Menominee Tribe uses controlled burns to protect county forests

Controlled burns in the Menominee forest have become a flashpoint between tribal land-management authority and nearby residents worried about smoke and safety. On land the county says covers about 234,355 acres, or 360 square miles, with roughly 223,500 acres of heavily forested land, the Menominee Tribe is defending prescribed fire as a necessary tool for keeping one of Wisconsin’s largest contiguous forest tracts healthy.

Menominee Tribal Enterprises says prescribed burning is part of a formal Fire Management Plan, backed by specific burn plans and other treatments when fire is not the best option. Those alternatives include thinning, mowing and removing excessive dead vegetation. Curtis Wayka, the tribe’s Prescribed Fire/Fuels Specialist, says the crew starts preparing in February and uses burns in grassy open areas after snowmelt to remove dead cured grass.

Wayka frames the work as both forestry and culture. Fire, he says, has long been part of the landscape and the tribe’s ancestors burned the forest regularly. That approach lines up with Wisconsin DNR guidance, which says prescribed fire is used to enhance natural communities and ecosystems while protecting people, property and resources.

The tribe’s case rests on more than tradition. A 2011 study of select Menominee pine and oak stands recorded 93 fire events before fire suppression began in 1935. It found fire-return intervals ranging from 5.9 to 17.7 years, and concluded that logging combined with reduced fire shifted the forest away from historic aspen, pine and oak stands toward later-successional northern hardwoods.

That history helps explain why the Menominee forest is often held up as a model of sustained forestry. The U.S. Forest Service has described it as an extraordinary, healthy and productive emerald forest, and the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals says the tribe has harvested more than 2.25 billion board feet over time. Alongside prescribed burns, the Menominee also have pruned trees, harvested at-risk timber and treated invasive species and oak wilt to protect the forest.

For neighbors, the uneasy part is the smoke and the temporary disruption that comes with a burn. For the tribe, the bigger risk is not burning enough. In a county where the forest dominates the landscape, the debate is really about who gets to decide how that land is protected, and what kind of forest Menominee County will leave in place for the next generation.