Inter-Tribal Ecosystem Restoration Partnership

The goal of ITERP is to restore aquatic and terrestrial habitats, work collaboratively to plan and conduct landscape scale ecological restoration, and repair impacts to ecocultural systems that indigenous communities depend on for subsistence and survival.

ITERP serves rural tribal communities by leveraging the unique expertise and overlapping skills of each partner organization, working collaboratively toward the common goal of implementing a comprehensive approach to ecosystem restoration, tribal workforce capacity development and the creation of tribal community business infrastructure.

ITERP is committed to the creation of ecological restoration jobs and the incubation of tribal businesses, supporting tribal members to work on their time immemorial, ancestral land bases as the first, best stewards.

ITERP works toward incorporating Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge into forest and watershed restoration planning. ITERP combines an applied ecological restoration adaptive management approach, with science delivery and the Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge of the diverse and unique regional tribes. This effort will engage people to work towards a healthier, sustainable, subsistence lifestyle and protect and preserve our collective cultures and natural resources.

ITERP works to recover as much as is recoverable of the key historic precontact ecosystem structure, composition, processes, and function, along with traditional, time-tested, ecologically appropriate and sustainable indigenous cultural practices that helped shape ecosystems. ITERP works to simultaneously build in resilience to future rapid climate disruptions and other environmental change, to maintain ecological integrity in a way that ensures the survival of both indigenous ecosystems and cultures.