ALBUQUERQUE — Darryl Wallace fondly reminisces about his crews from Zuni Pueblo — shoulders bent to the ground, cutting brush and scraping the soil to clear lines around forest fires.
Sooty, dirty, hot work. Morale high. A reputation to uphold.
“You tell them to build a scratch line. They wouldn’t. They’d build a highway,” says Wallace, fire-prevention crew boss for the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Zuni Agency and a firefighter for more than 20 years.
The tribe routinely would have as many as 14, 20-person Type 2 crews ready for the summer fire season a couple of decades ago. Now, Wallace is hard-pressed to find recruits, and the tribe was able to field only six crews this year.
His dilemma is not unique for Indian Type 2 crews, who are not as highly trained as Type 1 crews but are the backbone of firefighting efforts.
“Generally, we can only produce about half the crews that we were able to do 20 years ago,” says Lyle Carlile, a Cherokee and director of the fire-management branch at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.
In the BIA’s Southwest region — taking in New Mexico tribes; a tribe in El Paso, Texas; and two tribes in southern Colorado — the number of Indian Type 2 crews has dwindled from about 100 to 55, says Cal Pino of Laguna Pueblo, the BIA’s fire-management officer for the region.
“A Type 2 crew member is an individual who is just off the street, like you were recruiting for soldiers to support the war effort,” he said.
Tribal fire bosses pin the falloff on a spectrum of factors — mollycoddled youngsters, computers, strict physical standards, new job opportunities for Indians and drugs.
Demetrius Pino of Laguna Pueblo, forestry supervisory technician for the BIA’s Laguna Agency, said: “These young kids now, a lot of them stay at home and lay around.”
