Gary Morishima (b. 1944) has served as Technical Advisor for Natural Resources to the President of the Quinault Indian Nation, since 1978, after establishing the tribe's forestry program. Morishima was born in the Tule Lake incarceration camp, which was established by the United States for Japanese Americans who lived along the west coast during World War II. He earned an individual doctoral degree in Quantitative Science and Environmental Management from the University of Washington before embarking on his professional career.
The following narrative is based on a March 2025 interview with HistoryLink's Jill Freidberg. It has been edited for clarity and to include more details and stories. In the interview, Morishima discusses his childhood and family, education at the University of Washington, and his career in forest management. Morishima describes the history of land management at the Quinault Reservation, the effects of Bureau of Indian Affairs and the impact of 1974 Treaty fishing rights decision by Judge George Boldt on Quinault forest lands, and his efforts to establish a tribal forestry program.
Childhood
I was born in the concentration camp at Tule Lake, California, where my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles had been ripped away from their homes and livelihoods by the United States. The “camp” was established to relocate people of Japanese ancestry, mostly citizens of the United States, from the west coast.
My grandparents on my mother’s side had a little farm over in Kingston. When they left, they had to leave in a hurry, with crops in the ground, and placing care for the family farm in the hands of people they thought they could trust. It turned out that they couldn't. Those people who they had trusted, sold their equipment and harvested their crops for their own personal gain.
[Added after the interview: I don’t remember much about Tule Lake, except the dust, cold, tar-papered barracks, barbed wire fences with armed guards in towers, and tasteless rice gruel for food.]
In 1945, we left Tule Lake to live on a farm in Indiana. We didn't have very much, but some of the things that I do remember was freedom to go out and wander around in the local forest, the taste of blueberries I picked, and playing with snakes and frogs that I happen to find.
My father really had a hard time adjusting to that climate and the work growing mint. He was exposed to a lot of spraying. I can remember him coughing up blood. So, we decided we had to move back to Seattle.
My parents found work at the old Benjamin Franklin Hotel, and that's where I learned that in order to get things that I wanted, I had to work for it. So I went to work at a very early age. I think I was around seven or eight years old when I started working on farms to earn a little money picking berries and vegetables.
[Added after the interview: Growing up, I experienced racial taunts, conflicts, and blatant prejudices. I gravitated to sports like baseball and basketball where individual skills and teamwork mattered and umpires and referees were there to enforce rules to ensure fair play.] My parents took the family out on weekends on little fishing trips or drives in the country. We would go to Issaquah Creek when there was still water there. We would go to the Snoqualmie and Yakima Rivers. We went to the beach to dig clams and fish. We hiked in the mountains to gather mushrooms a lot. I had always grown up with a little affinity with the outdoors.
From UW to Boeing and Back
I studied math and science in high school and managed to earn a scholarship to the University of Washington. I ended up getting a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics, went to work for the Boeing Company as a systems analyst where I worked with the largest complex of computers in the world under one roof.
During my off time, I happened to pick up a book written by Rachel Carlson called The Silent Spring. It increased my awareness as to some of the changes to the environment that I had noticed over the years. The woods were becoming quieter, the fish were not as plentiful. I became more and more convinced that many of the things that I was seeing were related to siloed, fragmented thinking. People would know how to build airplanes, or how to do math, how to do fisheries, how to take care of trees, but they didn't understand how things were connected or even speak the same language. The words were similar but meant different things so communication and consistent understanding were poor.
I decided to go back to school to do some graduate work. I took courses in mathematics, fisheries, forestry, economics, law, and business administration. I was working full time at the Boeing Company as well as going to school full time, so it was a bit of a load.
I was taking a class in fisheries population dynamics, taught by Professor Gerald Paulik when a delegation from the Quinault Nation came to visit the class. They explained the problems they were experiencing and asked the University of Washington for help. Jerry Paulik said, "This sounds like something we ought to get involved in."
A joint project between the University of Washington Center for Quantitative Science in Forestry, Fisheries and Wildlife and the University of British Columbia's Institute for Animal Resource Ecology was established to provide assistance and advice to the Quinault Nation.
Quinault Reservation
The Quinault Reservation was originally established under treaty with the United States in 1855. Under that treaty, a reservation was to be set aside for the exclusive use and occupancy of Indians and rights to fish, hunt, and gather from open and unclaimed lands were reserved and protected by the U.S. Constitution. A reservation consisting of roughly 196,000 acres of land plus Lake Quinault was set aside.
In 1887, the United States passed the General Allotments Act or the Dawes Act to break up reservation lands into individually-owned allotments to assimilate Indians into the mainstream of American society by making them individual property owners and farmers. At Quinault, the entire reservation became allotted, leaving the Quinault tribe with very little land. By 1934, the single forest property that had been set aside as the Quinault Reservation had been broken up into 2,340 individual allotments even though Quinault lands were not suited for that; they were forest lands.
[Added after the interview: The allotments were placed in trust to be managed by the United States for the benefit of their owners. Instead of a single forest property, the Reservation forests had become fragmented creating formidable problems for management and securing funding for administrative processes such as rights of ways for transportation systems, accounting and disbursement systems for revenues, and obtaining permission from widely dispersed owners with divergent interests.]
"I Knew It Wasn't Right"
For several decades, the Quinault Reservation was managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) under a paternalistic relationship. The BIA would restrict what could be done and how.
Beginning in the early 1920s, the BIA had started to liquidate Quinault forests. Logging started in the south half of the reservation via railroads. There were no provisions for reforestation, accumulations of slash resulted in wildfires and brush fields.
After the Quinault delegation visited the University of Washington, I drove down to the Reservation with one of my classmates. At that time, the Quinault Nation began to assert its sovereignty, embarking on an effort to gain greater control over their affairs and resources. They closed their beaches to the non-Indian public after sacred sites were sprayed with paint and piles of litter were left behind. [Added after the interview: The Quinaults blockaded logging roads to protest how the forests were being harvested.]
In the late 1960s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was administering two large timber sales on the northern side of the Quinault River: the Taholah and Crane Creek units, each 30,000 acres. The lands were being clearcut with forest practices that were abominable.
During my first visit to the Quinault Reservation, Joe DeLaCruz, who would serve as the longtime president of the Quinault Nation, and Guy McMinds, a fishery student at the University of Washington, who was involved in the Boldt decision, drove me from Taholah to the village of Queets. That drive took me from the mouth of the Quinault River through the Taholah unit. As I travelled on logging roads, I saw the aftermath of logging and passed through forests of massive redcedar and Sitka spruce that were still standing. It's hard to imagine, but the trees were huge. Those trees were being cut and removed from just part of the Quinault Reservation at the rate of over 200 million board feet per year.
I saw the before and I saw the after the huge piles of logging slash left on the ground, streams and rivers that had supported the salmon, that had sustained the tribal culture and economy for so many centuries, were blocked with impassable jams and silted with choking sediment. The roads were being constructed right along the stream beds, there was no space for replanting. It was quite a shocking experience.
I didn't know a heck of a lot about forestry at that time, but I knew it wasn't right.
After Boldt
I met with the Tribal Council. They explained that they were going to file a suit against the United States for mismanagement of the forests of the Quinault Reservation. Also, I knew, from my association with the University of Washington, that the Indian Treaty fishing rights case was soon to be brought to trial.
I saw what was happening to Quinault forests and fishery resources and knew it wasn't right. The Quinault were asking for help and I answered the call. As a grad student, I helped secure funding for what became the Quinault Resource Development Project that constructed small tribal hatcheries on the streams and plants to process seafood and cedar salvage. Part of the University of Washington-University of British Columbia project involved providing the Taholah School with access to simulation programs to try to help generate interest in pursuing careers in natural resource management. We set up a direct dedicated communication line from the University of Washington to Taholah and set up a program to familiarize and acquaint some of the local school kids with some of the fundamentals of fisheries and forest management.
From my work as a grad student with Quinault, I was awarded a Ford Fellowship that enabled me to stop working full-time at the Boeing company. I decided to pursue an individual Ph.D. program that involved coursework in forestry, fisheries, business administration, operations research, law, economics, studying a bunch of areas.
In 1974, after the Boldt Decision affirmed treaty fishing rights, the Quinault leadership approached the administration and Congress saying, "You have a trust responsibility and an obligation to support tribal resource management." They were successful in securing funding to begin to expand some of their natural resource programs. A delegation from Quinault came to the University of Washington and recruited a bunch of Ph.D.s to go down and work for them. The leader of the Quinault Nation, Joe De La Cruz, came up to me and asked me to help with issues relating to land consolidation and forest management.
When Joe DeLaCruz asked me to help develop a Quinault forestry program, he said "I'm not asking you to do this for me. I'm asking you to do this for those who haven't got a voice, for the generations of Quinault that have yet to be born." He asked. I answered and set about trying to build a forestry program from scratch on the Quinault Reservation.
Forestry Program, First Steps
Around the same time that the Boldt Decision came down, (February 1974), Congress took two important actions. The American Indian Policy Review Commission was established and the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (PL 93-638), was passed providing an avenue for tribes to assume greater responsibility for operating programs that were formerly being conducted by the Bureau of Affairs and Indian Health Service.
At that time, allotments on the Quinault Reservation not only had had been decimated by historical management, but also by federal Indian policy. In 1952, the United States Congress adopted a policy called “termination” which sought to relieve the United States of its obligations incurred to tribes under treaties. At Quinault, the BIA encouraged individual allotment owners to sell their lands. Many of the allotment owners weren't aware that they were selling their lands, believing they were only selling their timber. The BIA didn’t clearly tell allottees that they were selling their lands. Roughly a third of the Quinault Reservation had become alienated, owned by timber companies and non-Indians. [Added after the interview: Land ownership was also becoming increasingly complex as allottees passed away resulting in fractionation of ownership in undivided fee and trust property interests owned by non-Indians and members of other tribes.]
When I first went to work at Quinault, my first assignment was to figure out how to consolidate Quinault forest lands for cohesive management and address threats to tribal sovereignty resulting from decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court that ties tribal jurisdiction to land ownership. When I started to build a tribal forestry program, the first challenge was to figure out: "What is the state of the land on the Quinault Reservation?" We didn't have very much in terms of resources, the tribal staff available was limited to me and a single forester, Larry Workman. We got images from Landsat and secured a contract with the Weyerhaeuser Company to do a soil survey of the Quinault Reservation. We started tying that information together with what we were seeing on the ground. Larry’s skill as a photographer was put to work setting up photo plots so we could record what was going on and track our efforts. [Added after the interview: We knew we were going to face problems with root rot and mistletoe infestation in stands of western hemlock and that there weren't going to be adequate sources of seedlings to reforest the reservation.] Part of our program also would include forest disease management the establishment of a seed orchard.
We were experiencing impacts of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The ESA was being implemented at Quinault was leaving a single tree where which had a bald eagle’s nest. That was their protection. Larry and I put together a proposal for a comprehensive tribal forestry program and produced a brochure that we distributed to Congress and the administration. That brochure carried the title, "A Portrait of Our Land," and picked up on one of the songs of the day "Is That All There Is?" The picture that we used on the brochure was that single eagle tree in the middle of a 30,000 acre clear-cut.
Quinault leadership had established very strong relationships with Congresswoman Julia Butler Hansen. She was an extremely powerful and influential member of Congress who had special understanding and affinity for the environment and for helping improve the conditions that Native Americans were experiencing. In any case, Congress supported our proposal and funded the Quinault Forestry Program as a 10-year demonstration project. That was how the Quinault Forestry Program initially got its impetus.
Patience and Opportunity
From a resource management standpoint, I learned from the Quinault. Especially, the importance of holistic management ways of thinking that recognized that all things are connected to take care of the land, community needs and be good stewards.
Another lesson I learned was the need to be patient because things weren't going to happen all at once. You had to be opportunistic and adaptive.
There are a few examples of being opportunistic and adaptive. When Congress established an initial 10-year Indian Forestry Development Program, the BIA was caught flat-footed. Its leadership did not have dreams of receiving any support or any additional money from Congress and simply didn't know what to do. A big meeting of the BIA’s regional foresters was convened, I think in Reno. Tribal leaders weren’t invited to participate, but Joe DeLaCruz, and Ken Smith from Warm Springs said, “We're going to go down there anyway.” We crashed the meeting and we told them what we thought that they needed to do. They didn't want to listen to us and kicked us out. We got mad and went out in the lobby, to think about how we should react. After discussing options, we concluded, "Look, we're not alone. There are lots of tribes around the country that are facing these problems."
We decided to convene a symposium that was called Making Dollars and Sense Out of Indian Forestry.” We brought together tribes from around the country and representatives from academia, state and federal agencies, private industry and the BIA. We talked about issues relating forest management and the contrast between the BIA and others was so striking that the tribes that attended concluded, "We need to organize." An association of tribal governments interested in forest management called the Intertribal Timber Council was formed, which continued working to this day.
Another example occurred in the late 1980s, when Henry (Scoop) Jackson passed away, and former Washington Governor Dan Evans was appointed to fill his seat. Governor Evans had developed close relationships with Quinault leadership. We went to him and told him about the land consolidation problems and the North Boundary Survey error that had been made in 1871. He decided that he was going to help support the Quinault Nation to correct the North Boundary error. In 1988, with Dan Evans' help, the North Boundary Act was passed which returned that sliver of land to the Quinault Reservation with the restrictions that the income generated from the sale of timber from the North Boundary area was to be used for land consolidation and to improve forest management on the Quinault Reservation. That provided the means to finance consolidation of reservation forest lands. It’s an example of being patient. The ability to adapt is the ability to survive. So that's one of the lessons I learned.
The Iran-Contra Affair Hits Home
Another example that happened right around the time the North Boundary Act was passed was the Iran-Contra scandal. Part of that scandal involved the Quinault Reservation, believe it or not.
Because of Congressional prohibitions against providing arms to achieve political objectives, Lt. Colonel Oliver North and others within the Reagan Administration concocted a scheme to surreptitiously raise funds. Part of that scheme involved the purchase and sale of Quinault timberland. North had arranged to try to purchase 10,000 acres of forestland that Mayr Brothers had acquired on the Quinault Reservation, sell it at a profit, and use proceeds to arm Iran and eventually to fund the Contras.
When North attempted to conclude the deal at an inflated price, the Federal Land Bank said, "No, it's overvalued. We're not going to support that." That land then became available to the Quinault. That represented the first major land purchase by Quinault. We managed to acquire 10,000 acres in one fell swoop through a guaranteed loan.
Accomplishments
When I first visited the Quinault Reservation, tribal government was just getting its footing, there was virtually nothing there in terms of resources or staff.
Our first efforts to establish a Quinault tribal Forestry Program under the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act were adamantly resisted by the BIA. Local and regional offices didn't like the idea of having tribes tell them how the forest ought to be managed or what needed to be done, so they resisted us every way. Even though we had that 10-year contract, we continued to run into problems. [Added after the interview: To be able to do the things that had to be done to address the forest management problems we faced, we had to be prepared to make and weather waves.]
[Added after the interview: We went back to Congress and secured a requirement for direct contracting with the BIA Central Office in Washington, D.C. to try to overcome local recalcitrance.] We managed to secure a site visit to Quinault by Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus. I took him on a helicopter tour of the reservation. As we flew over the reservation, I explained what we were trying to do and why, describing the problems we were facing, along with proposed solutions. As a result, we were able to institute a prescribed burning program to get rid of some of the slash, established a dedicated field office in Taholah, and started a salvage re-logging program to harvest some of the remaining value of timber that had been left behind. [Added after the interview: We continued to work through the Intertribal Timber Council to conduct annual symposiums to discuss issues and develop consensus recommendations for addressing them, and enact legislation like the National Indian Forest Resources Management Act, Tribal Forest Protection Act, and amendments to the Farm Bill.]
[Added after the interview: My day-to-day involvement in Quinault Forestry program operations wound down in the late 1970s when I was tasked with working on public, legal, and political repercussions of the Boldt Decision. The program has continued and advanced since then under the efforts of capable and dedicated people.] The Quinault Nation now owns well over 30 percent of the Quinault Reservation through land purchase and acquisition.
The Quinault Forestry Program is driven not only by holistic management, but multi-generational stewardship reaching from the past to the present and extending to the future. Decisions are based not upon today, not short-term issues, or the next election cycle. They're based on the need to provide for the generations that don't have a voice yet, those that are yet to be born.
Full Circle
Growing up as a young child, just after World War II, I had experienced the name-calling, the epithets, and occasional conflicts with schoolmates who still had some resentment from World War II. [Added after the interview: It wasn't a happy time, yet it created a foundation of family values, enjoyment of the outdoors, the need to work hard, and a burning desire to do my utmost to make a difference.]
In working with Quinault, I have become increasingly aware of similarities to my own life’s journey. I certainly can't begin to really fully comprehend the kind of trauma that the Quinault people have endured. But the stories they’ve told resonated, reminding me of my own family’s history.
I’ve had opportunities to go work lots of different places, but I chose not to pursue them. There were challenges to confront, needs to be met, and opportunities to improve management of the environment and the well-being of communities. There were needs and relationships I valued. I thought that I might be able to help, to contribute in some small way to try to create a more hopeful future.
