wanted no part of the federal governments plan to reintroduce wolves to Idaho
Thanks to bounties, trapping and widespread poisoning, by the 1930s the U.S. federal government all but killed off wolves that used to roam the U.S. Rocky Mountains from the Canadian border to Mexico.But in the 1990s the U.S. government undertook one of the most controversial wildlife programs in history – capturing wild wolves in Canada and reintroducing them in Idaho and Yellowstone National Park.On Jan. 14, 1995 – in the aftermath of a major snowstorm, Suzanne Asha Stone was part of a convoy of vehicles that made a white-knuckle drive across icy roads to release four wolves at Corn Creek at the edge of the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in Central Idaho. At the time, Stone was an intern on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s wolf capture and reintroduction team.
Conditions were so sketchy that some members of the team unbuckled their seatbelts as they worried about plunging into the freezing Salmon River below, Stone said.
“If you slid off the road into the river, you wouldn't have had time to disconnect your seat belt,” Stone said. “It was kind of like the decision of what's the worst that could happen, and preparing for that.”
The wolves, which had been flown from Canada, were placed in kennels and driven in the back of U.S. Forest Service pickups to the Frank Church Wilderness.
When they arrived at Corn Creek, the wolf team opened the kennel doors and immediately released the wolves into the wild.Those first four wolves reintroduced in Idaho had only been running wild for three days when the Idaho Legislature nearly derailed the entire operation.On Jan. 17, 1995, the Idaho Legislature rejected the Wolf Recovery and Management Plan developed by the Legislative Wolf Oversight Committee.
The move blocked the state from leading wolf recovery in Idaho.
And it left the federal government without a local partner to monitor and oversee the first wolf population to call Idaho home in more than half of a century.
What happened next is a largely untold story of how the Nez Perce Tribe stepped in to save wolf reintroduction in Idaho.
Even now, 30 years later, many people in Idaho don't know the role the tribe played.
‘A song for the wolves:' How the Nez Perce Tribe saved wolves in Idaho
Even as the Idaho Legislature said no to wolves, the Nez Perce Tribe was demonstrating its connection to wolves and investment in wolf reintroduction.
Just before wolves were reintroduced to Idaho and Yellowstone National Park in January 1995, the late Horace Axtell, who was the spiritual leader of the traditional Nez Perce Seven-Drum religion, and tribal member Allen Pinkham traveled to Missoula, Montana.
Axtell and Pinkham came to offer blessings for the wolves that had been captured in Canada and were being kept in kennels at an airport hangar before their release. They met the wolves just before they were transported over the final leg of their journey for reintroduction.
During the ceremony, Axtell led a song welcoming the wolves back home to Montana, Idaho and Yellowstone.
“And so he sang a song for the wolves,” Pinkham said. About that time, the late Nez Perce leader Levi Holt traveled to Boise to meet with policymakers, said his nephew, James Holt.
Levi Holt delivered a speech at the Idaho State Capitol pushing to have the Nez Perce Tribe take responsibility for the new wolf program in Idaho, James Holt said.
“My uncle Levi, being very active at that time, made that impassioned speech before decision makers to actually push them to have the tribe be the managing partner for that reintroduction effort,” James Holt said.
It worked.Because of the tribe's connection to wolves and history of coexistence, the Nez Perce Tribe was ready to take over wolf reintroduction and conservation after the Idaho Legislature said no.
“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was looking for a partner, and we became that partner,” said Aaron Miles Sr., who has worked as natural resources manager for the Nez Perce Tribe since 1999.Miles was still finishing his forestry degree at University of Idaho when the Nez Perce took over the program in Idaho. He took pride in seeing the tribe taking a lead role in protecting a species that had shared a homeland with his ancestors.
But Miles also heard plenty of stereotypes and lots of misinformation about the tribe – even among college students he was helping tutor.
“I'd hear all the chatter about, well, can the tribe do this? How can they do that?” Miles said. “They're all these questions, and sometimes it was racist. It wasn't just the fact that they were asking an honest question. But it had to be like, ‘OK, these Indians, this or that,' and here I am helping some of these guys with their homework, and that really upset me.”
Hiking and howling, the jaw-dropping work of monitoring Idaho's new wolf population
Biologist Marcie Carter is a member of the Nez Perce Tribe who served on the tribe's wolf project starting in June s1997.
Carter got her start while she was still a student at Lewis-Clark State College and helped put together the first wolf management plan.“Our goal was to go into the field, find paired up wolves that potentially had pups, and document the reproduction of those wolves, and also count how many pups were out there,” Carter said.
“That summer I don't even recall how many, we probably had maybe five or six pairs of wolves that had puppies that year,” Carter said. “So they started out very well.”
Carter and another biologist spent their summer hiking around Central Idaho in places like Stanley and the Bear Valley area near Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, looking for wolves.
The wolves had been fitted with radio collars that allowed the wolf project team to track their location.
Typically a pilot and another team member would fly overhead, locate the wolves from the air and then use a radio to relay the animals' location to the biologists on the ground.
At that point, the biologists would hike in and locate the wolves.
“We worked 10 days in a row, and then we'd take four days off,” Carter said. “And we camped out, we backpacked and lived in a tent and slept on our Therm-A-Rest and ate packaged noodles. And every day for those 10 days, that's what we were doing. We were up, out and looking for any type of sign of wolves.”
Although she grew up in Idaho and had spent time in the woods, Carter hadn't really ventured into the wilderness until she joined the Nez Perce's wolf project team. Before setting out, she had to borrow a backpack, sleeping bag, tent and cook stove.
A typical assignment during her first summer in 1997 involved flying into Central Idaho's remote Chamberlain Basin with a team of other biologists.
Located within the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, the Chamberlain Basin was the site where one of the first wolf packs in Idaho established territory following the reintroduction of wolves. That pack became known as the Chamberlain Basin Pack.
“That was basically our lives during that time,” Carter said. “It was just backpacking, walking, hiking, listening. It was a great time.”
The reason they spent so much time in wolf country is because that is the best way to get an idea of how the wolves are doing and what they are up to.Carter and the team conducted howl surveys. With hands cupped over mouths, researchers threw their heads back and let out their best imitation wolf howls.
They hoped to get live wolves to howl in response, which helped them track the wolves' location.
As the team hiked and drove across wolf country, they scoured the ground for wolf tracks and droppings that researchers call scat.
They analyzed data from wolves fitted with radio collars. They documented the newborn pups.
And they counted the wolves that were killed.
Once a year the team packed all that data into a report documenting Idaho's wolf population.
“It was all very positive and very, very jaw-dropping type work,” Carter said.
Although the wolf project started as a cool summer job for her, it became more than that.Carter began asking one of her grandfathers about wolves.
They talked about how himíin, the Nimíipuu language word for wolf, comes from the word for mouth. That's because wolves talk to each other, Carter said, with their howls.
When older members of the Nez Perce Tribe began to find out about the wolf project, they asked Carter about her work and shared stories about the tribe's history.When they talked about losing wolves from the landscape, sometimes the older Nez Perce members talked to Carter about other losses the tribe experienced.
“It was a learning experience for me, not just in the field, but culturally,” Carter said. “It's just that it goes back to the loss of the connection that all tribal people went through, with being moved to the reservation, being forced to stop speaking our language,” Carter said.
“It did kind of raise that awareness – also for other tribal people – that loss that we had experienced and continue to experience,” Carter said. “And then that reconnection – it happened with wolves. It's happening with salmon. Maybe someday it'll happen with grizzly bears.”
Over six years on the wolf project, Carter documented growth and stabilization in Idaho's wolf population.
As anti-wolf forces warned of danger to cattle, sheep and even children, Carter saw something very different when she observed wolves in their natural habitat.
“I saw these families of wolves taking care of each other and playing, and they are not this evil that people think,” Carter said.
As the wolf population increased in Idaho, calls for change grew
During Carter's time monitoring wolves, the population increased significantly.
Compared to the original 15 wolves released in Idaho's Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in 1995, the Nez Perce Tribe reported a minimum of 192 wolves in the central Idaho recovery area in the fall of 2000.
At the end of 2005 – a decade after wolves were reintroduced to Idaho – the Nez Perce team and Idaho Department of Fish and Game biologists had identified 59 resident wolf packs in Idaho.
Biologists observed a minimum of 370 wolves in 2005, and estimated the state's wolf population to be 512 in 2005.
By 2005, wolf territory in Idaho stretched from near the Canadian border, south to Interstate 84 and east from the Oregon border to Montana and Wyoming borders, the wolf team noted in its annual report.
During 2005, Wildlife Services officials said 26 cattle, 218 sheep and nine dogs were reported as “confirmed” or “probable” wolf kills. As the number of wolves and wolf kills increased, so did the calls to remove the wolf from the Endangered Species List and turn management of wolves over to the states.Under the Endangered Species Act, species that are listed in danger of extinction are given protective regulations – like the protection of critical habitat and prohibitions on hunting – and recovery plans. For species protected by the Endangered Species Act, the animals' recovery and stabilization is the priority.
Animal species that have been saved by Endangered Special Act protections include the bald eagle, the California condor, the whooping crane and grizzly bear, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Once species are removed from Endangered Species Act protections, regulations can be eased and states can approve hunting rules or other management and lethal population control methods.
In January 2006, then-Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne signed an agreement with the U.S. Department of Interior transferring day-to-day management of wolves to the state of Idaho.
After about a decade, the Nez Perce Tribes' role leading wolf recovery in Idaho had come to an end.“I think we would have kept it, but the funding was going away, and so we did not have the money to keep a program going,” Carter said. “And so I think the only way was basically to hand it over to the state.”
Removing wolves from protections under the Endangered Species Act
By 2007, the state of Idaho was officially planning for its first wolf hunts since reintroduction in 1995. At that same time, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife put forward plans to remove the gray wolf from the Endangered Species List.
A series of legal battles ensued, where wolves were removed and then returned to the Endangered Species List.In January 2009, Samuel N. Penney, the then-chairman of Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee, wrote a letter expressing the tribe's full support for removing wolves from Endangered Species Act protections in Idaho, Montana, eastern Oregon, northern Utah and eastern Washington. Penney told then-Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar that wolves met recovery goals for the Northern Rocky Mountain region in 2002.
For 2008, Idaho's wolf population was estimated at over 800 wolves in 88 packs, Penney wrote.
“The Tribe wants, and understands that citizens of United States also want, wolves to be conserved,” Penney wrote. “The Tribe is confident that you understand the importance we place on being able to make decisions locally about how to wisely manage this resource in combination with all our other wildlife resources.”
Ultimately, wolves were removed from Endangered Species Act protections in 2011 after Congress inserted language into the federal budget requiring the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove wolves in Idaho, Montana, eastern Washington, eastern Oregon and north-central Utah from the Endangered Species List.By May 2011, Idaho Fish and Game had taken over management of wolves in Idaho, and put wolf hunting tags up for sale.
“We did all this great work, and we spent hours and hours out in the woods and then to come to this point where they're treated like vermin, it's really disorienting,” Marcie Carter said.
“It's definitely being undone,” Carter added. “It's been being undone since we stepped out. It's very expensive to recover wolves and it's not very expensive to take them off the landscape.”
Journalists Clark Corbin and Heath Druzin reported and wrote Howl over the course of 14 months, trekking deep into the backcountry in some of the most remote places in the Lower 48 chasing the story of America's wildest and most controversial wildlife comeback story – wolf reintroduction. New installments of the written series will be published in the Idaho Capital Sun each Wednesday through July 2. The Howl podcast is available free everywhere that podcasts are available.
Coming next week in Howl, Part 3: Coming in two weeks, Part 4: Cattle Battle: With wolves returned to the landscape in the American West, ranchers like Jay and Chyenne Smith in Idaho said wolves have killed more than 200 of their cattle over the years. Many ranchers say that In addition to killing sheep and cattle, wolves stress their animals and affect their development and profitability. Meet some of the ranchers who say wolves are eating away at their family business. We will also introduce you to a longtime member of the wolf reintroduction team who studies solutions to protecting sheep and cattle from wolves.