Crystal: [00:00:00] I’m Crystal DiMiceli, and welcome to the Forces for Nature show. Do you find yourself overwhelmed with all the doom and gloom you hear of these days? Do you feel like you, as just one person, can’t really make a difference? Forces for Nature cuts through that negativity. In each episode, I interview Someone who is working to make the world more sustainable and humane.

Join me in learning from them and get empowered to take action so that you too can become a force for nature.

Welcome to another episode of the forces for nature earth X conference series, where I bring you [00:00:45] behind the scenes of my experiences during the earth X conference and up close and personal with some of their incredible presenters. Today’s guest, Julie Thorstensen, had me reflecting back on when I lived in Panama.

During my years there, I was fortunate enough to spend time with and get to know several Indigenous communities and families. One Mbira family in particular became like my own, and I have some lovely memories with them. One of my favorites is walking through the forest with the grandfather, being told the names and the uses of each of the plants.

There was even a plant they would use to treat venomous snakebites, and he himself was living proof that it worked. Their [00:01:30] ancestral wisdom about the land and its plants and animals was humbling and inspiring. And their deep connection to it all is one of the reasons that Indigenous managed lands often outperform national parks in forest preservation and carbon sequestration.

Despite this, though, their efforts are often underfunded or dismissed. This struggle is eerily similar to the experiences Native American tribes have faced for centuries in the United States. This is why I was excited to speak with Julie. Julie is a citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Nation and the Executive Director of the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society.

Just like the Indigenous communities in [00:02:15] Panama, Native American tribes have a profound connection to their lands, passed down through generations. However, they too have been displaced, ignored, and overlooked in land management decisions. The ongoing fight for land rights and the battle to maintain cultural identity through conservation is a constant theme.

In her current role with the society, Julie works tirelessly to amplify the voices of tribal nations. She’s particularly passionate about addressing the inequalities in funding for tribal fish and wildlife programs, which often lack the base support enjoyed by state agencies. Through her advocacy, she highlights the importance of needing to [00:03:00] pass the bipartisan Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, a bill that would help tribes gain much needed resources to protect culturally significant species and manage their own conservation priorities.

We talk about it in this episode. In our conversation, Julie shares how her unique blend of Western science and traditional ecological knowledge has shaped her approach to conservation. She talks about the need for greater collaboration in managing large landscapes, where wildlife, of course, doesn’t respect political boundaries, and emphasizes the value of tribal wisdom in addressing today’s environmental challenges.

I couldn’t agree more. Julie and her [00:03:45] colleagues are fighting to ensure that tribes are not just participants, but leaders in this vital work to protect wildlife and the lands and waters where they live.

Hi, Julie. Thank you so much for joining me on Forces for Nature. It’s so great to have you. Thank you for having me. Let’s start by just tell

Julie: me a little bit about yourself and what you do. Sure. So I am a Lakota. I’m a citizen of Shinarosu Nation, which is in north central South Dakota. I am a mother, I have five children, and I’m a wife, I have a husband, I’m a sister, I have four siblings, and recently I’m a grandma.

Both of my stepdaughters, uh, have had their, them and their husbands have had baby girls, so I am a grandma too. Um, I grew up on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation. Start, uh, my family has a cow calf family. Ranch operation, so I spent a lot of time outside, a lot of time horseback, just kind of being in nature, fishing, gathering, just kind of playing around [00:04:30] outside.

My parents were really good about kind of pointing things out, I guess not probably intentionally, but you know, like making us aware of when the berries were ripe, or what animals were out, and when the sharp tailed grouse were dancing, just kind of things like that. So I think it kind of just instilled that love for me.

Uh, I went to school at South Dakota State University and got a Bachelor’s of Science in Biological Sciences and started my career back with the Shriners Sioux Tribe Game, Fish, and Parks Department as a Wildlife Habitat Biologist where I focused on riparian restoration primarily and a lot of other duties as assigned.

And I’ve done a lot of different jobs, primarily just still living there on the reservation, ranging from working academics, I was the Tribal Health CEO for a while, I’ve been a I’m a federal employee at a consulting business, and I’ve been in this position, which is executive director for the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society since May of 2019, [00:05:15] so just about five years.

Crystal: Congratulations with all of that. How would you say that your, your knowledge of indigenous wisdom has influenced your management of natural resources?

Julie: Yeah. I w I mean, I wasn’t raised traditional Lakota, like most families, a lot of, I guess, not most, but a lot of native families. No, my family was kind of removed from it through the assimilation process and lost a lot of our, our culture and our language throughout.

So I think when I came back and started working for the tribe, that’s when I gained more of an appreciation for the traditional ecological knowledge and indigenous knowledge that the Lakota people hold and just kind of started trying to learn more and learn the language and learn more about the culture and just [00:06:00] listening to, to people that I worked with that had that wisdom and had been fortunate to be raised more traditional Lakota.

So I think just being able to ask a lot of questions, be open to, um, different viewpoints and different ways of looking at things has really helped me to. kind of marry that into my Western science knowledge that I’ve received for my education. How has

Crystal: their wisdom and your Western science education been able to come together?

Julie: Yeah, I, I think, um, you know, just my time at the Game Fish and Parks, I started out, I was young, I was like 22 years old. I started my career and I’d never supervised anybody. I am supervising people that have been there for a long time. And [00:06:45] I felt like I should know everything about the science world because I had a degree.

I think they really humbled me a lot, but you know, they would ask me kind of off the wall questions just to kind of challenge me, but then also teach me at the same time of, of different ways of looking at things. So it was definitely a humbling process that I needed to go through. Because you kind of come out of Western science a little bit with some arrogancy.

And I think that, that really helped me just like, oh wait, you know, just because it’s written in a textbook, that might not be the best way to do things. And so being open to, to different ways of doing things and different ways of knowing what’s going on.

Crystal: Yeah. Side note. My, my husband has done a lot of work with the indigenous groups in the Panamanian rainforest, and he [00:07:30] always says they are way smarter than he is, and he trusts their knowledge far more than anything he can bring to the table.

Yeah, for sure. What are some solutions or proposals you have come up with when it comes to building a durable national framework for large landscape conservation? Oh,

Julie: that’s a big question. I think oftentimes what I’ve found throughout my career, not just in the, not just in the fish and wildlife world, but I think kind of along the same lines of humbling, I think a lot of times that there’s people that might not be at the decision making level that have a voice that isn’t often heard.

Um, So I started making a practice when I worked for the health department that I would go through and I would walk through every [00:08:15] day and talk to the staff. Because a lot of times the decisions that you’re made at the top, Once they get down to the, the people actually doing the work, they don’t really work.

So I think that just being able to, to listen to more voices and ask those questions and going into it like open minded and not going in with like, Oh, well this, I read this in a study, so this is the way it’s going to work. Just being able to like, okay, well I’ve read this now, how do we apply it? How does it work in the field?

And does it work in the field? And just being able to be adaptable to that. I think that’s. That’s probably a way that you can definitely for the large landscape because of course wildlife They don’t respect our political boundaries So we have to work with each other and and making sure that those voices are heard.

I [00:09:00] know in my job It’s mainly amplifying the work that tribes are doing so making sure that people are aware that this work is going on and that tribes Just because they might not answer you right away with a dear tribal leader letter doesn’t mean that they’re not doing the work, it doesn’t mean that they’re not interested in it.

A lot of times it’s a capacity issue, they just don’t have enough people to, to be able to do all the things that they want to do. So, you know, developing those relationships, being patient, uh, building those relationships based on trust, those are, those are huge things if we really want to do large landscape recovery and restoration.

Crystal: Do you have any examples that you can

Julie: illustrate that for

Crystal: us?

Julie: Hmm. Trying to think. Some of the America’s Beautiful Challenge grants that have just came out are really good projects, examples of [00:09:45] tribes working with each other. Uh, I think, you know, that the bison restoration is a good one, tribes helping tribes.

I know at one point when I worked for the tribe, we did like this huge, like kind of massive tribal exchange. Like we had turkeys, so we trapped turkeys and we traded, we sent turkeys to like a tribe in Montana and the tribe in Montana sent like pronghorn to a tribe in. Um, I think the Southwest and the Southwest tribe sent something up to somewhere else.

And so we did like this huge. kind of trading thing. So I think not always basing everything on money is a huge thing too. And, and finding out what people have as strengths and what people have as weaknesses and then being able to augment those and not just like, okay, well, you don’t have this, so you can’t [00:10:30] participate.

There’s a lot of potential, the migration corridor work that’s going on. Those are good examples of a large landscape because you can’t just have a quarter that you’re mapping and then whoops, there’s a political boundary there. There’s a state line like, Oh, they don’t go past that. You have to. develop those relationships so that you can get the full picture of what the wildlife are doing.

Crystal: In an NPR segment, you once said the inequity in funding for tribal fish and wildlife is one of the most obvious but least known issues in conservation. Can you tell me more about this?

Julie: Yeah, so tribes are excluded from Pitt and Robertson Dingle Johnson funds, which are the excise taxes that fund a large portion of state Fish and Wildlife programs.

And it doesn’t mean, you know, I had told somebody that one time and they said, Oh, so you don’t like [00:11:15] tribes don’t pay those taxes. No, we still pay those taxes. The formula distributions are include lands that are tribal lands. They include populations that include tribal people. So tribes don’t have base funding.

I don’t think people realize that there’s federal funding through the Bureau of Indian Affairs to Fish and Wildlife Service, but it’s not something that’s consistent. And it’s not something that every tribe, so 574 federally recognized tribes, it’s not something that each of them receives a certain amount every year.

So you have fish and wildlife programs that really don’t have that secure, dedicated annual funding every year, and so they’re building programs based on what they can do for grant funding or what their tribe can pitch in. Some tribes have casinos, some have land leases, some have hunting and fishing revenue that they’re able to supplement their [00:12:00] income, and some don’t have that.

So you have tribes that aren’t able to, um, you know, exert that sovereignty as well as they’d like to because of the funding issue. How can we better support the tribes then? I think just learning about tribes and getting to know them. People often want to lump them all together, like tribes as one single entity, but there are 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States.

And they’re all unique. They’re all different. They all are sovereign nations. So, you know, there’s kind of an old saying, if you work with one tribe, you know one tribe. And that’s the truth. Like, I feel most comfortable, I guess, with my knowledge of the Great Plains region because that’s where I’ve spent most of my career.

So when I go visit other tribes, I’m constantly [00:12:45] asking them questions about, like, do you have a treaty? How’s your jurisdiction work? What’s your tribal council look like? Do you have your culture still in place? Do you have your language? Just those types of questions so that I can build my knowledge base so I can better help them, uh, in my role at Native American Fish and Wildlife Society.

Um, I definitely think just growing people’s understanding of what the needs are for tribes and That they do have their own fish and wildlife management, and they’re able to set their own laws and assert that authority. But again, the biggest thing I think right now is Recovering America’s Wildlife Act.

That’s a huge thing for tribes. It has a tribal title that was written by tribal fish and wildlife professionals. It’s 97. 5 million for tribes. [00:13:30] That seems to be like, people think that’s a lot of money, but the last two rounds of the America Beautiful Challenge Grant is There have been 130 tribal nations that have applied for about 320 million.

So that’s the tribes that have the capacity to put in for the grant. That’s still missing over 400 tribes that have a need. So if 130 need 326 million, what do 574 need? I don’t know. But I think, um, um, you know, RAW was a really good step in starting to kind of remedy, uh, the inequity in funding. And hopefully Hopefully people will recognize that, especially for tribes.

It’s not gap funding. It’s base funding.

Crystal: So let’s talk a little bit more about Rawa, which is the Recovering America’s Wildlife [00:14:15] Act, which was a bipartisan bill and hopefully will help to recover species and safeguard communities and traditions that rely on wildlife. What are, what are some of its key points?

Julie: I mean, like for tribes, like I said, it’s base funding. Uh, the thing I really like about it is it gives tribes the flexibility to establish what’s important to the tribe. So a lot of time we see grant funding that has a set of priorities. And so tribe find themselves writing to someone else’s priorities.

Robo allows them to establish their own species of greatest conservation need, which sometimes may not be based on Western science, but maybe based on some type of cultural connection that the tribe has with the species, be it a plant, a fish, you know, a mammal, whatever that may be. It allows a tribe to [00:15:00] exercise that sovereignty more.

It also allows for outdoor recreation. So some of the tribes that maybe don’t have the land base, They can still access the funding, uh, use it to educate tribal citizens on traditional hunting and fishing methods, um, try to get more, uh, interest in just outdoors and kind of reconnecting the tribal youth and the tribal citizens to some of the, the traditional methods are even just the land that they’re on.

I also like it because it allows for conservation law enforcement officers funding as well. And that’s something that’s severely underfunded in Indian country. We estimate that each of our conservation officers is responsible for about 360, 000 acres. Uh, it’s, it’s a safety issue. It’s also doing an injustice to actually preserving the species.

But [00:15:45] it’s also, you know, not letting tribes assert their sovereignty like they should be able to. So. There’s just, there’s a ton of positives for, uh, Rawa, especially the tribal title, you know, and honestly, we haven’t really heard anybody dislike the tribal title. Uh, it also establishes that the, the distribution formula will be worked out through consultation with the tribes, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Secretary of Interior, so that’ll allow tribes to figure out how that funding will be dispersed through a consultation process.

So

Crystal: this is very early stage. It hasn’t really been put on the ground yet.

Julie: So it’s been, it’s been around for five or six years. I think it’s been introduced in the House and got far. I guess it would have been in the 117th Congress that made it through a hearing and a markup, I think in both [00:16:30] the Senate and the House.

But, you know, just didn’t get across the finish line. This Congress, the Senate has a version out. I think it has 19 co sponsors now. They just saw two more sign on last week, 10 are Republicans. It’s still a bipartisan bill. I think people generally like the concept of it. Um, so, you know, we’re hopeful.

We’re still committed to seeing it across the finish line.

Crystal: I hope that happens

Julie: soon. Taking

Crystal: a step, well, not a step back, but just a more personal lens. Can you tell me about a time in the work that you’re doing where you said to yourself, yes, this is why I do it, you know, like a proud moment or

Julie: a success story.

Oh man. I mean, I, I tell [00:17:15] people all the time, I love my job. I absolutely love my job. Uh, being able to work. With tribes and so many tribes is just, it’s a pleasure every day. There’s not very many people that have this experience of being able to work with multiple tribes in multiple regions. A lot of times you kind of see like a regional focus.

So, I mean, I’ve been in the Redwoods and thought, wow, this is my job. Um, helping with the Menominee tribes bear project and holding baby bears, uh, walking in the Fatahachi. Uh, reserve and the Everglades of the Mizuki tribe in waist deep water looking for ghost orchids. Uh, yeah. And then just being around tribal people and, and hearing them laugh and have a good time and listening to their stories and having [00:18:00] them say, Hey, this is, this is what we need.

We need this place where we can come together, we can talk about the work we’re doing and we can elevate it unified to, to a national level. So there’s been lots of, lots of great times. We put out a textbook that has indigenous authors. That’s, that’s a huge one. And then also watching some of the indigenous students come through and, and move on and move up in their careers and just seeing their success and having people tell me that they’ve never seen a native person present at a conference or that they’ve never seen a native woman in a position like I am.

Those are, those are proud moments for, for me, but I love my job. I absolutely love it.

Crystal: So what can the listener who’s here with us today do to support the [00:18:45] work that you do?

Julie: Yeah, I’ve noticed a lot of people that come in, they want to help, but they think that they have the answer right away. So they’ll come in and they’ll be like, Oh, well, you should do this and you should do that.

And I’m always like, we’ve already thought of that. There’s something, there’s some barriers. So I think getting to know what those barriers are. Not just assuming that tribes haven’t thought of it or haven’t tried something, but maybe starting with a question like, I wonder why they haven’t tried that, instead of just assuming they haven’t, like, you know, a lot of it is, uh, capacity and being able to access fundings and, and just the nature of dealing with different sovereigns, and they each have something unique and different.

So I think doing your, your research and your education, asking questions and not being scared to, you know, To be [00:19:30] embarrassed, ask the question. That’s what I tell people, ask me. I would rather you ask me a question that, that you think may offend me and me be able to tell you, like, that’s offensive. Don’t ask that again, or give you an answer.

My mom and I were going somewhere during Groundhog Day and I was talking to her. I said, how many kids today do you think are talking about Groundhog Day, but yet have never heard of some of the, like Little Big Horn or some of the, the history of the lands that they’re on. And they’ve never once. And taught about some of the traditions of the people that lived on the lands that they live on now.

So I, I think just doing your own, your own education, asking questions and getting to know people. And building those relationships is really key. That’s [00:20:15] great advice.

Crystal: Thank you. You’re doing really important work, and thank you so much for sharing it with us today. Well, thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

Thank you for all you do. You’re making a difference.

Julie’s story is a powerful reminder that conservation is not just about protecting wildlife. It’s about preserving the deep, interconnected relationship between people and nature. Native American tribes, like the Lakota, have been stewards of the land for centuries, but have faced immense hurdles, such as underfunding and exclusion from key programs like the Pittman Robertson and the Dingle Johnson Acts, which fuel a lot of the country’s conservation work.

The Recovering [00:21:00] America’s Wildlife Act, on the other hand, could provide critical equitable funding to ensure that tribal voices are at the forefront of wildlife preservation, ensuring that tribes are empowered to lead efforts that benefit not just their communities, but the entire ecosystem. Don’t forget to go to forcesfornature.

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