Harvester Roger LaBine operates a tribal harvesting toolRoger LaBine making a manoomin harvesting tool at the 2019 Wild Rice Camp in Alberta. He is the tribal delegate for the Michigan Wild Rice Initiative. (Photo courtesy of Todd Marsee/Michigan Sea Grant)

MARQUETTE — When Roger LaBine was younger, he often drove his grandfather to the Ottawa National Forest to hunt porcupines.

The animal wasn’t just a food source.

His grandmother made birch bark-and-quill baskets from their sharp spines, and his grandfather made roaches — headdresses — from their hair.

LaBine, of Watersmeet, is a member of the Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians in the Western Upper Peninsula.

Mex-i-min-e Falls in the Ottawa National Forest in Watersmeet Township. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service)

And forests are significant to his family and community, LaBine said.

Throughout the year, they tried to gather enough food to last until the next hunting, trapping and foraging season. His grandfather earned some income by trapping animals like beavers and muskrats.

“My parents were subsistence people,” LaBine said. “We didn’t have a doctor or dentist. We didn’t have a lot of things.”

“So a lot of the ways that we dealt, for example, with health problems were through foraging and the traditional medicinal ways,” he said.

A notable proportion of the U.S. population relies on public forests for food and medicine, but the forest products industry is “not well served by institutions that set forest management policies,” according to a new study in the journal Trees, Forests and People.

Forests provide food and medicine at a low cost.

Michigan ranked third in the study for harvesting wild meat on public lands, based on the number of servings of wild game.

Hunting license data shows the state produced over 22 million servings of meat over five years — and that doesn’t count fish and small mammals.

A view of the Mex-i-min-e falls in the Ottawa National ForestMex-i-min-e Falls in the Ottawa National Forest in Watersmeet Township. Credit: U.S. Forest Service.

“We manage forests for a variety of uses, including timber, water, wildlife and recreation, but we fail to manage them for feeding people unless it’s wildlife,” said Jimmy Chamberlain, a researcher in the study.

He is a recently retired U.S. Forest Service scientist.

Chamberlain said policies should be created to recognize forest foods as valuable, thus supporting food production and biodiversity conservation.

If public land agencies aren’t managing plants that are foraged for food, those plants could die out, and the resource would no longer be available for people.

That would reduce food security, especially for rural and Indigenous communities, he said.

“If we can begin to manage for food and medicine, then we meet the needs of a larger constituency. That constituency is typically economically marginalized – poor people,” Chamberlain said.

“We can increase the value of that forest, and we can help more people feed themselves,” he said.

Jared Wolfe, a wildlife ecology professor at Michigan Technological University, said Michigan takes a more hands-on approach to forest management than other states.

“They’re not managing necessarily for food or harvesting per se,” Wolfe said, “but they are doing it indirectly by allowing people to use those lands for hunting as well as gathering.”

Federal agencies that own public land — primarily the Forest Service and Fish & Wildlife Service in Michigan — work with the state Department of Natural Resources to actively manage forests for timber sales.

“That type of management lends itself well to species that do well in edge habitats like white-tailed deer,” Wolfe said.

Trees can be clearcut, creating a field for deer to live in. That boosts the population, and people can hunt more deer – an activity that the federal agencies and DNR support on their land, Wolfe said.

Wolfe said he thinks there’s a “forest-to-table” movement that sustains deer hunting. People hunt largely for food, not a trophy.

“It’s about providing your family with affordable, high-quality meat,” he said.

“There’s a deeper connection, too,” Wolfe said. “If you’re in the forest and harvesting your own meat, you’re consuming a forest product. You have to know the system well to be a successful hunter, but you’re also really a part of the system.”

But some animals don’t do well with common management practices, Wolfe said.

“There’s other species that historically were here when the forests were managed by Indigenous people,” Wolfe said. “Those practices facilitate other species, like woodland caribou.”

He said people seem to have “ecological amnesia” – they forget the landscape has changed.

Some Indigenous settlements were positioned around manoomin – wild rice – beds, for example. Wild rice supported the community but also provided food and habitat for wildlife that are no longer around.

Wolfe said if there were a push to manage forests for food and medicine, he’d work with tribes and their traditional knowledge to create management strategies.

When oak savannas – habitats between prairies and oak forests – were maintained by Indigenous burning practices, they hosted herds of elk, bison and white-tailed deer.

“Those traditional practices seem to be honed over thousands of years of interacting with the environment and probably represent the most ecologically sensible way to manage a forest,” Wolfe said. “Of course, they weren’t selling timber products.”

The study said there is a need for adaptive forest management to make resilient forest food systems in the face of climate change and a growing population.

“It’s not only about offering additional opportunities for gathering wild foods for tribal and nontribal members, it’s also reestablishing the ecological systems we had in Michigan a hundred years ago or more,” Wolfe said.

LaBine, of the Lac Vieux Desert Band, said, “Be mindful and only take what you need. No more, because if you become greedy, you may hurt the resource. You have to leave some for it to be there next time you go.”

LaBine said his tribe is taught that plants and animals sacrifice for humans, and it’s mankind’s responsibility to protect them.

“Without them, we wouldn’t live because we cannot be like the apple tree. We cannot bear fruit,” he said. “So we rely on them for everything. For our needs, our food, our medicine, our clothing, for whatever we have.”