Living With Fire: What California
Can Learn From Native Burns

Officials are beginning to reimagine fire and land management, drawing upon
Native American tradition and perspectives that were long outlawed.

Written by Megan Botel
03/10/2021

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/california-wildfires-native-burns_n_604692eec5b69197db28fdd4

This story is co-published with The GroundTruth Project.

MARIPOSA, Calif. ― Rain falls on the 300-year-old oaks on a cold midwinter morning as a group of nearly 60 gathers here on what was once southern Sierra Miwok land.

Some have returned year after year. Others are here for the first time, eager to learn what California’s oldest residents have long known about land management after the most destructive fire season in the state’s recorded history. 

“We are here to make an offering to the land,” said Ron Goode, the North Fork Mono’s tribal chairman, who organized the event. “Mother Earth supports us. By putting fire on the ground, we support her.” 

Rakes, clippers, shovels and chainsaws in hand, the group heads out to assemble the dead vegetation into burn piles. Using drip torches ― red tin canisters with mixtures of diesel and gasoline ― they delicately light the piles on fire in slow, deliberate motions, painting the land in strokes of orange and red. 

It is the year’s first cultural burn for the North Fork Mono. For more than 10,000 years, tribes used small, controlled fires to open pasture lands and clear out underbrush, promoting new plant growth and reducing the risk of large, dangerous fires.

But when Western settlers took over Native American lands in the 18th and 19th centuries, they began barring many traditional practices, including cultural burning. In 1850, the U.S. government passed the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, which prohibited intentional burning. After over a century of this strategy left the nation’s forests choked with dry underbrush, California’s fire officials are now beginning to reimagine fire and land management, drawing upon Native American tradition and perspective. 

North Fork Mono tribal members are teaching the group of university students, ecologists, journalists and, notably, officials from the U.S. Forest Service and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) how it might help curb the state’s fire crisis by clearing out highly flammable vegetation before the dry, hot summer. 

Goode, a state-certified “burn boss,” runs several burns a year to rehabilitate meadows across California. This 369-acre property became an unofficial educational site when he opened it up to university students nearly two decades ago, and for the past six years he’s invited the greater public. Interest surged within the past three years, he said, attracting hundreds of participants at each burn, including a growing number of officials from Cal Fire and the Forest Service. (Due to the pandemic, those numbers are currently limited.)

“People are interested in what’s happening,” Goode said. “But it takes disasters for people to start waking up.”

In 2020, wildfires ravaged 4.2 million acres of California, including Big Basin in Santa Cruz, the oldest and one of the most beloved state parks in California. Over the past decade, the state known for its lush forests and rich natural resources has seen hundreds of lives lost and tens of thousands of structures destroyed, entering, as fire historian Stephen Pyne put it, the “fire equivalent of an ice age.” 

The disaster has awakened California’s land managers, who, after a century of promoting fire suppression and rejecting Native American controlled burn techniques, are now trying to figure out what to do with the abundance of dried shrub and brush that, along with a warming climate, fueled the current fire emergency.   

On this February morning, Goode’s 11-year-old nephew, Harlon, uses a chainsaw for the first time to take down a dying white oak. He watched it fall in awe. 

“One day, I’m going to take over for my uncle and be the burn boss,” Harlon said. 

The event took months of meticulous planning, including permits, funding and accommodating the pandemic restrictions. But they could not plan for the weather, and the forecast was for near-constant rain. 

“Whether we get much burning done or not, I am fulfilled,” said Goode, gesturing toward the group huddled under tents to keep dry. “Look at all of you.” 

So is Jonathan Long, a research ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service who attended the burn. 

“There’s some really bad history of labeling Native people as ignorant or superstitious, of actively arresting people and putting them in jail if they were trying to carry out traditional practices like cultural burning,” Long said. “Most people would now say: ‘Yes, if we kept burning in the frequency, in the ways Native Americans burned, we wouldn’t have the fires we are having now.’”