a historical essay with the mentorship of Felicity Scott.

“Ecologies of Land Termination” centers three major tree species, the Ponderosa Pine, the Lodgepole Pine, and the White Fir, at the heart of a well documented history of Native American land theft during the Termination policy era of US governance against the Klamath Nation of South Central Oregon in the 1950s and 60s. These forcible, yet "democratically" guised termination policies resulted in the nationalization of almost all 800,000 acres of Klamath Tribal forestlands through the creation of the Winema National Forest in 1961. This was the last instance of a long history of tribal land theft within the US National Forest system, and the largest territorial tribal land grab of the Termination era.

While this history is commonly narrated as a battle between tribal sovereignty and government imposition, by repositioning historical agency among the three major commodified tree bodies of the ecoregion, a greater capacity to understand the commodity driven, privatized networks of land/resource control that undergirded the termination of Klamath land rights may be drawn out. This apparatus of territorial governance was born out of a changing landscape of aggregated, fiber-based timber commodities (responding to the rapid deforestation of first-generation Ponderosa Pine forests and subsequent adoption of previously non-commercial Lodgepole and White Fir). Supporting this major shift in the timber commodity landscape of S. Oregon was the research driven, agriculturally inspired Klamath Tree Farm of the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, which operated in conjunction with the US National Forest system under dubious forest management standards. These two scales of arboreal control, individual and networked, created a new commercial landscape under which the last remaining first generation forests (Klamath tribal forestlands) could be harvested and economically transformed.

The essay is written with the contemporary, radical collaboration between the Klamath Tribe and the US Forest Service as a backdrop and a marker of the persistent ecological afterlife that the Termination era of environmental manipulation still has today. An important aspect of the paper is that in re-centering tree bodies as a historical agent, our conception of generationality is deeply challenged. While the Termination era of tribal governance is now several generations removed, its ecological effects are still in their nascent stage as the present-day trees and their surrounding ecologies are direct descendants of commodity-driven forestry practices. In this consideration of inter-species timescales, a broader, more representative history of environmental governance may be understood.