New tribal liaison in southern Colorado: 'You are responsible for learning this history'

When Jason Herbert is meeting with tribal members on their lands, he prefers not to wear his U.S. Forest Service uniform, despite whatever agency guidelines suggest in the case of official business.

“It’s not disrespect to the Forest Service. I’m really proud to work for the Forest Service,” Herbert says.

It’s just that he knows all too well the impressions that government uniforms can leave. He knows the deep history between Indigenous people and the government, though not as much as Fred Mosqueda knows.

Mosqueda is a language and culture coordinator for the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes in Oklahoma. Through a series of violence and broken promises, his people were moved to that state from their ancestral places in Colorado we now call the Pike and San Isabel National Forests and Cimarron and Comanche National Grasslands (the unit is commonly shortened to PSICC).

“Everything that we do with the government, we’ve been losing,” Mosqueda says. And so with uniformed people, he says, “sometimes you get that impression that you can’t trust them.”

That is the last impression Herbert wants to leave.

“Compassionate” is the impression Ernest “Muz” Pinnecoose has gotten. He’s an elder with the Southern Ute.

Herbert “wants to know more about the Native peoples who live here in the Southwest, and he’s very adamant,” Pinnecoose says. “He’s an open-hearted individual that wants to bring everybody to the table that should have a seat.”

Herbert is several months into his job as the first tribal liaison appointed to PSICC, a unit encompassing southern Colorado’s mountains to the prairie stretching to Kansas.

The job, first and foremost, is about building relationships, Herbert says. It’s about building trust with people who have forever called the land home but have long been ignored in its management.

“When I got here, we really didn’t have any relationships with any tribes out here,” Herbert says. “We’ve done consultations and things like that, but that’s not the same thing as having a real relationship.”

Herbert’s appointment comes amid federal land managers' stated push to collaborate more with tribes.

Read a Forest Service statement last year: “Understanding the perspective and wisdom of Indigenous people gives us an opportunity to reflect on our policies, programs and practices, the real-life implications they have on Indigenous peoples and what role we can play in rectifying historical or ongoing issues.”

More liaisons were envisioned with a nationwide action plan the agency published last year, titled “Strengthening Tribal Consultations and Nation-to-Nation Relationships.” The Forest Service’s Office of Tribal Relations director, Reed Robinson, envisioned “more realistic and progressive relationships that honor and respect tribal sovereignty.”

“Progressive” might describe Herbert. “A little bit different” is the word from Mosqueda.

“Sometimes you run into a liaison, and all they want to do is quote you regulation after regulation after regulation,” he says. “They don’t talk a language we always understand.”

Herbert talks the language of the everyman, “the down-home boy,” Mosqueda says.

Herbert holds a Ph.D. in history with a focus on Native American and environmental history, but “I don’t act, think or talk like a professor,” he says. Nor does he strike the calculated government tone. He sprinkles swears followed by an apology followed by more swears and candid reflections.

“I come from a long line of catfisherman in Kentucky,” he says. “So like other Coloradans, I hike, I paddle, I fish, and I hunt. I lift heavy-ass weights. And I watch a (expletive) ton of movies. And I read.”

Herbert is buff and tattooed with an array of interests shared by his fellow gym rats and his other fellows who spend afternoons outside or in libraries and classrooms. You can find notes on adventure, food, sports, politics and pop culture on his X account, where he live-tweets movies for tens of thousands of followers who also follow his podcast, “Historians at the Movies.” Also in his spare time, he’s writing a book about the origins of cattle ranching in Florida, where he lived most of the last 20 years.

Much of his time nowadays is spent learning, he says. It’s showing up and listening, he says. He was on hand for a Native ceremony in Colorado Springs, where he met Mosqueda. 

“Now he wants to come and visit us,” Mosquedo says from Oklahoma. “He wants to sit with us. He wants to talk with us.”

He wants to attend a bear dance this summer alongside Pinnecoose. Herbert met the elder for a land survey that yielded teepee rings and other memories. “I’ve never run across an individual that was willing and compassionate enough to learn about tribal ways, not only mine, but other tribal ways,” Pinnecoose says.

It’s knowledge that can do the Forest Service good, Herbert says. Knowledge that can do the broader public good, he says — knowledge all too often missed.

“The whole reason there’s a national Forest Service, the whole reason why we have a Colorado, is because the United States violently engaged and attempted genocide and extirpation of Indigenous people,” Herbert says. “I don’t say that to make people feel guilty. But you are responsible, and by that I mean you are responsible for learning this history so we can create a better present and a better future.”

Previously, while working toward his Ph.D, jobs and research took Herbert to the Seminole Tribe of Florida and North Carolina’s Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. The work taught him this: “When the bullets stopped flying, violence against Native people continued. It just took a different form.

“What you have are dams in the Pacific Northwest, you’ve got canals, dredges in the Everglades, you’ve got oil pipelines near Standing Rock. Changes to the environment are also violence unto Indigenous communities.”

Pinnecoose has watched changes happen from afar without his tribe’s involvement — changes to lands his people hold dear more than a century removed from their forced relocation to Colorado’s southwest corner.

“When you step outside reservation boundaries, it’s like (the government) is saying, ‘Well, your voice has no meaning out here,’” he says. “Which is totally untrue.”

Herbert’s aim is to prevent that. Just don’t count on him always wearing his uniform.

“I do wear Forest Service T-shirts,” he says. “I’ve already cut the sleeves off them, because I can wear them to the gym.”

He smiles and shrugs. “I gotta be me, man.”