Mike Durglo Jr. has spent his career preparing his community for a changing climate. Standing on a hillside above the 1.2-million-acre Flathead Indian Reservation, he points to familiar mountain ridges where his father taught him to track deer and to a lone whitebark pine on a distant peak. He calls that tree Ilawya — his ancestor — and treats it as a symbol of resilience.
Whitebark pines across the region have been devastated since the 1990s by warmer temperatures, bark beetle outbreaks and an invasive fungus. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes are trying to reverse that loss by harvesting cones from healthy trees and growing seedlings with greater resistance. Restoring these forests is not only cultural work; it also helps hold snow longer on the landscape, easing drought stress and reducing wildfire risk.
Durglo has been the tribes’ climate change coordinator for nearly two decades and authored one of the earliest tribal climate action plans more than 15 years ago. His plan weaves Traditional Ecological Knowledge with Western science, mapping actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prepare people, wildlife and infrastructure for longer wildfire seasons, hotter summers, worsening drought and shrinking snowpack.
The tribes take a broad approach. Their climate work includes wind energy development, water conservation, stream restoration for native fish, invasive species removal and habitat recovery. After federal control of the National Bison Range was returned to the tribes in 2022, they began restoring roughly 19,000 acres of grassland and managing a herd of about 350 bison to rebuild ecological balance.
This year the plan emphasizes wildfire and smoke. Montana had an unusually warm spring with much below-average snowpack, increasing the odds of hot, dry conditions. Smoke from fires as far away as Canada, Washington and Oregon can funnel into the glacial valley where the reservation sits, making air quality a major health concern for the reservation’s roughly 33,000 residents.
To address that, Durglo and his team have installed air quality sensors across the reservation — in homes, schools and outdoor sites — that feed into the global PurpleAir network and give community members real-time information. They trained people to build low-cost DIY air filters and identified several existing buildings with effective filtration as clean air centers. This summer the tribes plan to open three centers to serve six towns on the reservation. Much of that work was supported by the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services and a local nonprofit, Montana Health Professionals for a Healthy Climate.
Durglo also led outreach to local schools to adopt the EPA’s air quality flag program, so administrators and families can quickly see whether it is safe to be outdoors. The sensors and simple flag system help residents make immediate decisions during smoky days, and data have shown indoor air can sometimes be nearly as poor as outdoor air without proper filtration.
The tribes update their climate action plan every three years to reflect emerging risks. Durglo designed the plan to be holistic: people, water, wildlife, forests and air are all connected, and priorities cannot be set in isolation. That outlook has guided projects ranging from restoring habitat for bull trout to regenerating whitebark pine and reintroducing beavers and engineered dams in other tribal landscapes to help retain water when snow melts early.
Tribal sovereignty allows the Confederated Salish and Kootenai to act even when state or federal efforts stall. In recent years Montana’s own state climate plan has been shelved under the current governor, and legislation has limited the state’s ability to regulate emissions unless the federal government acts first. Federal funding for many renewable and climate projects has also been reduced or halted, and a $20 million grant the tribes received under a previous Solar for All program was canceled.
Those funding shifts have pushed Durglo and other tribal leaders to be resourceful. They piece together support from multiple sources: state agencies where possible, nonprofit partners, private grants and strategic collaborations with other tribes. Durglo has shared his planning approach widely; he has led climate planning workshops and served on regional tribal committees to help other tribes build their own plans.
One example is the Blackfeet Nation, which invited Durglo to help shape a climate plan in 2017. Blackfeet leaders adapted elements of the Flathead plan to their landscape, prioritizing actions like reintroducing beavers and building small water-retention structures to hold water on the land longer as springs come earlier.
This summer Durglo and tribal partners plan to meet with neighboring tribes to identify and prioritize shared projects and pursue grants together. Collaborative grant applications, they say, can stretch limited dollars further and make projects more competitive.
For Durglo, the work is rooted in stewardship passed down for generations. He points out that Indigenous people were managing these lands long before the phrase climate change existed, and that knowledge endures even if federal funding disappears. As he looks toward the future, his aim is pragmatic: safeguard people and ecosystems now while building capacity so his great-great-great-grandchildren inherit a landscape and community that endure.