Inter-Tribal Ecosystem Restoration Partnership

The Inter-Tribal Ecosystem Restoration Partnership (ITERP) is composed of initiative and project-based Steering Committees and Partners representing regional tribes, tribal community leaders, Native American-owned forestry, wildland fire and natural resource contracting businesses, and tribal-led nonprofit restoration and behavioral health organizations and programs throughout the western region. The goal of ITERP is to work collaboratively to build landscape-scale community and ecological resilience to wildfire, restore aquatic and terrestrial habitats, and support ecocultural systems that indigenous communities depend on for subsistence and survival.

ITERP supports partnerships with Native American Tribes and tribal communities throughout the western region to build strategic, long-term ecosystem stewardship and hazardous fuels reduction programs. ITERP works to incorporate Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (ITEK) into restoration planning to support healthy, productive forests and watersheds and protect cultural and natural resources using traditional time-tested, ecologically appropriate, and sustainable indigenous cultural practices that helped shape ecosystems.

The partnership additionally works to enhance landscapes historically tended by tribes, promoting stewardship practices that promote subsistence for tribes with ancestral ties and ceded lands within the geography. ITERP combines an applied ecological restoration adaptive management approach, with science delivery and the ITEK of the  unique geographies. This effort engages people to work towards a healthier, subsistence-based lifestyle and protects and preserves our collective cultures and natural resources.

By integrating job training and apprenticeship programs, tribal partnership initiatives assist in building tribal workforce capacity, including managerial and administrative, to implement ecological restoration and work on their time immemorial ancestral land bases through co-stewardship. ITERP works to simultaneously build in resilience to wildfire, drought, insects and disease, and other natural resource challenges to maintain ecological integrity in a way that ensures the survival of both indigenous ecosystems and cultures.