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Current Forest Composition in BWCAW: Over the past 150 years the forests of Minnesota have changed drastically due to increased logging and development.  Currently the forests around the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) are composed of jack pine, aspen, paper birch, balsam fir, white cedar, with fire suppression regimes in place to regulate the frequency and severity of fires.  In the northern most reaches of Minnesota,white and red pine trees have reached a high tolerance for the harsh environmental conditions.  The BWCAW currently has a natural disturbance regime of stand-killing fires with a fifty year rotation period. The near boreal species of Minnesota have adaptations that allow them to reproduce after intense fires such as the jack pine, one of most important and dominant tree species until recently, which has cones that open after fires and spread seeds, allowing them to benefit from fires. (Frelich).  People often believe the current forests are vastly different from those during the first centuries of Native American occupancy, yet more evidence is being found that may prove otherwise.
       

"Primative Ecologists?": Often times indigenous peoples are viewed as “primitive ecologists,” thought to hold the ancient knowledge and environmental awareness that has allowed them to tread lightly on the earth without leaving any substantial alterations behind.  Nonetheless, in order for human beings to survive off the earth’s abundance, indigenous peoples like the Ojibwe must have changed the environment in some way. David Botkin, author of "A Natural Myth" from the magazine Nature Conservancy, points out that “The Native Americans had three powerful technologies: fire, the ability to work wood into useful objects, and the bow and arrow. To claim that people with these technologies did not or could not create major changes in natural ecosystems can be taken as Western civilization's ignorance, chauvinism, and old prejudice against primitivism—the noble but dumb savage. There is ample evidence that Native Americans greatly changed the character of the landscape with fire, and that they had major effects on the abundances of some wildlife species through their hunting.”
       

Fire: If there was a main way the Minnesotan Native Americans, such as the Ojibwe, altered the landscape it would have been through use of fire, a fact many historians discount. Fire scars found on trees in Minnesota’s forests date back hundreds of years, but since no substantive amount of documentation exists on the indigenous peoples of Minnesota’s use of fire the scars are usually attributed to lightening.  Many people think the land of Minnesota must have been abundant with forested areas when the Native Americans were the only inhabitants, but there are accounts from early European settlers that this was not always the case.  Many found that vast amounts of land had no trees but open prairies and signs of large-scale fires, which probably created these prairies and open land.  To the new settlers this was a great sight to behold as it meant the land was ready to be plowed and converted into agricultural land without having to make many additional alterations to the landscape (Williams). The land that was still richly forested when the Europeans arrived was generally around lands with bogs or swamps, places where fires were much less damaging. The Native Americans generally burned every 1-3 years, with an occasion fire getting out of hand and burning much more of the surrounding ecosystems than desired (Cronon).

(see Native American uses of fire to right)

With so many purposes for using fire, it can be assumed that bands like the Ojibwe did have an impact on the Minnesota forest landscape.  Yet Lee E. Frelich, author of “Old Growth in the Great Lakes Region,” points out the general trend that from the 1600s to 1900s, studies show that intense fires happened roughly every fifty years, with the dominant species being jack pine, black spruce, and aspen. “At the landscape scale there was little change in species composition. Such changes were probably minor at the stand scale as well, since the large majority of seeds shed in a burned stand of jack pine aspen, or black spruce are also likely to be the same species. Thus it is likely in some areas that succession of tree species was minor or did not occur for periods of several centuries. Mosses and other ground flora, however, did have a true succession sequence of species following fire” (Frelich, pp154-155).  In other words, during the time when Native Americans, followed by European settlers, were the only inhabitants in the Minnesota forests, data shows the change in forest composition was not great. Since records are sparse dealing with this topic, one can assume Native Americans altered the Minnesotan landscape, but to exactly what degree is unclear.
       

Many debates occur today dealing with the idea of bringing Minnesota forests back to their indigenous composition, before the touch of human beings.  Yet if Native Americans did in fact have a substantial impact on the forests they inhabited, how can we know what constitutes a truly “native” forest in Minnesota? How do we know what the landscape looked like if people were changing it 500 years ago or more? It seems today we should be more focused on preserving what forests remain, not trying to go back to a landscape that may have been changed with the first Native Americans.