Firing Forests to Save Them: Could Native Traditions Save Lives?

When we imagined a podcast about environmental justice – it was
before the Tubbs fire here in Sonoma County – and the deadly fire
seasons of 2017 and 2018. Even so, we wouldn’t have thought of
Indians and their relationship to fire as a matter of
environmental justice.


But producers Allison Herrera and Debra Utacia Krol have a
different viewpoint. They’re members of a Western tribe – and see
the increasingly destructive fires in Northern California as a
matter of the Anglo society forgetting lessons that Native
Americans have known for millennia. Fire, they say, can be an
important – even necessary – part of the landscape.


Fire helps clear habitat for animals and space for plants. And
smaller fires can allow us to avoid the cataclysmic fires that
leveled neighborhoods in Santa Rosa and the surrounding
communities – especially in the past two years.


Herrera and Krol say Indian traditions once protected these lands
and could do so again— Allison Herrera brings us the story.


Learn more about native traditions and controlled burns.


(Photo: An ancient oak tree at Pepperwood Preserve likely won't
survive its burns from the 2017 Tubbs fire. Credit: Debra Utacia
Krol)


Read the story here:


Firing Forests to Save Them: Could Native American
Traditions Protect Land and Lives?


 


Can Native land management render the next round of wildfires
less destructive? These Indigenous people say ’yes.’


 


By Debra Utacia Krol and Allison Herrera


 


Alice Lincoln Cook at her jewelry bench at the Book Nook in
KlamathAlice Lincoln-Cook understands why burning is preferable
to huge fires. She and her family survived the Fire Siege of
1987, which ravaged a large swath of Northwestern California.
“They took out half the country here; I mean, it was a huge
fire,” she says. “It was really scary for [us] because all our
family down there and many other families had their homes and
stuff burnt down.”


 


That harrowing time led Lincoln-Cook’s her family to action. They
clear the land around their homes every year, and sprinklers are
placed to wet the ground in case of another fire. It’s also made
her cognizant of what cultural burn managers are working to
accomplish.


 


“That's why we're hopeful of more controlled fires rather than
disaster fires of that sort because those are those are pretty
hard to take when they're taking lives and homes and stuff like
that,” she says.


The 1987 fire—and the wildfires that raged through Northern
California in October 2017—are the stuff of nightmares to
residents. They, and other smaller fires, ravaged this part of
California. The October 2017 fires resulted in 44 lives lost;
10,000 structures destroyed with more than $8 billion dollars
in property damage; and more than 200,000 acres torched. And,
in 2018, the region took another fiery hit: this year’s
Mendocino Complex Fire is even bigger; to date, more than
460,000 acres have burned, making it the largest fire in
recorded California history.


 



But could these fires have been, if not prevented, at least
rendered less destructive?


 


Many Indigenous peoples in California say yes. They say their
traditions once protected these lands and could do so again—if
they’re given the opportunity. Journalists Allison Herrera and
Debra Utacia Krol visited several Northern California tribal
communities to learn more.


 


 


From fire comes new plant life at Pepperwood PreserveThe first
stop: Pepperwood Preserve, a 3,200-acre facility just east of
Santa Rosa. It contains oak groves, mixed conifer forests and
grasslands, and is home to many endemic species. It’s a beautiful
drive despite the burned-out sites we see on our way up to the
preserve.


 


This hilly region is also home to Indigenous peoples, including
the Pomo and Wappo cultures. Here, we meet Clint McKay, one of
several Indigenous Californians who are using fire to fight fire.
McKay is the cultural consultant and Native American advisory
committee chair at Pepperwood Preserve. McKay is a citizen of the
Dry Creek Band of Pomo and has Wappo heritage. He is also a noted
cultural practitioner, particularly in living with the land—and
carefully setting fires to cleanse the land.


 


“[Pepperwood] asked us to provide some insight to the native way
of working with the land,” says McKay. He adds, “Land management
means to me that you’re controlling something. I don’t believe we
have the ability or the right to control nature, so we work with
it.”


 


McKay shows us where the fire came through an area that was
scheduled for a controlled burn. It was supposed to clear the
area of the “duff,” as McKay calls the accumulation of dead
plants, weeds and unwanted trees that choked the area, but the
fire ripped through here and basically did its job. He points out
plants meant for medicinal purposes and food. “Soaproot is used
for soap and brushes,” he says. There’s also miner’s lettuce,
wild potatoes and other useful plants growing out of the ashes.


Cultural burning creates the perfect conditions to grow the
basket making materials Pomo people need to keep their
tradition alive, McKay says.


 



It hasn’t been easy for McKay to put his point across. “The very
thing you’re trying to preserve you are killing,” McKay says.
“Nature isn’t here to be hands off.”


 


The philosophy of “leave the land alone”—and that of excluding
Native people in particular from their ancestral homelands to
create what Muir refers to as pristine land untouched by human
hands—dates to back to John Muir, best known as the father of
modern environmentalism. “That Native people were inferior to
white Europeans was a given, and widely accepted by the general
public well before and after the 19th century,” Dina
Gilio-Whitaker, a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes and
a noted Indigenous studies scholar, writes in her upcoming book
As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental
Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock. “It was as true for
John Muir as it was for his predecessor Henry Thoreau.”


 


When Muir came to San Francisco in 1868, “California was engaged
in an open campaign of extermination of California Indians which
he doesn’t seem to ever have actively opposed,” Gilio-Whitaker
writes. “Instrumental in the creation of Yosemite National Park,
he supported the expulsion of the Yosemite Indians from their
ancient home in the valley, and journaled his experiences with
and thoughts about California ‘digger’ Indians (a derogatory term
even then) whom he found dirty, lazy, ugly, and altogether
disappointing.”


 


This philosophy became embedded in the environmental movement,
and although it’s slowly being replaced with a more Indigenous,
holistic approach, it’s caused no end of issues for Native
cultural practitioners.


 


Clint McKay says that the conifers were crowding out oak trees
and other plants at PepperwoodThe Pepperwood community is no
exception. “It’s taken a long time for us at Pepperwood to
understand that things are deeper than traditional
environmentalism,” Ben Benson, cultural resources coordinator at
Pepperwood, says.


 


People seem to be finally heeding McKay and other Indigenous fire
experts. “We’re here to support the habitat the best we can,”
McKay says. “Everything we do is reciprocal. We’re not just doing
it for the land and the animals, but we are also doing it for
ourselves.”


 


“I gave a talk out here and tell people that it’s like we’ve
pushed a reset button on the land,” McKay says. “You can see here
we’ve seen what seven generation of neglect can do.” McKay is
referring to the length of time that fire suppression has been
official government policy--roughly equating to seven generations
of Native peoples’ tenure in California.


 


Others, like the California Chaparral Institute, believe that
prescribed burns can do more harm than good. They point to what
they call “fire management practices on incomplete records from
prehistory” as a rationale for not heeding Native peoples’ calls
to burn. The institute also says that Native people claim that
their burning will prevent fires; however, the Native
practitioners we spoke with all refute that claim. What they told
us is that cultural burning will greatly mitigate the severity of
wildfires and prevent killing off beneficial microbial life that
lives in the top layers of soil, or “sterilizing” the soil.


However, recent fire science research validates Native fire and
land stewardship practices. For example, Stephen J. Pyne, a
professor at Arizona State University, has been a strong
advocate for a return to active lands management including the
reintroduction of fire. “We are uniquely fire creatures,” Pyne
began, “on a uniquely fire planet.”Pyne said during a 2016
seminar. “The real argument for fire is that it does ecological
work that nothing else does.”


 



The U.S. Forest Service is another player which has come to
understand that forests need fire to remain healthy. We visited
with one Forest Service ecologist who’s demonstrating that.


 


Some six hours north of Santa Rosa lie the Trinity Alps, some of
the most beautiful--and treacherous--peaks in the West. Narrow
valleys are walled by nearly vertical slopes, carved by the
mighty Klamath River and its tributaries. The Hupa, Karuk, Yurok,
Wintu and other northwestern California Native peoples call this
region home.


 


Narrow roads wind through the valleys, providing the only
lifeline out of harm’s way in case of fire or other natural
disaster. We’re driving north on State Route 96 on a chilly wet
spring day, weaving around construction zones, delivery trucks
and local residents to visit with Frank Lake, an ecologist for
the Forest Service. Lake is stationed at Six Rivers National
Forest in the small town of Orleans.


 


Frank Lake shows off huckleberry in burned areaLake is a Karuk
descendent, who grew up in Northwest California. The Karuk also
have traditionally used fire to maintain their lands and create
room for important food and medicinal plants to grow. Lake knows
these mountains and valleys intimately. Lake uses this
accumulated knowledge of more than 10,000 years of living and
thriving here in his work with the Forest Service. That
traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK, includes using fire to
increase biodiversity and support the entire ecology.


 


“I came to work for the Hoopa Tribe for a while to be culturally
closer to this area which is just to the south, about 20 miles
from Orleans,” Lake says. He sports a crocheted cap with a
geometric basketry pattern under his regulation hard hat. He’s
also wearing field gear and heavy boots. His office is cluttered
with maps, printouts, books and various other tools of the
biologist’s trade.


 


Lake takes us to a burn site outside of town to show us where he
and his crew conducted a demonstration burn in late September
2016. There’s open space between the tanoaks and a few other
larger trees, giving food and medicinal plants room to
breathe—and grow. “This is a mixed forest type,” Lake explained.
“It has Douglas fir, tanoak and madrone.” He points out healthy
huckleberry bushes and other shrubs such as the thimbleberry and
blackcap raspberries. Across the road, though, lies an overgrown,
unwalkable thicket. Just a few flowers dust the huckleberry
bushes, as opposed to the white blossoms with their tasty promise
covering the bushes in the burn area.


 


“We're going to be looking at the recovery of the sites from the
ecological and cultural perspectives,” says Lake as he points out
the regrowth from the burn.


 


Recreating what Lake calls “drought-tolerant fire adaptive
species”—or stimulating the growth of plants that can withstand
California’s periodic dry spells, and that can also benefit from
the fires that accompany the droughts—has more benefits. It
promotes ecological resistance and resilience as well as
“promotes cultural resiliency.”


 


Other tribes in the Trinity Alps echo Lake’s sentiment. Margo
Robbins and her nephew Rick O’Rourke of the Yurok Tribe meet us
in the nearby town of Weitchpec. Robbins is the co-leader of the
Indigenous People's Burn Network, which aims to revitalize
cultural burns, or as McKay says, “burn off the duff,” in Native
communities, at the same time revitalizing culture. They’re
restoring the use of fire in ceremonies, and training tribal
members how to safely conduct cultural controlled burns.


 


“For thousands of years, Native people used fire to manage the
lands,” she says. “But when the Europeans came, the park-like
countryside that they saw they thought was natural that way.” But
the new settlers didn’t understand how fire was used to care for
the land, and Robbins says they were fearful—even to the point of
shooting or, later, jailing Indians who set fires.


 


Margo Robbins and Rick O'RourkeRobbins echoes what Clint McKay
says about government policies and fire suppression.“The land is
choked out with brush because of the fire exclusion policy by the
government,” Robbins says. “And, we are basket weavers here,
known for basketry the world over.” To keep that artform alive,
Yurok weavers need top-notch materials, such as hazel sticks. “In
order for hazel to be used as a basket material it has to be
burned the year before—and we hadn't had sticks for a long time,”
she says. “The art of basketry was really starting to decline.”


 


But with the advent of prolonged drought, blights like Sudden Oak
Death Syndrome and bark beetle infestations, huge wildfires and a
changing climate, that’s all changing. Tribal members now burn in
culturally important sites, and places where animals can graze,
Robbins says. They’re restoring prairies to provide habitat for
deer, woodpeckers and other species that had grown scarce.


 


“The animals are coming back, our predator animals, our prey
animals, all aspects,” says O’Rourke, Robbins’ nephew and part of
the culturing burning team. “Owls, birds, all aspects of species
are coming back. I’m seeing animals I’ve never seen here before
coming back – flying squirrels. It’s beautiful.”


Meanwhile, other Native people are developing protocols to deal
with the aftermath of fires. One such program is Follow the
Smoke, an initiative of the California Indian Basketweavers’
Association. We met Alice Lincoln-Cook, who’s CIBA’s vice
president, at her business in Klamath, along the Northern
California coast.


 



The Book Nook is a cozy space. There’s an art gallery in front
where Lincoln-Cook makes traditional California Native jewelry
for sale and sells other Native people’s work. The bookstore is
in back. Here, shelves are stuffed with all manners of books for
sale or to give away if the shopper has no money--a frequent
occurrence in a town with twice the unemployment and an average
household income that’s half of the rest of California. The
center of the room sports a table for basketweaving classes or,
lately, a girls’ youth group that meets here.


 


Lincoln-Cook, a Karuk, says that Follow the Smoke’s goal is to
develop relationships with the National Park Service, California
State Parks and the Bureau of Land Management so Native people
can gather materials after a fire has passed through. “If there
are natural burns, we can help them by going out there and
collecting and helping them clean some of those areas and then be
able to process it for [our use],” says Lincoln-Cook. “If there
are trees that have fallen down, we can go out there and help
process the tree,” and clean up the land.


 


“We look at areas where we used to pick hazel sticks, because
those come back stronger and they're better materials for first
to work with,” Lincoln-Cook says.


 


Clint McKay shows Allison Herrera some shots of the burn zone
immediately after the 2017 fireAt Pepperwood, the land is
recovering. Oak tree seedlings are beginning to take root where
they couldn’t before because of the poison oak, weeds and bushes
that had taken over. It becomes apparent that the work of
Indigenous fire practitioners is far from over. There is still
resistance to Native land oversight and practices. But Indigenous
people like Clint McKay are hopeful the movement back to
Indigenous management protocols will spread.


 


And he’s not doing it just for food and medicine--he’s doing it
to ensure that Pomo and Wappo basketmaking can continue. The
nephew of famed Pomo basketweaver Mabel McKay, Clint McKay also
understands that his work to restore fire to the land also
restores sedge, redbud, willow and many other tools of the
basketweaver’s trade is also preserving this world-class art form
for generations to come. 

 


“The land is coming back stronger than ever,” McKay says.
“We’ve seen what seven generations of neglect can do. We’ve
been given another opportunity, I’ll be excited to see what the
next seven generations will do.”


 


(All photos: Debra Utacia Krol)



 


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