Fawn Wagner finds a promising spot among the tall grasses on the slopes of Protection Island, makes herself comfortable, and turns off her headlamp. It is after 10 p.m. on a cool clear June night, and she is waiting for the rhinoceros auklets to start flying back from the Strait of Juan de Fuca. All day the birds have been out gathering fish for their chicks, which wait in the burrows scattered by the thousands around the island’s fringes.
Protection Island is home to the largest colony of rhinoceros auklets in the Salish Sea, and Wagner (no relation to the author) is here to see what fish those auklets are carrying. An ecologist with the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, she is helping a research team that studies the auklets, their dietary needs and preferences. When an auklet lands near her, she will shine her headlamp on it. Shocked at the sudden brightness, the auklet should drop all the fish it holds in its bill. Wagner can then collect the fish in a little plastic bag for later analysis.
That, in theory, is how the procedure is supposed to go at any rate. In practice, a lot of luck is involved. The wind is strong tonight, which makes it hard to hear where exactly the auklets land; and the auklets are good at finding their burrows in the dark and sometimes disappear into their tunnels just before Wagner can catch them. But a couple of hours later, she, NOAA biologist Tom Good, and Jamestown S’Klallam biologist Kari Williamson have collected a statistically sufficient number of fish to call it a night.
Wagner gathers her plastic bags and starts back to the field house. “That was really cool,” she says, looking around at the shadowed island. “It’s really beautiful out here.” She has been to Protection Island before, but always during the day. This is her first time being on the island at night. The first time, too, that she has collected diet samples from auklets. But the evening represents another even more significant first. In addition to her role as tribal ecologist, Wagner is the new manager of the Protection Island National Wildlife Refuge and the nearby Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge. Her employer, the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe is the first in Washington—and one of very few in the United States—to be co-manager of refuge land that was until recently controlled solely by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
A new chapter
On the afternoon of August 16, 2024, a small ceremony was held on the trail overlooking Dungeness Spit, the five-mile-long centerpiece of the Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge near Sequim, on the northern coast of the Olympic Peninsula. At a little table, Martha Williams, then the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and W. Ron Allen, the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribal Chairman and CEO, recognize the agreement between the tribe and the service, making the two co-managers of both the Dungeness and Protection Island refuges.
“Our Tribe has a strong historical and cultural relationship with the Dungeness and Protection Island National Refuges since our original village was sitting at the mouth of the Dungeness River,” Allen said in the statement. “This agreement recognizes our unique Tribal sovereignty and the government-to-government relationships and symbolizes how these relationships have evolved into a very sophisticated level in the 21st Century.”
The move was born out of the earlier federal efforts either to transfer land ownership back to tribes, or invite tribes to co-manage or co-steward their spaces of cultural significance that might currently be under federal management. “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service takes tribal sovereignty, trust, and treaty rights seriously and is committed to continuing to work with tribal partners,” wrote Megan Nagel, a Public Affairs Officer with the agency’s Pacific Region, in an email. “In accordance with the law, the Service considered the request and worked with the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe through negotiations. The result of those negotiations was an agreement, the first of its kind for refuges in the Pacific Region, for the tribe to lead operations at both Dungeness and Protection Island National Wildlife Refuges.”
Both Dungeness Spit and Protection Island figure prominently for the Jamestown S’Klallam people. Dungeness Bay is their ancestral home, having six known S’Klallam heritage sites within just a few miles. In its immediate vicinity are culturally significant locations named in the S’Klallam language, such as cicákʷč , or Whale Lookout, a knoll at the base of Dungeness Spit; x̣áƛ̕sən, a sandbar between Dungeness and Jamestown; and məməkʷə́nəkʷ, an area on the inside of Dungeness Spit, where the ground is rough.
Settlers drove tribal people off the land in the mid-19th century, prompting them to purchase 210 acres to the east, at what is now Jamestown. But Dungeness Bay remains a key locale in the tribe’s “usual and accustomed grounds and stations,” to borrow the phrase from the Treaty with the S’Klallam, made in 1855 between a host of tribal delegates and Washington Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens. At such grounds and stations, the right to fish and gather food had been reserved for the tribes, in return for them ceding legal claim to thousands of acres of territory.
The federal government elevated Tribal-Federal cooperation in 2021 with the Tribal Homelands Initiative, which aimed either to transfer land ownership back to tribes, or invite tribes to co-manage or co-steward their spaces of cultural significance that might currently be under federal management. Securing the agreement between the Jamestown S’Klallams and the Fish and Wildlife Service took two years. A complicating factor was that both Dungeness and Protection Island were incorporated into a refuge complex, so separating out the responsibilities unique to each refuge was imperative. Under the agreement, the tribe will continue to treat the refuges like refuges, with wildlife conservation as the guiding purpose. But rather than Fish and Wildlife staff, it will be tribal staff that handles the two refuges’ day-to-day cares, in effect becoming their public face. If a building needs to be painted, the tribe will paint it. If a road needs to be maintained, the tribe will maintain it. When visitors are greeted at Dungeness—the public is not allowed on Protection Island—tribal staff, or volunteers under their tutelage, will be the ones to say hello.
Co-manager role
Although proud of their new co-manager role, the tribe was a touch hesitant at first to broadly publicize it, knowing that some people from the refuges’ surrounding communities had questions about what co-management might look like in practice. With the Dungeness refuge area especially, community groups had earlier raised objections to a proposed tribal oyster farm in Dungeness Bay. The tribe aims to restart a commercial shellfish enterprise on a 50-acre parcel leased from the Washington Department of Natural Resources, after being forced to stop in 2007 due to water quality issues, mostly from terrestrial sources, such as neighboring septic systems. Local environmental groups have been leery at the prospect of a shellfish farm so close to the refuge; a lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on the matter, brought by Protect the Peninsula’s Future, a non-profit organization, is currently ongoing in federal court. (The Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe is not named in the suit because of sovereign immunity.)
But the months since the tribe has taken over daily operations at Dungeness Spit have been, Wagner says, harmonious and welcoming. A refuge office that was almost never open is now open six days per week. There are pop-up educational programs on Saturdays, four times as many volunteers as there were before. “People were worried we’d close the land and just fish all the time,” Wagner says. “But what they’re seeing is we’re really about trying to share it with everyone.”
For her part, Wagner has an extensive and varied background in ecology and wildlife science. She is Indigenous and grew up on the Kitsap Peninsula where she later taught biology at the Northwest Indian College in Port Gamble. She has also worked in wildlife rehabilitation, and before becoming refuge manager was at the Bainbridge Island Land Trust. Since she became refuge manager, she has spent the first few months familiarizing herself with the federal policies and guidelines, as well as observing the spaces, looking for the different animals, seeing all the plants, photographing them, keying them out to species or family. The learning curve, she says, has been steep. But she envisions changes to the refuges’ ways of being. The Fish and Wildlife Service had a particular way of conceptualizing Dungeness and Protection, but she and her colleagues will try to look at them differently, through a different lens, one that incorporates traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK, practices into the ongoing stewardship formed through scientific inquiry and monitoring.
What does that mean for Dungeness Spit and Protection Island? The best way to explain it, Wagner says, is that while both Western science and TEK or Indigenous science are valid ways of knowing, they differ in their methods and applications. With the former, there is a notion of scientific rigor that people have to go through to prove a thing exists. There are processes, procedures, documentation. “But when we look to Indigenous knowledge,” Wagner says, “a lot of it is not documented in a Western sense." So as refuge managers, she says, you are not just doing research and finding peer reviewed articles but also including a participatory element. You talk to elders, you lean on an oral tradition. That is how you learn how these spaces were managed before. In the end, Wagner says, you are adding another way of knowing, integrating it, and then applying both to the landscape.
The co-management agreement between the tribe and the Fish and Wildlife Service is for two years. After that, Wagner says, the two entities will evaluate how things are going and whether or not to renew the agreement. But even in its nascence the partnership is exciting for other tribes. Wagner recently gave a presentation at the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society conference. Afterwards so many people came up to talk to her, gave her their cards. Call us, they said. Let’s talk. And she is excited to show what the tribe is capable of, and how the work they will do aligns with the refuges’ missions. “I guess our overarching theme right now is, what can we do better?” she says. “And then let’s do it.”