The Stewardship Project

THE PROBLEM: Federal forest policy is failing to keep pace with catastrophic wildfire, and it’s leaving centuries of Indigenous land management knowledge on the table. The result is a crisis managed with incomplete tools, on landscapes that Indigenous Peoples stewarded sustainably for generations. 

THE APPROACH: Since 2023, CWI has been supporting a partnership between Tribal land stewards, western scientists, and policy experts to develop concrete policy recommendations for federal lawmakers focused on three areas where the gap between current policy and proven practice is most consequential: 

• The Indigenous right to burn,

• Co-management of public lands, and 

• Building the workforce required to steward landscapes at scale

The project centers on “active stewardship” — the understanding that healthy landscapes require ongoing, intentional engagement rather than passive protection. 

THE IMPACT: Federal policy recommendations that bring Indigenous knowledge to the forefront when land management decisions are made, moving the conversation from acknowledgement to action and toward a more durable, grounded approach to stewarding the American West.

PARTNERS: Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger LLP; California State University Chico; University of California, Berkeley; The Brumidi Group