For a century, the Forest Service has allowed people to own recreation cabins on federal lands. Dismayed by a recent rise in annual use fees, recreation cabin owners from across the country have put forth a strong lobbying effort. In response, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Cabin Fee Act of 2012 (H.R. 3397) last month, which aims to increase affordability by imposing a tiered fee structure that ranges from $500 at the low end to a maximum yearly fee of $5000.
While the Cabin Fee Act is great news for recreation cabin owners, another very important group of cabin owners right here in Southeast is being left out. These rural residents own cabins on federal land that they use for harvesting and processing subsistence resources, like fish and game. Most of the cabins are Native-owned, and were built many decades ago by the same families who own and use them today.
In recent years, however, the Forest Service has substantially increased the annual fee it charges these cabin owners. Now around $900 per year, the fees threaten to put families living in relatively cash-poor subsistence economies in the impossible position of having to choose between certain basic necessities on the one hand, and access to food and culture on the other. Perhaps most upsetting, the fees are no less than what the Forest Service charges mining companies, outfitters, commercial fishermen, and academic institutions for use of similar shelters on federal land.
Southeast’s subsistence users deserve better. Unlike the recreation cabins at issue in the Cabin Fee Act, subsistence cabins are not simply a luxury. Rather, these structures provide an essential means of access to the wild foods that cabin-owners and their families depend on. In remote areas, harsh winters and exposed coastline render these permanent shelters a vital component of the year-round subsistence lifestyle for the families that use them. In short, to the handful of families who have them, the cabins are just as important a subsistence tool as the rifle, the seine, or the gaff.
Subsistence – or customary and traditional use, as many prefer to call it – plays an extremely important role for many Southeast Alaskans. For most rural families, much if not most of a family’s food comes from fish, game, and other wild sources. In smaller communities, subsistence is more than a lifestyle – it’s a necessity. And subsistence is of special value to Alaska Natives, who have harvested from these lands since time immemorial, and for many of whom customary and traditional use plays an integral cultural role. But customary and traditional use is also important from a conservation perspective: when people connect with subsistence resources in this way, they are more likely to be in favor of keeping our forests and oceans healthy enough to support those resources. Connection to the land fosters good policy. It is for all of these reasons that SEACC works in support of this time-honored way of life.
For the next year, I will be at SEACC focusing on customary and traditional use. My work will involve matters of resource management – like the cabin fees at issue here – as well as environmental threats to the subsistence resources themselves. As an attorney, I’m particularly interested in the legal side of things, but I am also eager to incorporate other disciplines and tools where they might be useful. I encourage members of the subsistence community to reach out and share their thoughts, concerns, and hopes for the future so that I and SEACC may do what we can to keep customary and traditional use alive and well in Southeast.
But at this moment, my focus is on the Cabin Fee Act. The bill is now before the Senate, and as the ranking Republican on Energy and Natural Resources, Sen. Murkowski has the opportunity to make sure that Southeast’s subsistence users aren’t left out. Families that depend on these cabins for their sustenance should not have to pay close to a thousand dollars per year, while some recreation cabin owners only have to pay half that. Sen. Murkowski, please amend the bill to ensure that families can afford to continue practicing subsistence the way their families have for generations.
• Sinaiko is the Arthur P. Liman Fellow at the Southeast Alaska Conservation.
Comments (18)
Add commentCabin fee act
I am suspect anytime someone supports the assignment of a public area or resource to a specific group which denies the general public the ability to get the same benefit.
How would the bill assure that the lower fees only are available for those structures are really subsistence uses and not recreational? Do the payment of fees allow the holder to limit access to the lands adjoining the cabins to others?
Are these cabins passed from generation to generation as property?
It appears you are supporting these dedicated cabins as beneficial to the general public because you feel the users are likely to lead to the limiting of commercial uses of the forest.
OK. How many recreational
OK. How many recreational cabins are also used for subsistence? Does the Juneau attorney who has a cabin on Horse Island where he goes to catch halibut and salmon in his 50ft pleasure yacht count? He's using for subsistence...
Have to wonder how much 'support' SEACC is ready to put
behind building new ones.
Cabins?
How about using a free tent!
Sure. Let's eliminate the
Sure. Let's eliminate the cabin rents if they let the public stay at their cabins.
Summer cabins for the poor
Summer cabins with government support for the poor.
Too all of the above
Amazing how all the above nit-pick or miss the point altogether. The Forest Service already regulates commercial, subsistence and recreational cabins (and tent platforms). They know which are which. As far as the selfish need to have them open to the public to avoid some "privileged" right, the rights of the individual are always the basis of the rights of the whole. All have a right to the security of your home without opening it to the public. This individual right benefits all. I will agree to remove the escrow fee on your house if you let me stay there when I feel like it.
Your churches are tax exempt, yet you would deny people whose church is in the woods and the animals who give themselves up to them the same right to practice their culture.
Yes the rich urbanite can subsistence fish and hunt, but that is a problem of the state constitution not the rural people who have used their areas long before the Forest Service even existed.
traditional nonsence
Yes a subsistence life style where using an aluminum skiff with a traditional outboard engine is used to set a commercial made net to catch fish. They use a traditional rifle to hunt and then using a traditional freezer in their home keep the meat to subsist on.
Meanwhile other cabin holders expect the Forest Service to keep watch and stand ready to provide rescue or emergency medical services at no cost to the subsistence users. And everyone should not have to pay for anything the Forest Service does on their behalf.
SEACC is hiding in plain sight
Of course SEACC supports this notion where "subsistence" summer cabins are disbursed throughout the federal forest lands.
Later SEACC can sue to stop all logging activities in the region under the guise of protecting those summer cabins and their subsistence hunting and gathering rights. Everyone knows that a trap line may span 5 - 10 miles in length. So it doesn't require too many subsistence summer cabins to close down the entire Tongass to logging.
If it looks like a snake and slithers like a snake then it's SEACC.
Public areas should be kept for the entire public
not just select groups. Treaties and trade offs were made to Natives for the lands that cost taxpayers billions every year through such programs as the IHS which provides free healthcare and so on.
If Natives want to dictate and control public lands; the treaties shold be renegotiated.
Watch closely friends
Ahhhhhhh....I believe that is the tart, pungent aroma of good old fashioned bull---- I detect. If the federal government is going to set aside land and provide cabins they should be for ALL citizens. If the Big Shot Huntin' Club wants to buy some land and put up some cabins for BSHC members that's fine with me.
But when my tax dollar is spent for a cabin in the woods I assume......ASSUME....that it is available to me too.
And do we really need ONE MORE person studying subsistence in Alaska?
I think we all understand it.
And do we really NEED one more young attorney visiting Alaska to? LOL
cabins not public
Many of these cabins have been in existence for generations. Longer than the US claim to Alaska. To say that now they are on public lands and should be open to the public is like saying that because the zoning in you neighborhood was changed from residential to commercial (through a public hearing where your objections were probably ignored, or you were not even allowed at the table because common knowledge at the time was that you lack the intelligence to understand) a Walmart can take up residence in your living room.
Buy hey, we allow foreign mining companies come on our land, and by virtue of pounding in a few stakes exclude everyone else.
good points
not sure what all the fuss is about in these comments. this is a common sense idea--these cabins have been around a long time.
i fully support this effort and similar efforts to step out of the way and let native communities practice their culture. i'm a hunter and fisherman too, and i want these practices to continue to thrive in our time. this is one small step to that end
Civil Rights Issue
Where to start? The free tent comment, the aluminum skiff accusation, the remark about simple treaty renegotiation, or the summer cabins for the poor?!
What this boils down to is a modern-day civil rights issue.
Many people in this community are so quick to wag their finger in disappointment and near disgust at villages deprived of cash-poor economies with one hand while simultaneously using their other hand as a fist coming down hard for those same communities advocating for their right to the traditional lands they've seen seized in the span of their grandparent's lifetime.
Also, Alaskan Natives have every right to use modern technology, afterall they are thinking, rational human beings who see the advantage of such tools that aid in harvests. You should also take into consideration that in Alaska's recent past, missionaries and traders from around the world forced, coerced, and encouraged dependence on these tools as a complete suppression of traditional knowledge and culture. And afterall, they are held accountable by a modern, Western permitting and regulation system, why shouldn't they be able to use modern, Western tools within that process.
Ultimately, true subsistence means LESS dependence on government assistance in cash-poor economies if they weren't being held in such a chokehold of expenses. The cabin-fee and restrictions to improving private in-holdings will only drive a bigger wedge in socio-economic divisions locally.
The Yukon terrritories have figured this out and have entered into co-management of federal lands with First Nations people making room for a sustainable economic base to be developed and allowing room for traditional and contemporary connections with public land. This required progressive minds (from the subsistence communities, the province, and the federal entities) who did not dwell on many past injustices, but looked forward to making things right, seems like we have the chance to do the same for our own community.
CP
You have restored my faith in the goodness of humanity.
Just some food for thought ladies and gentlemen:
Olivia Sinaiko is a Arthur P. Liman Fellow. This is significant.
Arthur P. Liman distinguished himself as an attorney in areas most of us could only be classified as tourists: Attica Prison and Harlem, just to name two.
The Arthur Liman Public Interest Program of Yale Law School, founded in 1997, selects a small number of graduates who distinguish themselves to qualify for Liman Fellowships.
These Fellows are awarded nominal stipends of $44K to spend a year working in the U.S. on Public Interest Legal Issues in areas of welfare rights, homelessness, racial profiling, indigent criminal defense, alternative sentencing courts, immigration, worker's rights, juvenile justice and now, I take it, the protection of natural resources as it pertains to public interest law.
Ms. Sinaiko is being modest in her byline. She is not only a Yale Law School Graduate but received a B.A. in Philosophy with distinction from Stanford University. Since being based in Juneau she has clerked for the Honorable Walter L. Carpeneti, Chief Justice of the Alaska Supreme Court, as well as worked for Earth Justice and now SEACC.
Her focus this year is on "limiting the contaminating effects of mining in the region" as well as "reforming resource management institutions through involving local communities that depend on natural resources such as salmon for their survival." (Yale Law School Liman Fellows website)
I would say she has a full plate.
SEACC is most fortunate to have Ms. Sinaiko on their staff.
If Ms. Sinaiko is focusing attention on this matter of the Cabin Fee Act on behalf of S.E. Alaska's subsistence lifestyle I believe it warrants our full attention.
Cabin ownership should be cherished
Those of you out there that are fortunate enough to own a cabin along with the coveted Forest Service permit should count your blessings. I cannot fathom the number of people in SE and the "lower 48" who would love to have a cabin of their very own in the National Forest. Many of the cabins in the Juneau area are currently being used for recreational pursuits and not by subsistence users.