FS-2025-0001-475510

To the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Forest Service: My name is Stláay V. Cloud-Morrison. I am Kaigani Haida, Yáahl (Raven) moiety, Yahkw Jánaas (Middle-Town Women) clan, of the Shark House/Brown Bear House, with roots in Daadans (Langara Island). I am an Alaska Native artist, mother, Navy veteran, and registered nurse. I begin with who I am because my opposition to the proposed rescission of the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule is not simply an opinion about federal land-management policy. As a Haida woman, my relationship to the lands and waters of Southeast Alaska is ancestral, cultural, and deeply personal. The Tongass is not simply acreage. It is a living landscape that continues to sustain Indigenous people and those who call Southeast Alaska home. Our Indigenous relationship with these forests, waters, plants, animals, and salmon has existed since the beginning, but the love and responsibility felt for this land are not ours alone. The Tongass sustains people who live, work, raise their families, gather food, recreate, and build their lives here. USDA, through the U.S. Forest Service, is proposing to rescind protections that currently restrict road construction, reconstruction, and timber harvest across nearly 45 million acres of National Forest System lands. These are not simply acres on a map. They are forests, salmon streams, watersheds, wildlife habitat, and places of subsistence, culture, livelihood, and connection. I am particularly concerned about what this means for the Tongass. Once an intact forest is fragmented by roads and industrial development, we cannot simply put it back together when we decide we have taken too much. Roads create access, access creates additional development pressure, and individual decisions that appear small can accumulate into enormous and permanent loss. For Indigenous people, there is something fundamentally troubling about continuing to describe our ancestral landscapes primarily in terms of what can be extracted from them. We have cared for, known, named, harvested from, traveled through, and lived with these lands since the beginning. That relationship and our continued presence deserve meaningful consideration. But protecting the Tongass is not solely an Indigenous issue. There are many ways to belong to and care for a place. What we share is an understanding that the value of the Tongass cannot be adequately measured in board feet, miles of road, or dollars generated through extraction. There must be places where our measure of value is not how much we can take. I urge USDA and the U.S. Forest Service to withdraw the proposal to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule and retain its protections. Please give meaningful weight to ecological integrity, clean water, fish and wildlife habitat, subsistence, Indigenous cultural relationships, the communities that call these places home, and the generations who will inherit the consequences of the decisions being made today. Forty-five million acres should not be viewed as 45 million acres of opportunity for extraction. They should also be understood as 45 million acres we still have the opportunity to protect. Respectfully, Stláay V. Cloud-Morrison Kaigani Haida Anchorage, Alaska Sincerely, Stlaay Cloud-Morrison Anchorage, AK 99507-3071 sv83cm@gmail.com