Taking Care of Business Where Least Expected
My father, Reino R Sarlin, showed his entrepreneurial flair when assigned in 1942 as forest supervisor to the Hupa Valley Indian Reservation in California, whose forests were plagued with man-made fires set whenever there was a grievance with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He educated them that they were burning their own wealth and showed them how to benefit from their forests instead, and arson ceased.
Later, as Senior Forester at the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico (c.1947-1952), his many achievements included founding with Bert Shields the first Native American wildfire fighting crews, the Mescalero Red Hats, and leading them at major fires, including when they rescued a small badly-burned bear cub from the Capitan Gap fire who became the original “Smokey Bear”. He was also aware of the significant renewable treasure that the Mescaleros had in their timber and worked with them to capitalize on it through strict logging controls, "pay as you go” camping and recreational services, and a world-class trade for tribal grown and harvested Christmas trees where each year massive convoys of military five-ton trucks hauled hundreds of thousands of Christmas trees from the small reservation to Mexico.
Transferred to the now Navajo Nation in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, he was soon promoted to Agency Forester of the 740,000-acre Navajo forest responsible for fire control and timber management. He not only modernized forestry and environmental management practices in the world's largest producing ponderosa pine forest, but also plowed through red tape for years to develop a world-class Navajo-owned sawmill and lumber industry dedicated in 1962 as the Navajo Forest Products Industry (NFPI) which employed some 500 Navajo. I witnessed many of the “fires” in the bureaucratic morass that he faced daily, but he was a dedicated man and when one door would shut he would find others open a crack, eventually succeeding despite many both inside and outside the civil service. Along the way, he saw other ways to bring industry and jobs to the people, starting with related timber furniture manufacture.
It had been known since World War 2 that Native Americans possess certain traits and skills to a high degree that made them, for example, great at working high steel in the construction industry. Dad saw their extreme attention to detail in crafts and convinced the electronics industry and other industries to set up assembly plants on the reservation; why should the sole focus be on finding jobs off the reservation, largely in big cities? His entrepreneurial focus on bringing jobs to the reservation saw him promoted into economic development. He also fought hard to preserve First People's rights and resources including, for example, the waters of the Colorado River.
So OK, Dad was not the only competent and dedicated civil servant whom I have witnessed during my early years in the police, US Forest Service, and military, but he added to that an entrepreneurial flair to benefit those whom he was serving, and that was unusual. He saw the citizens as owners and stakeholders who deserved to benefit from their labor and their natural resources, so he helped them set up industries, businesses, and jobs.
Later in life when I worked in the military and big business and even later as a management consultant, my unspoken benchmark was that if innovations and systems that I had set in place lasted six months after I left I had done my job. We can only control what we can control. People are, after all, people. So how have Dad’s efforts survived in the half-century since he retired in 1966?
Alas, the scorecard is mixed. Thirty years after his death, many of his efforts survive: Smokey Bear is still preventing forest fires while the Mescalero Redhats and Navajo Scouts are still putting out nationwide those that aren’t prevented, now under a large “Hotshot” framework. Firefighting schools that he initiated have become institutions. Forest management and recreational use practices that he implemented, then innovative, are now standard. The Navajo Tribal Scholarship Committee that he chaired has by any standard been a success.
However powerful political, labor, and activist forces did not want industry successfully brought to Indian Reservations, and it is easier to destroy than to build. Most of the large businesses built on or brought to Native lands have closed or moved on (small business is okay). Solutions to Colorado River water usage have yet to be found (thanks, California).
Dad performed his Civil Service job as if he were running a business owned by the people he was serving. He did that despite many influential people around him disagreeing with that approach. Over the years as I faced my own trials and tribulations in business I have come to see his always swimming upstream as commendable, at times even heroic. I wish that I could have told him that while he was still alive.
