May 4 2025. On a late summer day in 2020, Gina Lawrence stepped onto her porch and spotted fire rolling through the dry grass across the valley from her home on the eastern edge of the Colville Indian Reservation in central Washington.
“It was moving pretty fast,” she recalled. “I could see the flames and was like, ‘I think we’re going down.’”
The fire started about 10 miles away when heavy winds downed power lines. It was one of three fires that broke out that day around the reservation town of Inchelium, nestled between timber stands and the banks of the Columbia River.
When tribal authorities ordered an evacuation later that day, Lawrence and her family packed important documents and valuables into their RV and drove to Inchelium, population 431.
The family spent several excruciating hours watching the hillsides burn, wondering if their own house was still standing. In the evening, Lawrence and her husband could no longer wait, so they drove out to check.
“It was moving pretty fast. I could see the flames and was like, ‘I think we’re going down.’”
Driving through the smoke-filled valley, Lawrence passed a single red pickup truck belonging to the Mount Tolman Fire Center, the local department that serves the entire 2,180-square-mile Colville Reservation. A fire official who was in the truck spoke to Lawrence.
“He tells us that ‘there’s nothing we can do,’” she said; the center’s firefighters were already tied up fighting another blaze 80 miles away.
“Everybody’s so spread out that we don’t have anybody to come,” the fire official said.
MORE FIRES, LESS MONEY.
About 10,000 people — descendants of 12 Indigenous tribes — make up the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation today. They like to call their land “God’s Country,” a place of near-divine beauty where sheer cliffs descend from dense timber-lands and plunge into the Columbia River. Rugged alpine mountains bisect the reservation, opening onto windswept plains with stands of towering trees on its western edge. Junipers and huckleberries dot the woods along with other culturally significant plants.
The Colville Reservation is one of the many Indigenous tribal communities protected by its own tribal wildfire fighters with funding from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). In 2019, about 80% of tribal forests were managed in part or fully by tribal programs funded directly by the BIA. Tribal communities that lack their own programs can opt for direct management by the BIA.
However, these tribal wildfire fighters, who protect some of the nation’s most vulnerable communities, are stretched to their limits. Long-term federal land mismanagement and climate change have caused the number and intensity of reservation fires to soar. About 7% of the 4 million acres of tribal lands in the country burned between 2010 and 2020.
Wildfire-fighting programs across the nation all struggle with low pay, funding and recruitment. But on tribal lands, the pressure is even more acute.
Despite dealing with more fires per 100,000 acres than the U.S. Forest Service does, tribal wildfire programs receive less than half of what Congress appropriates for the Forest Service per acre.
In 2019, tribes across the country received a total of $176 million from the BIA for forestry and fire programs. Based on estimates by the Inter-tribal Timber Council, a nonprofit Indigenous organization mandated by the government to audit federal management of tribal lands, tribes need almost double that amount to properly manage their lands and fires.
Under century-old treaties and contracts, the federal government is required to pay the cost of preventing and fighting fires on tribal lands. But fire-preparedness funds, which pay for wages, training and equipment, have remained stagnant for decades despite inflation and the increasing number and severity of wildfires.
“As long as I’ve been the (fire management officer), every year our preparedness budget shrinks,” said Don Jones, a member of the Cowlitz Tribe and the fire management officer for the Yakama Indian Reservation in Washington. “When I first started, we were getting a little over $750,000 for preparedness, which took care of training costs and vehicles, operational stuff.”
Now, he says, they receive around 86% of that.
Many Indigenous tribes are suffering from similar funding shortfalls. Tools and equipment are outdated, and firefighters often leave in search of more lucrative jobs.
Despite decades of repeated calls for the BIA and Department of the Interior to address the funding issue, little progress has been made.
“We’ve been saying the same thing for 30 years now,” said Jim Durglo, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes and a fire technical specialist with the Inter-tribal Timber Council. “What makes you think that they’re going to listen to us now?”
RED TAPE.
Previously, the BIA directly managed tribal wild-lands. In the 1970s, a push for greater autonomy led to tribes taking over the responsibility.
In 1990, Congress passed legislation requiring the government to increase its support for tribal forests. The new law called for routine audits on the government’s progress by an Inter-tribal Timber Council assessment team. Nearly every assessment since 1993 has found severe funding and staffing deficiencies in tribal and BIA forest management programs.
In recent years, however, some progress toward appropriate funding levels has been made.
In 2021, thousands of wild-land firefighters across the U.S. received temporary pay bonuses through the Biden administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Tribal firefighters were initially left out, but after weeks of pushing, the law was amended to include them.
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In March 2025, these temporary bonuses were made permanent in an attempt to bolster the nation’s firefighting forces. This time, tribal firefighters were included from the start and will continue to get the same bonuses they’ve received since 2021.
“It’s a huge win, not only for tribal firefighters, but wild-land firefighters in general,” said Darron Williams, the BIA Northwest Region’s assistant fire management officer. However, Williams acknowledged that the new codified boost wasn’t a “pie-in-the-sky” solution that would fix all the funding issues faced by tribal fire programs.
“We’ve been saying the same thing for 30 years now. What makes you think that they’re going to listen to us now?”
The formula used to calculate how much money goes to each tribal program hasn’t been updated in more than 20 years, multiple sources from the BIA and tribal wildfire programs told HCN. It sets funding based on the prevalence of wildfires and the staff, equipment and training costs needed to fight them.
The formula is “not adequate for what we currently have in 2024, and we’re just trying to figure out a way to bring us up to speed,” said Williams. “Our tribal folks are very frustrated.”
UNDERFUNDED AND UNDER-PREPARED.
The outdated funding formulas have left tribes across the West reeling.
The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation in western Montana have had to cut key wildfire jobs, and recently the reservation decommissioned two of its eight fire engines.
Currently, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai get about 60% of what they received in 1998 to fight fires after adjusting for inflation, according to its fire management officer, Ron Swaney, a member of the tribe.
Swaney said he would need more than twice the amount to properly carry out the work given the rising costs and frequency of wildfires.
When Don Jones, the Yakama Nation’s fire management officer, first started in 2007, the tribal program had 40 to 45 workers compared to over 100 employees in the 1990s. Now, the Yakama program has 14 employees, including 10 on-the-ground firefighters who at one point handled around 1.2 million acres.
At the Colville Reservation, the Mount Tolman Fire Center faces similar challenges: Its fire-preparedness budget is the same as it was in the late 1990s, according to its fire management officer.
Between 2014 and 2024, the Mount Tolman Fire Center added four employees to its fire-preparedness team, bringing it to 34, with just nine full-time staffers. During that time, more than half the reservation burned.
In 2021, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation sued the federal government, alleging the BIA did not support adequate fuels management on the reservation and failed to adequately suppress the fires that broke out in 2015.
“Had we had adequate resources and funding to do the work that should have been done, those damages wouldn’t have been to at least the extent they were,” said Cody Desautel, executive director of the Colville Tribe and president of the Intert-ribal Timber Council. Over half a billion dollars’ worth of the tribe’s timber was destroyed by fire that year.
70 HOUSES BURNED.
While Gina Lawrence waited to see if her property would survive, members of the Inchelium community, long accustomed to the land’s intense fires, tried to help.
With Colville’s professional wildfire team tied up fighting blazes elsewhere on the reservation, Inchelium residents like Joe Pakootas Jr. stepped up to help their neighbors.
“As soon as those fires hit that first day, there was hardly any resources here,” said Pakootas. “My partners and I, we all met out there on the roads, and we just started hitting all the flames we could to protect those houses that were right in that region.”
Wearing shorts and a T-shirt and driving his “fire tender” truck, a 1997 Ford F-350 with chainsaws, a 350-gallon water tank and hoses, Pakootas and other residents worked to control the flames.
“There was no contact between us because we are just private owners of our own equipment,” said Pakootas. “So it’s not like we were working in conjunction with the tribe. We weren’t working with fire management. We were just basically working off instincts of what we knew as far as growing up here.”
For hours, Pakootas batted down flames and hosed down land next to nine homes, including the Lawrences’.
The flames came within 30 feet of the Lawrences’ home, but it survived. The professional wildland firefighters reached Inchelium at around 11 p.m., Pakootas said. Fires still raged around the reservation, though, including two others near Inchelium and an even bigger blaze to the west.
“That thing ran like I’ve never seen a fire run before,” said Desautel, describing a fire that burned on the other side of the reservation. “We threw the kitchen sink at that one.”
Desautel, the Colville Reservation’s executive director, said that about 70 houses burned that day. In total, those 2020 fires burned 200,000 acres on the reservation.
FIRES ON THE HORIZON.
Around the Colville Reservation, nearly everyone has vivid memories of fire. The blazes’ names — Devil’s Elbow, North Star, Tunk Block, Summit Hill, Cold Springs and Chewah — are recalled and recited even as the fire years blend together.
Every summer, the infernos return, threatening families and damaging the reservation’s economy.
The Lawrences’ house survived the 2020 fires, but soon after, its roof caved in under heavy snow. The couple lived in an RV until winter 2024, when they finally moved into their renovated shop on the property.
Tribal wildfire-fighting programs continue to work with the same inadequate budgets they’ve had for decades even as another fire season begins amid federal tumult and already-historic blazes.
When the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires ripped through Southern California, fire crews from at least eight tribes helped battle the blazes. Mutual aid agreements between federal, state, local and tribal fire crews are becoming customary as the number and intensity of wildfires continue to increase.
On top of everything, this February, the Trump administration terminated thousands of fire-support positions in the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service.
“Staffing levels were below subpar last year,” said Yakama Fire Management Officer Don Jones. “This year, we were not looking too good. We lost two engine bosses since last summer.
“I don’t know what we’re gonna do about this year.”
Looking back to the day in 2020 that nearly cost her family so much, Lawrence remembers the terror of watching the blaze, not knowing if her home would survive.
Year after year, the land continues to burn. She is already dreading the next fire.
“Every year there’s been fires along that ridge up there and back over there, and I think, ‘What is there left to burn?’” said Lawrence. “It took everything.”
High Country News Author Lachlan Hyatt. May 1 2025.
