Cody Desautel (b. 1977) is the executive director of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and president of the Intertribal Timber Council. He has worked his entire career for the Colville Tribes, serving as a forest engineer and the head of the Natural Resources Division, and grew up on the reservation, spending time in its forests hunting, fishing, and hiking. He spoke with HistoryLink's Jennifer Ott on June 11, 2025, about his work with the reservation's forests, in policymaking, and in leadership in the tribal forestry community across the United States. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Getting Into Forestry
Cody Desautel: I grew up with ranches on both sides of my family. So, I spent a lot of time in the outdoors. Father and family always hunted, fished a lot. So, I was exposed to it essentially since birth and it just always something that I did. So, I had a lot of interest in a career that let me stay in the forest enjoying the things that I grew up doing. And I spent the first half or so of my career in the field serving as a forest engineer - what roads we need, where they need to be located - and then doing some silvicultural work, some pre-sales work within the forestry department. I spent some time in fire, some in range. But for the last at least 11 years, I've been in more administrative positions as the Natural Resource Division Director for Colville starting in 2014 and then the Executive Director for the last three or so years.
Early in my career, there were people I worked with that were particularly influential on me. Whitey Holford was one. He was a scaler for us in Inchelium. Jack Matuska was a silviculturist there. He kind of provided a lot of guidance. Dick Leferink was our district officer. He also served to install good work ethics in us. Ronnie Michelle was one. He was toward the end of his career, but really was good about sharing information, sharing perspectives about what we do in the Forestry Department or at least at the district level. And he always would ensure he included us. So, we were learning skills. Jim Erickson - Jim was particularly good at pushing me to do things. So as ITC (Intertribal Timber Council) board member, he would frequently sign me up to go do things like testify in front of Congress that I was really uncomfortable doing. But he was good about just telling me I was doing them, so I didn't have the option to back out…I've learned this later in my career, the saying “get comfortable being uncomfortable” applies very well if you want to be in leadership roles and you want to try to address problems that exist and have existed throughout your career.
Moving on to later in my career when I got into, I would say, more the administrative side or was more involved with policy things, then Darrell Dick was our assistant forest manager at the time. Very good individual. Very smart. Always kind of pushed on us to do things that we weren't very comfortable with, which is what good supervisors should be doing. Reggie Atkins was our forest manager at the time. Kind of did those similar things. Particularly him and Darrell would give us the opportunity to do things and then be there to help guide us or correct us if we needed to change things we were doing or correct things.
Because I've worked for the tribe or the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] at this agency my entire career, there's always been that Indigenous knowledge component. And I would say that's really been the guiding principle. So, I would say most of my just academic/technical fire and forestry knowledge comes from college. But again, because of where we work, everybody always had that eye toward: "What are the impacts to the membership? Are there any traditional or cultural uses that we need to consider when we're planning these projects?" And our integrated resource management plan is driven by a holistic goal that was derived from many, many public scoping meetings with the tribal membership to ensure that what we're doing is consistent with what our member tribes and our tribal membership want and what their needs are from a cultural and subsistence perspective.
Shared Challenges, Shared Knowledge
CD: I also serve as the president of the Intertribal Timber Council, but it's an organization that I've been involved with for probably 20 years. I've only been the president for the last five. But I mean, that's a group of about 60 member tribes, forest landowners that have similar challenges, similar issues with funding and staffing, similar management objectives… all of our tribal life ways and cultures are pretty tied to natural resources in place. So that's been a group that has been great to work with because it gives us an opportunity to share perspectives, share successes and failures. I mean, even going as far as going back to D.C. and collectively lobbying that this isn't just a Colville Tribes issue, this is a Colville issue, a Yakama issue, a San Carlos Apache issue, a Menominee issue.
So we finished the last Indian Forest Management Assessment Team report in 2023. But I don't think we did a very good job messaging that in the past. It's a congressionally mandated report, so we reported it to Congress, but we didn't do as good a job sharing with the public as we should have. But we brought on some PR [public relations] firms with this last one to do different components of outreach and communication, and that's been much more effective. I mean, like as recently as a few weeks ago, I had a congressional hearing on the Forest Act, which is a draft bill that they wanted us to come back and testify on. But I got feedback from a lot of different people, both at the symposium and locally, because people are seeing it and it's becoming more visible. So, I would say [there's] a significant improvement in how we message and communicate the work that we're doing and why it's important.
Forest Management in Indian Country
CD: I think our biggest successes, both at Colville and nationally from an ITC perspective, is the visibility that we've brought to Indian forest management and the subsequent authorities that Congress has given tribes to do work on adjacent federal land. So, I mean, we saw expansion of the 638 Contracting Authority to Tribal Forest Protection Act proposals in the 2018 Farm Bill. We saw the Good Neighbor Authority expanded to tribes and counties in the 2018 Farm Bill. They gave states the ability to do work on adjacent federal ground under these Good Neighbor Agreements. Both that and Tribal Forest Protection Act were kind of responses to bad fire years in the early 2000s where fires had started on unmanaged federal land and then burned off mostly forest service boundaries and impacted their adjacent neighbors.
The 638 Contracting Authority goes back to 1975, with the passing of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act. It was a piece of legislation that gave tribes the ability to contract federal functions primarily within the Bureau of Indian Affairs. But they've expanded that authority to give us the ability to manage other federal functions, in this case, forest management projects on adjacent Forest Service land if those can potentially have negative impacts on reservation acres.
I think that's one of the things that Congress appreciates most about the management in Indian Country: that we look at such a diversity of ecosystem functions and have balanced those, I would argue, better than anybody in the country. And we do that in such an efficient way that when we look at the amount of funding that BIA receives or tribes receive for that forest management, it's significantly smaller than the other federal agencies. We produced 300 million in board feet of timber last year to BLM's [Bureau of Land Management] 200 million. And they're funded at 14 times what we are. So, it gives some sense of the effectiveness of tribal management and how efficient we are with the resources that we have.
Tribal Priorities in Natural Resource Management
CD: I think many of us trained in the same way who went to any type of forestry school or had any type of forestry training was largely that Western European approach. How do we maximize volume? How do we maximize economic revenue? And that's really not how tribes view natural resource management. It's not that extractive approach that you see from what I would call "Western science." We understand what our relationship is with the natural environment. We know what our obligations are as people to be part of that functioning ecosystem. And I mean, if you look at many tribes across the country, Colville included, most of our creation stories talk about how the animals were here before us, how they gave themselves up for us. And now we have an obligation to respect and do the right management activities on the landscape to take care of those things that take care of us. So, I think that's a very different approach than what you see for management across the rest of the country.
When you look at what our management priorities are, I always say logs and revenue are really kind of a byproduct of our management approach. What we're trying to do with these logging operations is restore forest resilience, restore functioning ecosystems - ensuring we have clean water, clean air, good big game habitat, the cultural plants and medicines that are important to our tribal membership. And that's really our driving factor for management decisions. But again, in doing that work, you produce logs, which then produce revenue, which support the tribal government for a lot of things that the BIA just doesn't get appropriations from Congress to do.
So I mean, if you look at what BIA is responsible for, compared to the other interior bureaus in particular, I mean, most of them have very specific missions - like the Park Service or U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service - where BIA's responsibilities extend from natural resource management, law enforcement, social services, even education to some extent, because you have BIE (Bureau of Indian Education) within Indian Affairs. So, their responsibilities are much broader, much more complicated. And when we see priorities come from tribes about where they want BIA resources to go, funding to go, it's largely for some of those more critical needs like law enforcement. It makes it even more important for the revenue that the tribes are able to generate from forest management activities to reinvest those in funding their tribal governments and for additional forest management activities that BIA just doesn't get appropriations to fund for us.
Fire Management
CD: So, if you look at Colville, a 1.4-million-acre reservation, 922,000 of those acres have forest on them. But, in spite of the fact that we do all of this good work from a forest management perspective - fuels management, prescribed fire - we've burned 800,000 of those 1.4 million acres in the last decade. So, although we're the poster child for the things you're supposed to do right to avoid those kind of situations, we've just burned a ton of acres here.
The positive to that is that when we look at post-fire effects, Colville has done much better than our neighbors, particularly if you look at the Forest Service ground to the north of us. When we look at fire severities in the Swawilla Fire we had last year [July 2024] was a great example. A 53,000-acre fire that we struggled to contain largely because of lack of resources. I was back in D.C. testifying that week with the chairman, and it wasn't until I got home and saw an incident action plan for the fire team that was there and realized that we had like five engines, a hand crew, and a couple of dozers on what was at the time was a several-thousand-acre fire. So that's just become a reality for us: that we're not going to get much suppression help. There's just not enough for all the fire we have in the landscape. And we do a good job with land use planning so we don't put people out in the wildland urban interface, so when they're prioritizing where those suppression resources go, they don't come here because our people are safe. And if you look at other jurisdictions, they let them build everywhere. So, they send all the engines, the tankers, the dozers, they go to protect the houses that are way out in the woods that shouldn't be.
But back to Swawilla. We had some serious concerns because one of the metrics we used to track fire danger is called ERC. Energy Release Component kind of gives you some comparison of how much heat is generated by a fire. But we were at or near record highs on all three of our weather stations that we track that at. So, based on fuel and weather conditions, the fire should have run hard and it should have had severe post-fire effects. That's not what we saw. What we saw was, once we got it caught, was: out of 53,000 acres, only 2.8 percent of that had burned in high severity, and 65 percent of it had burned in either low severity or didn't burn at all. So, we've always known that you can't remove fire from fire-adapted ecosystems. But it's kind of shifted our management priorities [from less focus on] "how do we do a better job catching fires?" It's "how do you have wildfire on the landscape and have post-fire outcomes that give you management options and still provide all of those ecosystem functions that are important to the tribal membership?"
It’s been a valuable lesson. I mean, a saying that I've always agreed with, is that failure is a great teacher. That's been a great teacher from that perspective. Because I would say earlier in my career, when I first started fighting fire back in the mid-90s, that 10,000 acres was a rough year. If we had a 10,000-acre fire, I was like, "Oh my God, that's huge! How did we lose that many acres?" And that was really the case up to about 2010, 2012. We had some bigger ones. You got up to 20 or maybe 30,000 acres. And then we had 2015, where we burned 255,000 acres here, and saw the North Star Fire do things I've never seen a fire do in my 20 years of firefighting prior to that. Kind of reset, I would say, our perspective on what could happen. We saw that fire eat up chunks of ground like we'd never seen before. We saw crown runs and spotting distances like we'd never seen before. So, that really reset our expectations and really what we were preparing for from a management perspective. I mean, we can call it a 100-year event, but the reality is that's probably not going to be the case in the future. It might be like more than a one-every-decade event. So what do we do now, recognizing that when we have those conditions, everybody else in at least the Northwest has similar conditions? And we know we're not going to get suppression resources because they're probably going to go to Lake Chelan, and they're going to go to Cle Elum. And they're going to go to those places that have the million-dollar homes on the hill. How do we create a forest that is resilient to that type of fire that has lesser post-fire impacts? And that once that fire is done, we still have the forest to manage. We still have many of those things that… Again, those ecosystem functions that are a priority for us, and gives us an opportunity to go in and do some post-fire rehab work that puts that landscape on a trajectory to get back to the condition it was before the fire.
Forest Practices as Fire Management
CD: We've always been very active trying to go out there and harvest mortality after wildfires. One: because it reduces insects. Two: it reduces the fuel loading for future fires. And three: it produces revenue from those acres that we intended to have produce revenue over the next 120 years of Colville's rotation. But in doing that … So, well, another good example: About half of that fire burned, in 2007, in the Manila Creek fire was then bumped into a fire that we'd had in 2021 called Chuweah Creek.
And I think because we'd been active in that post-fire restoration. We've reduced fuel loadings. What we saw for post-fire impacts the second time was significantly less than what we would have expected. And even some of the unburned stuff that hasn't burned in, it might've been a century ago. But we've done enough work in those areas to mimic those more natural disturbances that we just didn't see fire severities like we expected to based on the fuel and weather conditions we had at that time.
Jennifer Ott: So you're on 120-year rotation.
Cody Desautel: Yep. For most of the forest type, some of the higher elevation stuff is 100. So, we're managing one age class through that 120-year rotation. And the intention is that in 120 years, we're going to remove most of that timber, regenerate and start over at year zero, essentially. When I say, "lose acres," I'm referring to those ones that they were somewhere within that 120-year rotation timeline. High severity fire killed most or all of the trees, and you essentially reset that timeline. So, we have a target for different structure types, different age classes, different species composition. And we want that balance across the landscape through time. Through our management actions, we get to control that very directly. When we have these huge disturbance events, we don't have so much control over that. And that can significantly skew what those ratios are in any particular watershed or project area.
Salmon Restoration and Water Management
CD: There's a number of things that are priorities for us. I would say, probably one of the most important priorities was salmon reintroduction above Chief Joseph [dam] and Grand Coulee [dam]. That when you look at particularly some of the tribes within Colville, I mean, 80 percent of their diet came from salmon historically in places that are now behind Grand Coulee and blocked from salmon. We also recognize that when you look at Columbia Basin stocks and recovery in the basin and access to fish for our membership and their cultures, that this was a task that we needed to take on. Things you would frequently hear like: "If you bring back the salmon, you will bring back our culture. If you bring back the salmon, you will save our people." So, that became a significant focus for us.
And going back to, boy, I want to say that was 2015-ish, we started looking at feasibility of reintroduction above Chief Joe and Grand Coulee. So fast forward to about 2020-ish, I don't even remember the date that we actually finished the report, but we had what we called the Phase I report. That was a donor stock assessment, looking at what stocks exist in the upper Columbia that we could use for reintroduction above Chief Joe and Grand Coulee. A risk assessment, recognizing that Grand Coulee's been in place since 1941, and there are things in the anadromous zone of the river that exist now that did not exist prior to 1941 and how would those impact resident species above the dams. And then, what habitat is available now (recognizing that that's a reservoir system versus a free-flowing river like it was when Grand Coulee got built)? And what habitats do we think they would utilize? And what do we think production would look like from those habitats?
After going through all of that work over several years, [we developed] a report that demonstrated that it is feasible. We thought the upper Columbia had the potential to produce millions of juveniles and tens of thousands of Chinook and hundreds of thousands of sockeye. So we moved into what we call our Phase II Implementation Plan. That was a very scientific-driven series of studies for adults and juveniles to track behavior and survival up and down the river, looking at what are the available passage technologies that exist today, or what should we try to develop that maybe doesn't exist anywhere today that would help us get adults and juveniles past Chief Joe and Grand Coulee and into the upper Columbia.
But I mean, it became very apparent as we were releasing those fish … Sanpoil River, we started releasing adult Chinook into there three years ago. Of 75 adults we put up there, we tried to have equal numbers of males and females. I think we ended up with more than 30 redds. I think it was more than 35. So, I mean, 70 of those fish found a mate, made a bed, and spawned successfully. And then this year, we should have adults returning, so we'll get to see. What will survival in the ocean look like? What condition are they in?
The first example I saw firsthand, as I'm driving home: I see a carcass on the bank, bear eating it, bear runs off in the brush. Further down the river, there's another one. There's an eagle sitting on it, he's eating it, he flies away. I mean, it became very apparent that nature is resilient. It knows what it's supposed to do, even if things have been gone for, in human context what seems like a long time, but in nature's context, not very long at all. And we've had several reintroduction efforts trying to bring species back here that were extirpated. We've reintroduced bighorn, we've reintroduced antelope, we've reintroduced buffalo as recently as a couple years ago. So, trying to bring those species back that were culturally significant to the member tribes of Colville to make sure that they had access to them. It will heal both the landscape and our people. So, it's really important for us to get that work done.
But again, we also recognize the interconnectedness of all of those things, and we recognize that you pull on any one of those strings, it affects the other. So, I think we do a better job at that than anybody. A lot of people try to look at things from a single resource management perspective, and typically there are not great outcomes when you're trying to manage for one species. You end up with unintentional consequences to other things you didn't think about.
If you talk to almost anybody at Colville, if you say what's natural resource priority number one, it's water. Because we understand how important it is to a functioning ecosystem. And if you don't have the quantities and qualities of water that you need, the other things don't do well.
Involvement in Public Policy Making
CD: I think the reason I participate in all those things is because I recognize the value of the tribal approach to ecosystem management. The question always comes up: “Why don't you stop going to one or two of those things?” And I ask the question. I say, "Well, which ones? Which ones aren't important?” And usually, we don't have an answer for that. I mean, like the council, as executive director, there's a lot of demands on my time. We have a huge tribal government with 1,500 employees and 77 programs, and [we] spend a quarter of a billion dollars a year. There's a lot of responsibility with just holding down operations here. But when we look at, I mean, whether it's Intertribal Timber Council and bringing awareness and legislation and policy changes that enhance tribal forestry and fire management, that's important. You can't stop doing that. If you look at some of the work the NGOs are [doing] and how they align with what tribal goals and objectives are and the funding and the resources that they bring to those activities, we should be in partnership with them. When you look at the coordination we have with Washington state - I mean, pick the agency, DNR [Department of Natural Resources], Department of Ecology - there's so much better coordination and collaboration than when I started my career. I mean, I always joke that when I came in as the natural resource director in 2014, I couldn't have named a single DNR or Forest Service employee. And now I've got a bunch of them in my phone that I text frequently. So, we've built those personal relationships that have led to more successful relationships and better coordination on what management [looks like on the] landscape or what sharing of resources [we should be doing] to make sure that we're accomplishing our collective goals.
The reason I do it is because I see all of it as valuable. I've been called back to D.C. - I think it's about 15 times - to testify in the last three years. We've never had that type of attention. We've never had that type of traction with Congress. I have seats at tables that tribes have never had seats at in the past. And I don't want to miss that opportunity to show people how good the management in Indian Country is and how we should be included in those management decisions. Tribes should not just be consulted or co-managers where they get to give input on the planning. They should be co-managers where they're sitting at the decision-making table because, if you look at who's making the best decisions, in my opinion, it's happening in Indian Country.
I do feel a real obligation not just to do good things for Colville and our people, but for Indian Country in general… What benefits Colville benefits all tribes. So, this work is important.
Cultural Resources in Forests
CD: When we look at things that are important to tribal members, it's largely not the things that are important for people outside of here. So, I mean, we're looking at camas, bitterroot, huckleberry, serviceberries, good big-game habitat (so you can get enough deer and elk to fill your freezer), adequate water qualities and quantities that it supports fish populations (so that you catch enough fish to keep your freezers full and perform those ceremonies that our tribes do in recognition and honoring those resources that give themselves up for us). So, again, when we look at impacts, it's not just board foot volume lost or acres burned. It's one of those other things that most people don't track. So, when we submit a report to the BIA about our accomplishments, we don't say "We have another 100 acres of camas." We say, "We harvested 77 million board feet. From a fire perspective, we treated X many acres with mechanical treatments and burned in prescribed fire X many acres." But for us, when we look at that - particularly if you look at the 2015 fire season and all of the stuff that burned in North Star - that for the vast majority of people in the Omak and Nespelem districts, that was their huckleberry grounds that burned. Where do those people go to get those things? Those are critical food for both their subsistence and cultural needs.
I think tribes will be more impacted than anybody by climate change because it's not like as the landscape changes, and things move north in latitude and up in elevation, we don't get to move the reservation to have the same kind of conditions we have here now, if conditions are vastly different 100 years from now. We're going to have to try to figure out how we effectively manage to mitigate for what those changes will be and maintain the things here that are important to our membership. Our rights are established. And I think that's something that - if you look back in tribal histories - we recognize that. That we moved across the landscape through time and space and knew that we had a part in trying to keep those landscapes resilient. That's not really the approach that most people take to things now, particularly from a forest management perspective. It's just so hard for people to understand that time context. I mean I'm more than halfway through my career at this point, and I'm one-third of the way through a rotation of our forest. The work that I did 30 years ago when I started - I mean, we won't see that come to fruition until, I don't know, 50 years or 60 years after I'm dead probably. So, it's just such a long time context, and it's hard for people to really understand. But I think tribal people get that more than anybody. You'll hear a lot in Indian country talk about the seventh generation. So, the planning that we do now, the actions that we take now, and how they impact seven generations from us. We're always going to be here. I mean, we're in this for the long game.
Relationship to the Forest
CD: The forest is my church. That's where I go to get away from all of the hecticness that comes with the position I have with all the extra work I do. I spend the vast majority of my time - when I'm not sitting at a desk or on a plane or in a meeting - out in the woods, particularly in the fall when I'm hunting. I really enjoy being out there. And, again, it helps set context for me, for one thing. It kind of reminds me why I do the work I do, but also just gives me that opportunity to check out and just be in nature, be in the things that I enjoy, look at those dynamics. We’ve got really long hunting seasons, lots of opportunity to harvest lots of things. I kill just what I need to fill my freezer, but I spend a lot of time out there. I just like watching things. I like to see how nature functions. That's very relaxing to me and, again, provides great context for why we do the work that we do. I see the things out there that we're fighting for, that we're working for, and I see them just behaving naturally as they're supposed to be. So, it gives me a lot of confidence that what we're doing here is functioning on the landscape the way that we intend it to.
Pre-Contact Impacts on the Landscape
CD: When we look at federal management plans, they're largely looking at this historic range of variation or they're looking at a certain point in time that they're trying to restore the landscape to. And I have a problem with that concept in general. So, when we look at, say, the Wilderness Act, the "untrammeled by man" philosophy, the reality is that's not how these landscapes developed. I mean, if you look at the tribes, we'll say we've been here since time immemorial. Archaeological record says we've been here for probably at least 10,000 years and maybe more. But I think very few people understand how much influence tribes had on the landscape, particularly prior to contact. And I think they understand less what tribal populations were in North and South America at contact and don't understand how much impact disease had prior to settlement.
So, when you see Lewis and Clark moving west and in their documentaries you see references like, "We're going down the Columbia River and we see these Indians along the river." But what the more recent data suggests is that 80 percent to 95 percent of that native population had probably died from disease prior to European settlement for sure and even contact, in a lot of situations.
So, what early settlers observed was a very different landscape than what they would have observed, say, 50 to 100 years before that. And I think when you look at the language in the Wilderness Act, they also didn't recognize that. If there's 20 times as many people that were using fire on the landscape, the number of fires they would have seen, and the way that landscape looked, would have been vastly different even 100 years before contact.
So, that's the type of fire regime these forests developed in for 10,000 years. What they saw was very different than what they would have seen 100 years before that and absolutely different than what would have been on the landscape, say, 500 years before that. I think that's a reality we need to get to. When we look at the policy world, we only get to manage natural ignitions. "Natural ignitions." And right now, the way the policy interprets that, that's just lightning for us. And lightning doesn't necessarily come here at the times of year that we're doing burning, so it doesn't give credit for the Indigenous knowledge that tribes had that knew when to burn, knew what to burn, and under what conditions. And it doesn't account for the fact that, if we want to return to those historic forest conditions that are consistent with some point in history, you've got to have tribal people out there doing that burning at the right times of year. And I mean, frankly, we still maintain that culture. That's why I think also you see fires happening on reservations having significantly better post-fire outcomes than those that are happening on unmanaged federal land where we don't have access to do some of that cultural burning or traditional burning that we would have done.
So I think that's a serious flaw that we need to overcome. Honestly, I think it takes a change in the education system…Washington state passed a law that states schools need to teach the history of the local tribes. But I still think we're missing the ball on what that tribal history is. I mean, we think about tribes as being where they were at contact, but almost certainly those people moved and changed through time. And yeah, from a natural resource perspective, we're going to have to vastly change how we view what they did, why they did it, and then build those authorities back into policy and legislation going forward if we really want to recreate those landscapes. Also recognizing, though, that we have a vastly different landscape than they did back then with land use patterns, with challenges with people and infrastructure that may be in the way, and with the smoke considerations we have for a Clean Air Act. We're at a much different starting point than tribes were at contact. So, all of those really need to be considerations when we think about where do we want to go because I think that's one of our biggest considerations and something I think we're missing when we're talking near-term. How do we fix fire risk today? We're not talking about what do we want our forest to look like 100 years from now.
