Stewart Huntington
ICT
BOSTON — Some call it Indigenous Knowledge or Traditional Ecological Knowledge. To others, it’s Native Science or even “Indigenous Brilliance.”
To Amira Madison, it’s all of the above, and something that must be shared.
“Our world needs Indigenous Knowledge,” Madison, Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), said recently at a presentation at the Boston Museum of Science. “We have not been taking care of the land the way that we should.”
Madison, who sits on her nation’s tribal council, joined with Hartman Deetz, Mashpee Wampanoag, in organizing a series of presentations, “Indigenous Knowledge and Climate Change: The Keys to Our Future,” at the Boston museum. The events highlight a set of principles and a worldview that they say deserve a wider audience in the age of rapid climate change.
The first event was held in March and featured the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe’s Natural Resources Director Jason Steiding, Aquinnah Wampanoag climate journalist Joseph Lee and Shavonne Smith, a Shinnecock Nation citizen who works to build partnerships and networks to address some of Shinnecock’s climate concerns. The third presentation is scheduled for next spring.
“Western science is catching up to many things that it was very dismissive of, that Native people have known and spoken about for generations,” said Hartman, who works on restoring Boston waterways with the Charles River Watershed Association as well as language revitalization through the Wampanoag Language Reclamation Program. “The idea that we are all connected, that the world is a single living system.”
‘Ties to the land’
At a presentation Sept. 18, the pair arranged a panel of experts on cultural burning, the practice of embracing fire as a critical component of stewarding a healthy forest. The idea is slowly gaining acceptance in state federal agencies — and beyond — that for more than a century have focused exclusively on fire suppression.
“There’s a better understanding of how fires have been a part of the ecosystem and an acknowledgment that [Native peoples] have burned to maintain the health of the system, to protect our communities, to stimulate plants that are important forage for big game,” said Don Gentry, Klamath Tribes. “There’s more of a recognition of that — even by the Forest Service, where they want to do Indigenous burnings.”
Gentry was on the four-person panel that also included Talia Landry, Mashpee Wampanoag; Wallace Cleaves, Gabrielino-Tongva Indian Tribe; and Juliette Jackson, Klamath Tribes. Gentry brought striking photos from the aftermath of Oregon’s devastating Bootleg Fire that burned some 400,000 acres in 2021.
The aerial images showed vast tracts of charred and dead forest juxtaposed with a bright green swath of healthy trees on land tended by the Klamath foresters using traditional cultural burning practices. The tribe won the right to reintroduce its stewardship practices years earlier under a co-management pact with the Forest Service.
“We’re reclaiming (initiative) and trying to move toward what made us healthy,” said Gentry, who previously served as chairman of his tribal council. “Our ties to the land and use of those practices is critical for that.”
Changing times
There appears to be growing acceptance of Indigenous strategies within the Forest Service. The service plans in October to release its final draft Amendment to the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan that “embeds traditional ecological practices into biodiversity and ecosystem management” and expands tribal-forest service co-stewardship frameworks, according to the USFS.
Jackson, an attorney with Henkels Law, also noted a shift in the broader society’s understanding of time-tested Native understandings. “Growing up in Northern California, people weren’t talking about Indigenous knowledge. There was no recognition of tribes and their having that knowledge,” she said.
But today, things have changed.
“It’s awesome that we were able to share [at the science museum] our Indigenous brilliance in this space,” Jackson said. “It’s a positive thing, because there’s a recognition of the validity of this knowledge, the sacredness of it and that it’s needed and necessary.”
Jackson noted that this year CalFire, the California state agency in charge of fighting wildfires, for the first time began working with tribes to reintroduce cultural burning practices. The Karuk Tribe was first to sign a pact to implement the strategies under a 2024 state law authorizing them.
Cleaves, a University of California at Riverside associate dean, noted that the awakening to the efficacy of Indigenous stewardship practices is evident not only at the federal and state level of government, but on the local level as well.
“In just the last few years, there’s been a transformation in the way that they see this relationship. They’re much more open to our Traditional Ecological Knowledge. They’re much more open to ideas about how to steward the land, how to do and perform cultural burns.”
The support has grown in the aftermath of the wildfires that swept through the Los Angeles basin in January.
“Our local fire companies, they’re excited to learn about cultural burns,” he said. “They realized that the system wasn’t working. It’s very obvious to them … how problematic the system has become.
“That’s been a real change that we’ve witnessed within the last decade, really even within the last five years.”
Looking ahead
But additional support is needed to bring Indigenous Knowledge to the rest of the world.
“In the United States of America, we’re taught that time is money,” said Madison. “We’re taught that land is just something that you own rather than something that you care for and that you’re connected to. For us, we believe that we are a part of the land. We grow from the land.”
It’s time for humanity to listen to the land.
“We cannot continue to operate on the same system that created the problems that we’re dealing with,” Hartman said. “We have to look to something new.”
Or, perhaps, something very, very old.