After wildfires destroyed 95% of this California tribe’s forests, members uncovered 1,200 ancestral sites

CONCOW, Calif. — Until recently, when members of the Konkow Valley Band of Maidu pulled up a map of their ancestral land in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, only about two dozen of their historic sites appeared.

How Indigenous leaders are ‘carrying fire’ from Northwest history to the present

A soft rain fell around Joe Scott as he unwrapped the leather cord fastening halves of a mussel shell. Scott, an elder from the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, packed each half of the shell with stringy willow wood — his insulation. He added chunks of smoldering fungus — his fuel. The small fire stayed lit, even when he closed the shell.

Indigenous fire practices can help Oregon wildfires, land management

As fires appear to haunt Oregon’s imagination of summertime, we sit to reflect on the need to define our collective relationship with fire through an engagement with Indigenous science or ways of knowing and understanding the world.

Native American communities in western Oregon have been tending the land with fire since time immemorial. This practice, known today as cultural burning, offers many lessons on the value of fire to care for land and water. Cultural burnings are an ecological practice grounded in Indigenous science that prevents disastrous fire seasons, nourishes watersheds, sustains traditional food sources and maintains cultural practices and keeps memories alive across generations.

In western Oregon, Native communities have carefully burned to maintain oak groves for acorns, used mindful fire in meadows for camas and other foods and pruned and burned hazel patches for basketry materials. These practices, among many others, require the use of fire as a transformational element — fire to clear grassland, maintain forest health and encourage new growth, while rejuvenating springs and water tables.

Groups Seek Liability Reforms to Fight Wildfire

According to Karuk Natural Resources Director and traditional fire practitioner Bill Tripp, "My ancestors practiced cultural burning for millennia along the Klamath and Salmon Rivers. Low intensity burns at the right time of year reduce wildfire risks in our communities and promote forest health. We must enact policies to enable and encourage rural communities to do this important work."

Reading the Landscape for Fire

In the aftermath of the extensive fires that burned across California and the West in the 2020 fire season, there is a lot to reflect upon. People grappling with the trauma of disaster. Communities trying to recover and plan for future fires. Ecosystems responding to fire within the landscape. More carbon dioxide released through combustion and thus further contributing to our already troubling atmospheric conditions. Fires that reinforce the likelihood of more fire by decreasing forest cover, damaging the soil’s health and moisture retention, and contributing dead and dying vegetation to the landscape. These are just some of the cycles that are perpetuating fire until we make change.

A burning planet: Why we must learn to live with fire

There is a paradox at the core of Earth’s unravelling firescapes.

California tribe offered solution to wildfire management. Was U.S. Forest Service listening?

HAPPY CAMP, Siskiyou County — Leeon Hillman walked slowly, sadly, to a semicircle of piled rocks surrounded by blackened trees. He knelt there, turning away from the heap of ash, which was all the massive Slater Fire had left of his house.

Alarmed by scope of wildfires, officials turn to Native Americans for help

Our land was taken. But we still hold the knowledge of how to stop mega-fires

As wildfires rage across California, it saddens me that Indigenous peoples’ millennia-long practice of cultural burning has been ignored in favor of fire suppression.

What turned California forests into a tinderbox? Fire suppression, paradoxically

Before this unprecedented era of mega-blazes on the US west coast, California’s forests had a canny, ingenious way of avoiding destructive worst-case forest fire scenarios. By periodically removing the grasses, shrubs and young trees – known as the forest understory – California avoided fires growing to destructive intensities before the 20th century. The way this was done? Fire.

To Manage Wildfire, California Looks To What Tribes Have Known All Along

On a cool February morning, around 60 people gathered in the Sierra Nevada foothills to take part in a ceremony that, for many decades, was banned.

Men and women from Native American tribes in Northern California stood in a circle, alongside university students and locals from around the town of Mariposa. Several wore bright yellow shirts made of flame-resistant fabric. For the next two days, the group would be carefully lighting fires in the surrounding hills.

California Teaming Up With Native American Tribes To Prevent Wildfires

For more than a century, California's Native American tribes were largely banned from doing traditional burning of the landscape. Now, they're restoring that practice to help prevent fires.

Navajo Nation faces twin threats as wildfires spread during pandemic

The Wood Springs 2 fire arrived at Michelle Johnson’s home a week ago. Ash from the 13,000-acre wildfire that burned five miles away rained on her land, with thick smoke billowing above the house she shares with her husband and children.

Hands on the land, heart in community: Returning cultural fires

It was a California Summer. I was working in a plant nursery tucked into the Cascade Mountain Range—blue mountains in the distance and rivers and creeks to splash in.

But I couldn't clearly see my hand outstretched in front of me. It's the smoke. Like almost every summer of my childhood, a wildfire raged in a nearby forest.

Looking back, what was most disturbing was not the smoke or the thick layer of ash on my car after work, it was how normal this was. Evacuations and high severity forest fires are an almost annual occurrence. California's forest fire problem now routinely makes international news as entire cities are destroyed.

Now more than ever California forest fires have become synonymous with death, destruction, and long-term economic depression.

Tribes and firefighters work together to prevent catastrophic wildfires

Elizabeth Azzuz had already worked with fire three times during the week I spoke with her from her home at the confluence of the Klamath and Trinity Rivers in Northern California. Azzuz is a member of the Yurok Tribe, which has used fire for cultural and ecological reasons for hundreds of generations. She burns dense understory to cleanse conifer forests and promote the growth of hazel for basket weaving. At night, she ignites leaf litter and grasses; the resulting smoke discourages weevils and moths, which can infest the acorns used in traditional foods.

The fire we need. Can managed fire heal more than just the forests?

Elizabeth Azzuz had already worked with fire three times during the week I spoke with her from her home at the confluence of the Klamath and Trinity Rivers in Northern California. Azzuz is a member of the Yurok Tribe, which has used fire for cultural and ecological reasons for hundreds of generations. She burns dense understory to cleanse conifer forests and promote the growth of hazel for basket weaving. At night, she ignites leaf litter and grasses; the resulting smoke discourages weevils and moths, which can infest the acorns used in traditional foods.

Good Fire on the Klamath

Native people have been applying good, medicinal fire to their homelands along the Klamath River for thousands upon thousands of years. Recently, amid intensifying climate, wildfire, and social crises, Karuk and Yurok people have been organizing TREX, prescribed fire training exchange events conducted in collaboration with The Nature Conservancy and a diverse, international set of participants.

Native Solutions to Big Fires

Cultural burning practices are working to reduce wildfires in northern Australia. Can they work in California, too?