By: Maya W.
At this point we are all very familiar with the wildfires that have been going on across the Pacific Northwest. While this is not the first time this has happened, the conversation around these wildfires is beginning to change. There's been a lot of conversation on how to prevent some of the damage that these fires cause and how to control them. While climate changes has undoubtedly increased the severity of many of these fires, one important thing that is lacking from the conversation about climate change overall but specifically within the conversation about these fires is Indigenous knowledge.
Indigenous people in California have prescribed burning as a way to keep their land healthy for thousands of years. Prescribed burning is when fires are lit on purpose to keep extra fuel from building up, re-engaging with tribes to expand prescribed burns could be a way to help control some of these wildfires in the long run. The removal of Native Americans in California once it became a state was not only cruel and harmful to the people but also to the land. With removing the people who had been stewards of the land for so long the seasonal relationship with fires and the concept of good and controlled fires was cut off as well. Many Indigenous activists have been pushing for their rights to burn to be recognized for years. Ron Goode, a tribal chairman in the North Fork Mono has been working for decades to try to convince people to apply Native American knowledge to the land. He's a proponent for controlled burning and he says that before California became a state, before colonization, and the removal of native people the land was constantly on fire under the control of the tribes. He believes that fire suppression is what is leading to the severity of these wildfires. He's also highly critical of how he believes that many services agencies are “not thinking in terms of how to take care of the land and how to make the land sustainable”. He says that there are still many institutional barriers that have to be broken down in order for Indigenous rights to burn to be recognized by the state and even beyond that, once it is they would need consistent and reliable funding mechanisms in place in order to practice prescribed burns.
Bill Tripp, with the Karuk Tribe along Northern California’s Klamath River, says that “Those practices have been adopted in this place over thousands and thousands of years. When the fire exclusion Paradigm began Indigenous people were shot and hung and everything else for burning, our intent is to work within our existing system to bring those practices back.” When researching for this article I was shocked to find out that many standard firefighting techniques like using bulldozers to cut fire lines can have long-lasting impacts on the landscape and fire retardants can be toxic to waterways and Wildlife. Chief scientist with Wild Heritage which is a project for the Earth Island Institute says that fire suppression to protect homes and lives is good but it's being way overdone in this current moment.
Discussion Questions:
What are some of the benefits of fire suppression and traditional burning?
In what ways can we put pressure on our public officials to pass policies that allow Indigenous burning practices?