Muckleshoot Indian Tribe v. United States Forest Service

The U.S. Forest Service (defendant) traded old-growth forest land containing the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe's (plaintiff) ancestral grounds and a historic 17.5-mile trail to Weyerhaeuser in exchange for other land. To mitigate the exchange's effect on the historic trail, the Forest Service proposed only to map and photograph it, rejecting easements, covenants, or logging restrictions as impractical, and it denied the tribe's request to study additional historic sites, citing its own prior research and the tribe's refusal to share further site information. The tribe sued, claiming inadequate consultation, inadequate mitigation, and failure to nominate sites to the National Register of Historic Places; the district court denied all claims, and the tribe appealed.

Whether the federal government's reasonable good-faith efforts to identify historic properties satisfy the National Historic Preservation Act's consultation requirement, and whether merely documenting historic resources satisfies its mitigation requirement.