Native Lands for Wolf and Man.

• Author: Hardman, Chris
• Position: Brief Article

As THE SPIRIT of the wolf returns to Idaho's national forest, so does the spirit of the Native American tribe in charge of reintroducing it. For the first time, the U.S. government has contracted an Indian nation--the Nez Perce tribe of northern Idaho--to manage the recovery of an endangered species--the gray wolf. The success of this project is being hailed as a cultural victory for a people with a strong spiritual connection to an elusive and beautiful animal.

The history of the Nez Perce is sadly similar to the history of the gray wolf. Both were forced out of their territory to make room for white settlers. In 1855 the Nez Perce signed a treaty with the U.S. government allowing the tribe to keep most of its traditional lands in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, but with the discovery of gold in 1860 much of this land was taken over, and a second treaty was created in 1863, to which the Nez Perce claimed they never agreed. Hostilities escalated, and a series of battles and forced marches ensued. After the Nez Perce surrendered in 1877, the tribe's remaining members were shuffled around the country until they finally were placed on a reservation in Lapwai, Idaho.

At the same time the Nez Perce lived in the Northwest so did thousands of wolves, but as white settlers spread throughout the region's forests and rivers, the wolves soon learned that, unlike the Nez Perce, the new people did not welcome them. In the 1860s hunters slaughtered thousands of wolves by scattering poisoned bison carcasses around wolf feeding grounds. When the demand for wolf fur increased, as many as a thousand animals were killed a winter. In Montana alone more than eighty thousand wolves were killed in a forty-year period. The U.S. government joined the slaughter in the 1900s by hiring hunters and trappers to kill wolves thought dangerous to livestock. Thirty years later, the gray wolf had been eliminated from most of the U.S.

"Our history has mirrored one another's," says Jaime Pinkham, Nez Perce Tribal Council member. "The settlers had two obstacles: that of the Indian people and that of the predators such as the wolves. Both the Nez Perce and the gray wolf were dispossessed. Today we see that mirror continue but in a more optimistic journey."

Between 1995 and 1996, as part of...