[power saw buzzing] - Marshall Pecore: A lot of people get that same feeling, you know?

"Geez, it would be nice not to cut that tree down."

[tree crashing] But so far, to my knowledge, no person or organization or government entity has said, "Here, Menominee, don't manage your forest and don't derive any income from it."

But as soon as people want to have economic good derived, we have to start talking about management and different types of management-- taking out the bad trees, leaving the good trees, and doing that enough where eventually, you'll have mostly good trees that you'll be selecting.

We go out hundreds of years because obviously these trees take hundreds of years to take them out to their maturity.

The tribes talk about seventh generation, looking out down the road to that seventh generation so all generations will have a forest to think about, like we've got today.

It's the ancestral lands of the Menominee.

Most of that land base was given up or taken, [laughing] whichever your view on the historical aspect of that is.

It was a lot of acres-- most of Wisconsin.

234,000 acres we have today.

You know, just about every species got an invasive disease or insect after it that is threatening its future existence.

I've seen the loss of elm to the invasive Dutch elm disease that swept through the nation.

There seems to be something happening on every front and against every tree.

The other thing is beech scale.

We're gonna have to remove some of that beech to lessen the spread of that.

It's doubtful, but it may save a catastrophe loss in dollars and cents.

We're hoping that the forest is resilient, you know, and it historically has been.

So I think the next 20 years are more important than our last 20 years.

The other part of the operation here on Menominee is the milling operations.

We try to grow the trees tall, big diameter, and without too many limbs on them because boards that are clear of knots and defects are worth more money.

What we have done in maybe the last 30 years is try and start to make different products from those boards, whether it's caskets or tables, right here on the reservation.

The more we can make locally, the more that's captured here within the community, more jobs are created, more income that's created.

So cultural identity is everything.

The maintenance of the forest has enabled the Menominee to maintain their land base, to derive income, and to maintain cultural identity.

[gentle music]