The Mountains Remember the People, 2025. Archival pigment print photo collage, glass beads, beading felt and nylon thread, 6 x 9 inches. Pictured is Cynthia Espirito with her great-grandson, Jayven Killsfirst. Images used: Elaine Harvey, Gifford Pinchot National Forest Archive.
(Epiphany Couch/High Country News)
This article was first published by High Country News.
Susan Jim held each dark purple berry with the tips of her fingers. One by one, she picked off oval-shaped leaves stuck to some of the small fruits, as she sorted them into large silver bowls. Unwanted stems, sticks and bugs tossed in one bowl, clean berries in another. Time was measured by the deepening magenta of her fingers, how sticky they became from the berries’ sweet juices. These were the summer season’s first huckleberries, to be honored and thanked at a ceremonial feast that Sunday afternoon.
“We were taught to be quiet when we picked,” Jim, who is 60 and a member of the Ḱamíłpa Band of the Yakama Nation, said as she cleaned the berries that had been gathered the day before. Her family carries themselves reverently in the mountains where huckleberries grow. They have to pick in a good way, she explained, so the food won’t catch bad feelings and pass them along.
Campfire smoke drifted through the warm early-August mountain air at Cold Springs campground in the Sawtooth Berry Fields in southwestern Washington’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Jim’s family knows these places as Kps Waanayt and Psawaswaakwuł in Wahúupam, a dialect of Ichishkíin, the mid-Columbia River language.
For several hours, Jim cleaned berries, called wíwnu, at a picnic table under towering cottonwood trees. Sunbeams shone through the branches and onto Jim, who wore sunglasses and a purple wing dress. Woven baskets decorated with geometric designs were filled with freshly picked berries ready for cleaning. Women in colorful patterned dresses cut potatoes and carrots and prepared dozens of plates, bowls, cups, forks and spoons for the meal. Kids ran through the campground; their parents occasionally yelled to them to come help.
The annual huckleberry feast at Cold Springs commences berry-picking season, in late July or early August, enabling tribal members to gather the last of their traditional foods for the year. The feast is always held on a Sunday when tribal members don’t harvest any berries or other food. It’s a law that they follow year-round, no matter how busy their lives become, said Jim’s brother, Ḱamíłpa Chief Bronsco Jim Jr. Long before the Bible arrived on this continent, his people followed their own count of the days. “You don’t break the branches or fir boughs of the living trees or the grasses” on the last day, he said. “You don’t hunt the deer, or fish, or dig roots. Anything alive is respected.”
The night before, 41-year-old Jim Jr. swept dirt away from the temporary longhouse that he and other tribal members put up each year for the feast. Every summer, for as long as berries have grown here, the family has traveled from their homes along the Nch’i-Wána (Columbia River) to the berry fields west of Pátu (Mount Adams). Villages surrounded the Big River, in canyons carved by smaller rivers, from the mouth of the Umatilla west to the mouth of the Deschutes — home to Wahúupam-speaking people, the River People. They named the rocky peaks and clear shallow lakes in and around the huckleberry fields. Lalukušwaakwuł. Łmáma Pšwá. Watám Watám. The mountains remember the people when they return every summer, Jim Jr. said. “The land understands our language.”
The Jims’ grandmother, atway Lasáyat Louise Billy, followed the berries as they ripened, camping with her family for weeks. She’d start at low elevations near Carson, then head to Trout Lake before ending the season in the high-elevation fields in and around Sawtooth — places and harvesting rights that the U.S. government promised to preserve in its 1855 treaty with the Yakama Nation.
But over the decades, the River People watched the landscape change. Under U.S. Forest Service management, berries vanished. Once-open fields became dense forests that have continued to grow since the agency banned tribal burns in the early 1900s. The mountains in and around Sawtooth became a source of profit when the agency allowed a burgeoning commercial industry to turn the treaty-protected huckleberries into commodities.
Now, the Jims find commercial pickers in their family’s gathering sites every summer. A gallon of the berries sells for up to $200. Gifford Pinchot is the only national forest with a large-scale commercial huckleberry program, but the Jim family and other Ḱamíłpa members want that to end. “The way we were taught and raised is when you go gather, you gotta give back,” Susan Jim said. “You gotta give back for what you’re taking. To them, it’s just dollar signs.
“But people are not all raised the same.”
NOT LONG AFTER THE GLACIERS released Washington’s Southern Cascades from their icy blue grip some 11,000 years ago, huckleberries appeared. Every spring, the hardy shrubs emerge from a blanket of winter snow with new growth. Light-green ovate leaves decorate shrubs that can grow up to 5 feet tall. Flowers bloom and dangle from their thin branches like tiny blush-colored bells. Small fruits like blueberries develop, red at first, until they mature under the July sun into shiny, nearly black berries. Western scientists say that huckleberries belong to the same genus as blueberries. Lewis and Clark referred to the plants growing near the Columbia in 1806 as huckleberries, possibly confusing them with the huckleberries that grow on the East Coast and belong to a different genus.
For decades, Western scientists have tried to cultivate huckleberries, starting as early as 1897, but the plants won’t grow on farms. They’re found only in the mountains. The Jims prefer it that way. Huckleberries rely on winter snow and proliferate from regular fires set by the River People and other Indigenous peoples who also created and maintained huckleberry fields. Fire nourished the acidic soil and cleared out trees so that the shrubs had enough water and sunlight to blossom and produce berries. Bronsco Jim Jr.’s father said that he could still see signs of those regular burns in his childhood, when the Sawtooth fields resembled the hillsides around Mount St. Helens after the 1980 eruption. “It was open, big open areas,” Jim Jr. said. “You could see a long ways.”
Mount Adams was always visible, its rounded, glaciated 12,276-foot summit watching over from the east, just 14 miles away. To the west, Mount St. Helens stood a few miles farther, at 9,677 feet before its eruption. Thousands of acres of huckleberry shrubs grew in the volcanic landscape, from Twin Buttes, south 12 miles to Red Mountain in the River Area, where the River People harvested. As the berries ripened, the hillsides and meadows grew so colorful with chartreuse grasses, purple lupines and white beargrass blooms that Western scientists called the ecosystem a subalpine “parkland,” insinuating that it was a purposefully landscaped place, which it was — managed by tribal people.
Before huckleberry season, the River People followed different edible roots and sucker fish as they appeared within the Columbia River’s tributaries in early spring. Come April, roots grew higher up, on nearby plateaus and ridgelines. Then, the people would cross the Big River on horses, and headed south to the Blue Mountains for summertime currants, serviceberries and chokecherries ripening along the John Day River. Eels came up the river, too. After, they headed north again to fish for summer salmon. Huckleberries, the final food of the season, grew in the mountains to the west, late summer until fall.
All of these food-gathering sites were supposed to be protected under the 1855 treaty, fulfilling the U.S. government’s trust responsibility toward tribal nations to conserve off-reservation resources — the lands and rivers where fish, deer, roots and berries live. But in the decades that followed, through land theft, removals, allotments and boarding schools, the treaty was seen by the federal government as one step in its efforts to eradicate Indigenous peoples and cultures. Assimilation would negate the treaties, the government assumed, and those promises to protect tribal sovereignty would eventually become irrelevant.
Hunting, fishing and gathering sites were soon fenced off as private land. By the 1890s, some were declared federal forest reserves, later called national forests. Part of what became Gifford Pinchot was set aside in 1897, and several years later, in 1905, Congress established the Forest Service under the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The new federal agency claimed these lands as “public,” owned by all Americans. Treaty-protected huckleberries became “special forest products” that the public could harvest. Forest Service roads cut through berry fields. Hiking trails traversed cultural sites. “The land, as well as what grows upon it, must be used for the purpose for which it is most valuable,” Gifford Pinchot, the first U.S. Forest Service chief, wrote in 1907. “On it may be built stores, hotels, residences, power plants, mills, and many other things.”
The Forest Service implemented an aggressive fire-suppression policy to preserve trees for logging and protect mountain towns where white settlers now lived. Tribally set burns that maintained the huckleberry fields became illegal. Hemlock and fir trees began to grow.
Around the early 1900s, when the River People returned to the berry fields, they found more than trees: An estimated 150,000 sheep grazed the national forest, thriving on the grasses in the high-country huckleberry fields. The animals’ stench emanated from the mountains, Bronsco Jim Jr.’s family said. Tribal leaders complained; Forest Service officials dismissed them. Berries were plentiful in other parts of the forest, they said.
Then the white pickers arrived. During the Great Depression, more than 6,000 people flooded the Sawtooth fields. They set up a commercial store in a nearby campground. They hogged the roads and stole berries from tribal women. “Now today the white men are commercializing our berries,” Tommy Thompson, a tribal leader from Celilo, said at a council with Forest Service officials in 1929. “It is our patch and the same as a wheat field or corn field or a herd of horses or cattle. I wouldn’t come into your place and take your crops or your stock and sell them.”
In 1931 alone, pickers sold more than 60,000 gallons of berries from Gifford Pinchot National Forest, worth about $6 million today. The commercial huckleberry industry exploded in other national forests in Idaho and Montana. Pickers used rakes and beaters to harvest berries quickly, up to 50 gallons a day. Businessmen wanted to squeeze every penny they could from the mountains. The berries were free for the taking, no regulations. One forester wondered whether land managers should prioritize “the growing of timber or if huckleberries may be the more profitable crop.”
Tribal leaders complained. Berry fields packed with sheep and non-Native pickers violated the treaty, they said. They demanded exclusive picking rights. But Forest Service officials said the white pickers had equal rights to the fields. “Someday Indians won’t come anymore,” assistant regional forester F.V. Horton wrote in a 1931 Forest Service memo, discussing tribal complaints. “The area will grow up to timber (and) there will be no more berries. Should not agree to an Indian monopoly of berry grounds.”
The next summer, in 1932, Ḱamíłpa Chief atway William Yallup asked to meet with Forest Supervisor J.R. Bruckart at Watám Watám (Surprise Lakes) near Cold Springs. “Now in the last two years whites as thick as the needles on the firs have driven our (women) from the berry fields,” Yallup told Bruckart, as quoted in a 1997 Western Historical Quarterly article. “Yet our treaty, signed in 1855, gives us the right to hunt, fish and gather berries for all time in our usual and accustomed places. So let the white man leave. This is our land.”
“I myself was placed here by the Great White Father to see that all people enjoyed the forest equally,” Bruckart replied. “I cannot exclude the White Man from the berry fields or I would also have to exclude the Indians.”
In what’s known as the Handshake Agreement, Bruckart eventually agreed to set aside 2,800 acres of the expansive Sawtooth fields and four campgrounds, including Cold Springs, for the River People’s exclusive use during huckleberry season. While the agreement lacked legal teeth, Forest Service officials and tribal leaders met regularly to reaffirm its terms. In 1990, it was officially added to the forest’s cultural resource management plan. The agreement prohibits non-Native pickers from gathering berries east of Forest Road 24, which cuts through the Sawtooth fields. Several signs throughout the area advise visitors: “Huckleberries on this side of the road reserved for Indians.”
A RAVEN CALLED above the firs as bees buzzed down below. Huckleberry leaves, now spotted red from the September sun, gently rustled as Susan Jim and her aunt, Lumkyheet Penny Jim, moved through the bushes. Berries thumped softly as they rhythmically hit the bottom of the women’s cedar baskets.
“It’s just really soothing, isn’t it?” 64-year-old Penny Jim said of the sound, looking down as she maneuvered through shrubs nearly as tall as her own 5-foot frame. She drew the thin stems toward her and plucked the deep-purple berries. Huckleberries don’t commonly grow in bunches; just one or two grow on each stem. They take time to pick. These plants, known as big or mountain huckleberries, grow only at mid to high elevations. They’re a different species than evergreen huckleberries, which grow in low-elevation forests and have been cultivated for gardens and yards. But evergreen huckleberry fruit is less desirable. The berries’ skin is tougher, and their juices less flavorful.
By early September, the berry season was starting to wane. Maple leaves in the forest below began their golden transformation. Penny Jim took off her black hooded sweatshirt, tied a floral purple scarf around her forehead and fanned herself with a beige bucket hat. The low clouds and wildfire smoke made the mountain air feel like the inside of an oven. She sighed, put her hat back on, then started picking.
“We should have been here at 6 in the morning, huh, Auntie,” Susan Jim said.
The increasingly warm summers of the last few decades have created softer berries whose juices stain pickers’ fingers purple. Susan Jim’s father, atway Bronsco Jim Sr., started picking when the sun came up. He finished with hardly any pigment on his fingers, a sign of proper picking.
“My dad would say, ‘You should have been there earlier when it’s colder, and they’ll fall off,’” Susan Jim said of the berries, which harden overnight. “Our dad was no slouch.”
“Don’t look at my hands,” Penny Jim said, laughing.
The two women picked quietly for about six hours in the northwestern part of Gifford Pinchot, outside of Randle. They pick together every year, driving two to four hours from their homes in the Yakima Valley, east of the Cascades. They gather berries to preserve in cans for ceremonies throughout the year. They stay in the picking mindset, as Susan Jim described. It’s an act of endearment. “You need to remember that these foods are gonna help somebody,” she said. “If they’re lonely, they’re sick, or whatever it may be, it’s gonna help them.”
But it’s hard to find time to head to the mountains, with 8-to-5 Monday-through-Friday jobs. Penny Jim is also earning a Ph.D. in Indigenous studies, on top of her full-time job. “I should be writing now,” she said. “But it’s berry season. My professor knows.”
Good, secluded berry patches are also becoming harder to find. Many tribal members can pick only on Saturdays in August and early September, since they don’t harvest food on Sundays. By the time they arrive at their preferred patch, it might already be picked over by commercial pickers, who camp in the forest for weeks during the season, picking every day. “I always tell Auntie, we just gotta find places, more places that people overlook,” Susan Jim said.
As children in the 1970s, Susan Jim and her sisters picked with their mother, father, grandmothers and cousins, all day until dusk. They tried to keep up with their mother as she maneuvered through the bushes. If they lagged too far behind, the shrubs slapped them in the face. They’d set up camp and pick all week, leaving only to refuel on gas and food at nearby mountain towns. Their grandmothers, as Susan Jim’s older sister, Tina Jim, described, were “go-go-go, pick-pick-pick.” At night, they’d start cleaning the berries, preparing them for canning.
Each family member had their preferred camp spot: Louise Billy and her younger sister camped on the southwest side of Surprise Lake, while another grandmother stayed on the north side. Their uncle favored a roadside pullout with his wife, just the two of them. Later, when Bronsco Jim Sr. began commercial fishing on the Columbia in the summer, he needed more help from his family, and their trips to the berry fields became less frequent. But the River People haven’t always had to choose between berries and salmon. “My dad said when our people would be at the berry fields, there were places they would go to, to get salmon,” Jim Jr. said, of nearby rivers, like the Lewis. But the fish can’t get there anymore, blocked by dams.
The Jim siblings and their cousins had to behave and be quiet in the fields. They weren’t allowed to swim in the numerous lakes. “Our grandparents did not know that area (as a place) to go camping, leisurely, and play,” Jim Jr. said. “They were really respected. There are things that we don’t talk about to the public, the powers of these places that our people know of.”
Legend-stories pass on the lessons about how to hold yourself in the high country. It’s not like today, with people on dirt bikes, ATVs, paddleboards, snowmobiles and skis, cruising over cultural sites. Floaties on a lake, bass drum booming. “The new people view it as playing,” Jim Jr. said.
DECADES PASSED without fire. Huckleberry shrubs still grew in the understory, but as trees closed the canopy, they robbed the bushes of the sunlight and water they needed to produce fruits. “At this rate it will not be long until berry picking in this area will be no more,” a former Forest Service employee wrote in 1952, estimating that the fields dwindled to less than one-third of their previous size.
By the 1950s and 1960s, the commercial huckleberry picking fueled by the Depression faded as the economy improved and the timber industry expanded in the post-World War II housing boom. But some pickers persisted, and the berries still fetched a high price. As part of a Forest Service study on managing huckleberry fields, the agency removed trees from about 190 acres of the Sawtooth fields but barely curtailed the encroaching vegetation. A huckleberry management plan was developed in 1968 but never implemented.
A 1972 Forest Service report urged land managers to restore the fields in both Oregon and Washington — not for their cultural importance, but for their economic value. They were worth an estimated $300 per acre, or about $11,200 based on the price of berries today. Work to bring them back “should begin at once,” the report said.
More than a decade later, in 1983, Yakama Nation leaders met with agency officials to discuss managing the Sawtooth fields and returning fire to the landscape. The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens buried huckleberry fields under hot ash and killed bees that pollinated the shrubs, leaving tribal people with even fewer places to pick.
In 1984, Congress established the 20,782-acre Indian Heaven Wilderness. The area encompassed the berry fields where the River People picked, places Louise Billy took her family. In a designated “wilderness,” the trees that have invaded those fields cannot be cut.
As the berry fields diminished, demand increased. Huckleberry products became souvenirs for tourists visiting small mountain towns in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana, garnering fans for their flavor but also local allure. They represented nostalgic relics of the mountain West, with consumers willing to pay a lot for a taste.
By 1994, still lacking fire and a long-term management plan, the Sawtooth fields had shrunk from 12,000 acres to 4,000 acres. The 2,800 acres originally protected by the Handshake Agreement within the Sawtooth fields decreased to about 700 acres. At the time, Gifford Pinchot archaeologist Cheryl Mack brought Yakama elders to Indian Heaven, including Louise Billy and two of her sisters. Mack asked them if they recalled camping at particular sites as children. But the elders couldn’t remember. They didn’t recognize the landscape anymore. Colonization shaded their memory, hiding treaty obligations under a thickening canopy of firs.
The Forest Service attempted a few small-scale tree removal projects with the Yakama Nation in the 1980s and ’90s, 20 acres here and there, but the tree growth outpaced the agency’s effort. In a 2008 report, the agency said the Sawtooth fields were “rapidly declining.” The fields were estimated to be 1,500 acres, but of that, only 182 acres were still considered open berry fields. Around that time, the agency thinned about 1,100 acres using hand tools and contracted with a timber company to remove trees. And in 2011, after more than a century, the Forest Service, in collaboration with the Yakama Nation, burned 90 acres. A few smaller burns took place several years later. No other fields have burned since.
These projects over the decades are “the reason all of the Sawtooth huckleberry fields haven’t disappeared,” Jessica Hudec, a forest ecologist for Gifford Pinchot who has worked on huckleberry restoration projects, said. The agency plans to thin 500 acres of the Sawtooth fields this summer. In the last few years, it has also worked with the Cowlitz Indian Tribe on projects to reduce tree cover on a berry site in the northern part of the forest where both Cowlitz and Yakama members pick. The field is closed to commercial picking at the Yakama Nation’s request.
“I wish we could do more (restoration) work that was just targeted at that,” Hudec said, speaking of huckleberries. “Unfortunately, we have fallen short over the years in securing funds beyond the agency’s timber management program.”
For years, Forest Service officials have told the Yakama Nation that the agency cannot burn the fields because of drought. As the climate warms, huckleberry habitat is predicted to shrink by up to 41% by the end of the century.
A CAR TAILED Louise Billy and her daughter, Cynthia Espirito, as they drove through the berry fields sometime in the 1980s. At first, they wondered why someone would follow them into the mountains. Then they realized it was commercial pickers. “They were following us so they could learn where we’re going, where the berries are,” Espirito, now 66, said.
Tina Jim, 61, remembered seeing commercial pickers in the Mount St. Helens area sometime in the early 2000s. Pickers poured red unripe berries into white plastic containers near a 12-passenger van. A few years later, a picker tried to block Jim’s way as she drove up a narrow forest road to a berry field. She’s seen a dozen pickers in the fields, standing in a line, stripping the shrubs clean.
Some commercial pickers strap rifles to their backs. One had a machete. They try to intimidate elders with dogs, blocking roads and picking from the same bush. In addition to bear spray, the Jims now carry Mace and a knife.
“One day, someone’s gonna get hurt,” said Anna Wahtomy, a 65-year-old Ḱamíłpa member and great-granddaughter of Chief Yallup, who established the Handshake Agreement. Twenty-some years ago, not far from where that handshake took place, two white boys fired a gun toward Wahtomy as she picked, missing her. Soon after, she attended meetings with the Forest Service. “It feels like we’re talking to you on deaf ear, like you don’t listen,” she told a group of federal officials recently. “We’re just moving our mouth, and you’re just there and shaking your head.”
Most of the productive and accessible huckleberry habitat in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana is on Forest Service-owned lands where commercial harvest is prohibited. But enforcement is scant, and illegal harvest is common.
At Gifford Pinchot, the only national forest with a large-scale commercial huckleberry program, commercial pickers pay either $60 for a two-week permit with a 40-gallon limit, or $105 for a seasonal permit with a 70-gallon limit. Pickers who don’t sell berries also need a personal use permit that allows them to harvest up to three gallons a year for free. The Forest Service doesn’t require commercial pickers to show proof of insurance, including general liability, worker’s compensation or vehicle insurance. In contrast, the Idaho Department of Lands issues commercial huckleberry permits for state-owned lands for $500 with proof of insurance.
Gifford Pinchot sold 928 permits last season, for a total of $83,445. Revenue from permits has grown steadily since the early 1990s, when the Forest Service started its commercial program, from $625 in 1993 to a high of $105,807 in 2022.
Come mid-August, cream-colored canvas tents pop up near gas station parking lots on a short stretch of Highway 12 in Randle, just outside the forest’s northern boundary. Commercial huckleberry buyers set up temporary shops, with cash registers, scales, strainers and large freezers, to buy fresh berries from pickers. For weeks, buyers camp in RVs in the small town, purchasing berries everyday until the season subsides. Some also buy wild mushrooms, like chanterelles.
Pickers set up tents in Randle, too, camping near the Cowlitz River, while others camp in the woods, closer to the berry fields. Most descend from Vietnamese and Cambodian families who came to the U.S. in the 1970s and found work picking huckleberries. In the last few years, more people from Mexico and Central America have begun picking, too.
Pickers drive to the mountains in the morning and return to the canvas tents in the evening, selling buckets of berries to buyers, who are also typically southeast Asian or Latino. Buyers are often small business owners or work as contractors for wild food companies, like Mikuni Wild Harvest, a Canadian corporation with a distribution center in Tacoma. Those companies then sell to private customers, chefs, wineries and other companies that create huckleberry products. This season, buyers typically paid pickers $5.50 per pound of huckleberries, or $27.50 a gallon, about $13.75 an hour for eight hours of work if a picker sells four gallons, the average amount. “That barely covers gas and a beer,” one picker said after selling two gallons.
A buyer who did not want to be identified said that he was paid on commission, earning 50 cents a pound for the berries that he bought, about $250 for several weeks of work. The company typically purchases 500 pounds over the season, likely earning around $12,500 from those berries.
Pickers delivered 250 to 300 gallons daily during the season to the Trout Lake Grocery, a store near the southern part of the forest that sold berries for $67 a gallon.
Tina Jim will close her eyes as she passes the tents on Highway 12. She’ll look at her phone, or fiddle with the music. “I’m sick and tired of this,” Jim said. “Look at what they’re doing.”
In a large white freezer perched on a trailer, another buyer stacked white buckets on top of each other — 780 pounds of huckleberries, worth about $20,000. “There’s a lot of money in the mountains,” he said. “A lot.”
MIKUNI WILD HARVEST sells frozen huckleberries for about $30 a pound, or $150 a gallon. Fresh & Wild, a Vancouver-based company, sells the berries for about $40 a pound, or $200 a gallon. Northwest Wild Foods charges about $20 a pound, or $100 a gallon. According to a 2007 Washington State Department of Natural Resources report, Northwest Wild Foods, a Burlington, Washington-based corporation, grossed $750,000 in 2006 from selling frozen berries, though that included other varieties such as elderberries and lingonberries. The company also sells huckleberry pies for $50, using berries harvested near Mount St. Helens, which is located within Gifford Pinchot, although berry-picking is prohibited in the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. Northwest Wild Foods also sells Idaho huckleberries, describing them on its website as “typically growing naturally on US forest service land they are 100% spray free.” The company says that the “majority of Idaho huckleberries come from the Priest Lake area,” though harvesting is prohibited if it takes place in the Idaho Panhandle National Forests.
In an email, Northwest Wild Foods owner Tom LaMonte said that he hadn’t heard about the issues raised by the Yakama Nation. “The tribes have their own designated picking territory in the National Forest that is protected for them only,” he wrote. “I have never once heard of intimidation or other issues regarding the tribal land so that is completely new news to me. The only thing I have ever really heard is that none of the tribe members actually pick on their designated territory.”
Huckleberry soap, lotion, lip balm, candles, jam, pancake mix, caramels, taffy, jelly beans, honey, tea, vinaigrette and soda pack the shelves of small-town stores and online retailers. The Oregon-based Tillamook Creamery and Umpqua Dairy sell huckleberry ice cream. A Washington-based cannabis company named Wyld sells huckleberry CBD gummies. Wild Roots, an Oregon-based company, makes huckleberry-infused vodka. A cafe in Trout Lake sells huckleberry mimosas and margaritas. Wineries in Oregon and Washington make huckleberry wine.
“We get offended when we go out and we see huckleberry products,” Ḱamíłpa member and food-gatherer Trina Sherwood, 60, said.
“It just shows how much they pick and pick off of our bushes,” Sherwood’s 18-year-old daughter, Tamisa Sherwood, said.
It’s unclear where some companies, including Tillamook, Umpqua, Fresh & Wild and Cascade Organic, get their berries, as none of them responded to multiple interview requests. A Forest Service official said that he was told that Tillamook buys berries picked in Gifford Pinchot.
Sherwood and other Jim family members regularly see commercial pickers harvesting from bushes in the Sawtooth fields exclusively reserved for Native use, as well as in other areas of the forest where commercial harvest is banned. Pickers are out before the commercial season even starts on the second Monday in August, a regulation the Yakama Nation pushed the Forest Service to adopt in 2005 so that tribal members could have enough berries for their huckleberry feast. “Who’s to say pickers aren’t just getting (free) personal-use permits and then selling the berries?” one commercial buyer who didn’t want to be identified said.
Gifford Pinchot employs one to four temporary officers to patrol the berry fields. Last season, the Forest Service issued 13 citations to people who lacked permits but claimed they were harvesting for personal use. Forest Service law enforcement officers declined an interview request.
Washington’s commercial huckleberry industry was unregulated for decades until 2008, when the Yakama Nation successfully lobbied state legislators to pass a law. Buyers are now required to obtain permit information from pickers and keep track of how many berries they buy. While Forest Service law enforcement officers can check buyers’ information, the law is enforced by county sheriffs. A conviction can lead to fines and time served in the county jail. But no one has ever been charged in Lewis County, where Randle is located, according to the Lewis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. In Klickitat County, one person was charged with buying 990 pounds of berries before the commercial season opened in August 2017, but the case was ultimately dismissed, according to a report released by the Klickitat County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office in response to a public records request.
“It’s great to have a law, but if no one is getting in trouble for breaking that law, do you really have a law?” Phil Rigdon (Yakama Nation), superintendent of Yakama Nation’s Department of Natural Resources, said.
“When you start having such a big economy tied into this, it’s changing the nature of what we as Yakamas wanted and think it should be,” he said.
Cynthia Espirito’s daughter Elaine Harvey, a 48-year-old Ḱamíłpa member and food gatherer who is also related to the Jim family, has worked for years to protect cultural resources. The commercialization of all cultural plants, including huckleberries, should be phased out, she said. “We’ve got treaty rights, tribal rights, that supersede and preempt the development of states, counties and national forests.”
Harvey is a part of a volunteer federal committee that has developed amendments to the Northwest Forest Plan, which guides management of 17 national forests from Northern California to Southeast Alaska, including Gifford Pinchot. When the initial Forest Plan was adopted by the Forest Service in 1994, the process lacked input from the 82 tribes within the region. Many of the proposed amendments center on cultural resource management. One amendment reads: “Commercial collection of special forest products shall not be permitted if the relevant Tribal governing body identified it would result in limiting Tribal member access to treaty, reserved, or retained resources.”
“We’re tired of being put on the back burner,” Harvey told the committee at a meeting in December. “We’re the ones dealing with the loss of our food.”
“Most tribes would not give permission to exploit our foods,” she said. “That’s what’s happening here. Our First Foods are being exploited, our medicines, our basket weaving material. These are all being exploited without rightful tribal consultation.”
Harvey and other tribal leaders, including Phil Rigdon and Bronsco Jim Jr., meet with Forest Service officials annually to discuss the huckleberry season, among other things. Each year, they complain to officials about commercial pickers and the lack of fire in the fields. But turnover in the agency is high. Harvey and Jim Jr. have to constantly teach new employees about their relationship to the landscape and treaty rights. “We’re the same people talking, saying the same thing, and there’s a number of different people that have no clue (about) what these mountains mean,” Jim Jr. said. “We have to explain, spill our heart out, and then they move onto another place, or they move up on the corporate ladder.”
Gifford Pinchot Forest Supervisor Johanna Kovarik, who was hired in 2023, said the agency was open to considering a ban on the commercial program. At a meeting in late September in Stevenson, Washington, Jacque Buchanan, the Forest Service’s regional forester for the Pacific Northwest Region, said that the agency would conduct a review and decide whether to further restrict commercial picking in Gifford Pinchot before the upcoming huckleberry season.
EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, Bronsco Jim Jr. assured his 10-year-old nephew, AJ Martin, that they were almost there. Jim Jr. led a group of his family — AJ and his mother, Velene Antone; Jim Jr.’s two sisters, Tina Jim and Lorna Jim; and retired Forest Service archaeologist Rick McClure — on a Sunday hike to Kalamát (Indian Racetrack) in Indian Heaven Wilderness. Huckleberries’ scarlet leaves brightened the understory. The ground was crisp, hardened by late September air almost cold enough to show clouds of breath.
The family’s ancestors raced horses and played games on Sunday afternoons at Kalamát. They gathered there before concluding the huckleberry season and their summer in the mountains. While the salmon still run in the fall and the deer still graze in the forests, huckleberries are considered the last of the seasonal foods, the final word, as Jim described. The “finale of the finale.”
Three miles into the hike, Jim Jr. passed a small meadow and lake. “Čiķwáš,” he told AJ. The area used to be open, not crowded with trees, he said. AJ nodded and looked around. They kept walking.
In another small meadow covered with dry yellow grasses, Jim Jr. pointed out the still-visible racetracks on the ground — a straight, slight indent that holds the memory of generations of hooves pounding and people enjoying themselves while gathering berries.
Farther up the trail, on top of Lutsá Puštáy (Red Mountain), Jim Jr. pointed to the surrounding buttes and mountains. Áyunaaš. Tuksaywáakuł. He told AJ stories about why they have to pick berries quietly.
They held a small ceremony in the meadow at Kalamát, a final acknowledgment and thanks to the mountains, and to the huckleberries.
“These mountains, meadows remember us,” Jim Jr. said. “They know what we’re saying. They understand us.”
Epiphany Couch, a spuyaləpabš (Puyallup)/Yakama descendant, is an interdisciplinary artist exploring generational knowledge, storytelling, and the natural and spiritual worlds. Couch is from Tacoma, Washington, and now lives in Portland, Oregon.
Reporting for this article was supported by an award from the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources.
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