Native Forests Need Native Fires

Thank you for that kind introduction. It is truly an honor to be invited to speak today at this historic gathering that brings together many communities to discuss traditional Indian use of fire in land management.

Ten years ago I helped draft a citizen's initiative for the Warner Fire Recovery Project on the Willamette National Forest that proposed managing the Warner Fire area with prescribed fires.

The Warner Creek Fire burned across the Cornpatch Inventoried Roadless Area which is comprised of a ridgetop meadow complex laden with Native American archaeological sites, and traversed by an historic Native American trail that links the Willamette Valley with the Cascade Crest.

Prior to implementing prescribed burns in the Warner Area, we called for the Forest Service to conduct some oral history research and consult with local Native American communities on traditional burning practices.

Our plan would have required the Forest Service to utilize their research findings on Native American burning practices in the design and implementation of prescribed fires.

To the extent possible, we were asking the Forest Service to emulate the frequency, intensity, seasonality, and methodology of Indian burning in the Warner Fire area.

Yes, if need be, put away those driptorches and pick up some burning cedar boughs! And don't forget the ceremonies, songs and prayers that should accompany the lighting of the firesticks.

Ten years after this proposal was made, Willamette Forest employees who played active roles in the Warner Fire Recovery Project have helped organize this profoundly historic conference.

I am immensely grateful to the role these Forest Service employees--truly dedicated public servants--have played in helping the Tribes organize this conference.

There would be innumerable ecological benefits to the biological community from restoring Native American burning practices.

One of the benefits that is of prime interest to society today is that prescribed burning would reduce the accumulation of hazardous surface fuels such as dead needles and downed limbs, flammable brush, grasses, and small trees. These forest fuels, in conjunction with weather conditions and terrain features, can cause large-scale, high-intensity, high-severity wildland fires.

These high-severity fires can cause adverse impacts and even alter ecosystems that are not well adapted to such events.

But I would caution us not to be overly reductionistic in the view of all forest vegetation as merely "fuel."

Some of the plants that fire managers may want to eliminate because they increase fire hazards may also be plants that serve vital functions in the ecosystem, offer food or shelter to wildlife, or may be the very plants desired for traditional cultural use values by Native American communities.

These traditional uses included food, fiber, medicine, crafts, art, and ceremony. They are a vital part of a living cultural-ecological legacy that, unfortunately, most people have forgotten today.

These plants should be viewed appropriately as being intentionally cultivated with fire. Land managers need to consider these traditional uses and cultural relationships between these plants, Native communities, and fire before managers embark on sweeping, landscape-scale programs to reduce or eliminate this and other vegetation with fire or machines.

Hazardous fuels reduction and prevention of uncharacteristically severe wildfires may be one worthy benefit of restoring traditional Indian burning practices, but by taking a holistic approach to restoring ecosystems, fuel reduction should be seen as just one means and one goal among many others. It should not become the sole focus of ecological restoration, which it has in many people's eyes.

Federal agencies should not replace one reductionist view of forest management with another, as in switching from timber production to tinder reduction.

Other benefits to the biological community from restoring traditional fire practices would include increasing structural, seral, and landscape diversity.

As rare, threatened, endangered as native old-growth stands are becoming in western Oregon, young, natural, fire-regenerated stands are perhaps even more rare and endangered due to both fire exclusion policies and common federal post-fire recovery actions such as "salvage logging" and conifer planting.

Traditional burning practices enhancing structural, seral, and landscape diversity would result in enhance biological diversity of both vegetation and wildlife.

Other ecological benefits of burning would include enhanced soil fertility, increased watershed stability, as well as greater wildlife habitat diversity and quality. These are all benefits to the biological community that the forest conservation community would wholeheartedly endorse and welcome.

It may not be my role to address this matter, since I was asked to focus on the ecological benefits of fire, but I would like to offer a potential social benefit to the forest conservation community from their support of restoring traditional American Indian burning practices.

That benefit would be the following: Many of my respected colleagues in the largely-Anglo forest conservation movement are suffering deeply from anger, despair, and cynicism born out of the biodiversity crisis and deplorable state of forest ecosystem health resulting from the past century of so-called scientific resource management.

I don't think I need to go over the immense and in some cases irreparable ecological harm that has resulted from a century of federal forest management policies and practices.

There is plenty of blame to be shared by bureaucratic agencies, private corporations, elected officials, and the people who willingly or unwittingly supported these policies and practices with their labor, taxes, consumption, or votes.

The perception of crisis and level of cynicism is so high among members of the environmental community that it has provoked a national campaign to eliminate all economic uses of and human interventions in forest ecosystems.

There simply is no living example, in my colleagues' eyes, of human beings using or interacting with ecosystems in ways that are not exploitative, destructive, or "unnatural."

And their cynicism is not completely unfounded as every year it seems federal agencies and corporate public relations firms invent new euphemisms for cloaking business-as-usual resource extraction with the noblest of altruistic goals. For example, simply sticking the label of "forest restoration" or "fuels reduction" on every proposed commercial timber sale project can certainly breed cynicism and mistrust towards federal land management agencies.

But with the legacy of traditional American Indian burning practices, we have an example of human beings interacting with ecosystems and working with natural processes in ways that provided many benefits to humans and our fellow members of the biological community.

These burning practices were carried on in some places of the North American continent for over 700 human generations--that's a lot of practice! Over that great span of time, native flora and fauna adapted to and co-evolved with Indian burning, and now cannot be sustained without fires from both human and lightning ignitions.

In fact, it is nearly impossible to reconstruct the "natural" fire history of a place by separating out Indian fires from lightning fires. The very notions of "natural fire regimes" or "natural fire processes" that exclude the role of Indian burning are in my opinion erroneous and practically meaningless abstract concepts.

Current federal fire policies are based on a flawed conceptual split between so-called "natural fires" and "human-caused fires," again with the assumption that human-caused fires are unnatural interventions in the ecosystem.

Consequently, all human-caused ignitions that were not planned, wanted, or implemented by federal employees are declared wildfires and are aggressively suppressed, even if they are accomplishing resource or ecosystem benefits.

This policy has essentially criminalized Native American burners--labeling them "arsonists"--who have attempted to continue their cultural traditions and fulfill familial responsibilities to care for all our relations among the plant and animal peoples.

As a society, we have got to find a way to suture this philosophical and psychological split between Nature and culture and restore the whole; to rediscover the role of human beings as a part of, not apart from, the ecosystems that nurture us all.

We have got to find a way to relearn how to burn, to envision and practice the idea of natural human-caused fires.

I was only half-joking earlier when I suggested that federal agencies use burning cedar boughs to light prescribed fires. Given the vast scale of land that is thirsting for fire, it may be that modern incendiary devices such as fusees, driptorches, helitorches, and ping pong balls are the most economically efficient means, but this may not be the most socially beneficial means of reintroducing fire to fire-adapted ecosystems.

It may be that we need a large portion of the population, especially youth, to go through the experience of stacking sticks and carrying torches in order to restore a psycho-physical understanding of our interrelationship with forests and fire.

Such an experience may also teach an important lesson in humility in caring for the land and serving people--a much-needed experience especially for technocratic federal agencies.

In the future, prescribed fires hopefully won't be the exclusive work of federal agencies but will become the responsibility of local communities and civic groups. The Tribes should be able to assert their sovereign rights to conduct light-burning projects on their lands, and these might provide useful models for emulating burn projects on public lands which, I need not remind folks at this conference, were stolen lands from the first peoples of this continent.

Looking to the past of traditional American Indian burning practices and forward to restoring cultural landscapes may be the best means of leading us to where we need to be: the re-creation of a fire-adapted society able to dwell sustainably within fire-dependent ecosystems.

Members of the (Anglo) forest conservation community, whether they realize it now or not, would greatly benefit from restoring traditional fire use practices that would serve as a positive role model for healthy, healing, wholesome human interactions with ecosystems.

I wholeheartedly support the restoration of traditional Indian fire use practices, and look forward to its role in the creation of a Multi-National Fire Plan that works for all the sovereign nations inhabiting North America.

In my opinion, given the biological legacy of native flora and fauna co-evolving with Native American fires, there is no functional way to restore fire-adapted forests and grasslands that does not involve the restoration of traditional cultural fire use practices.

In essence, "Native Forests Need Native Fires!"

Thank you very much.