Hunting Stewardship & Safety Program

The Nez Perce Tribe initiated a hunting stewardship program in 2016 to increase awareness of the impacts of spent lead ammunition on non-game wildlife and the variety of benefits that tribal hunters can bring to their community by voluntarily switching to non-lead ammunition.  The program was expanded through an Administration for Native Americans (ANA) grant in 2019 to further promote use of non-lead ammunition among tribal hunters, with secondary outreach to members of the hunting community, and the general public.

Through this voluntary program we aim to increase tribal members’ knowledge, access and opportunity to use non-lead ammunition to improve traditional food harvest, hunter safety, and the stewardship of non-game wildlife. Our ultimate goal in promoting non-lead alternatives is to reduce lead in the food web in order to improve the health and resiliency of our communities by ensuring thriving wildlife populations and subsistence food security for tribal families. Currently, lead toxicity from spent bullet fragments left on the landscape in the form of gut-piles, continues to kill culturally and ecologically significant wildlife within the Nimiipuu homeland. Nez Perce tribal members may be unknowingly contributing to that loss while also putting their families at risk from consumption of lead-contaminated game meat.

Program Goals

1. Build a youth outreach and education program that includes: culturally-based hunting curriculum, hunter education and firearms safety classes, annual cultural hunting camps, and the production of Nimiipuu hunter orientation videos.

2. Further develop our hunter outreach program to increase the visibility, availability, and use of non-lead ammunition in our local communities through: retailer partnerships, expanded non-lead ammunition distribution, multi-media development of information detailing the benefits of lead- free hunting (hyperlink to Non-lead ammunition brochure), and community outreach events.

3.  Initiate policy development and implementation by creating a strategic plan to: improve the existing tribal law and order code, promote the use of non-lead ammunition through tribal policy papers (hyperlink to white paper), and adopt formal Resolutions that can be used as models for other tribes.

All of these activities will be monitored and adjusted through a voluntary community Steering Committee and participant feedback through formal surveys (hyperlink to survey results). By the end of three years we will have a well-developed program with community participation and support which results in 50% of tribal members using non-lead ammunition for subsistence hunting activities. All current and future hunters and their families will directly benefit from this project with secondary benefits to non-tribal hunters and their families as well as all scavenging wildlife species.