Starting the fire again: Indigenous cultural burning
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Kalle Benallie
ICT
Rhiana Jones, environmental director at the Washoe Environmental Protection Department, questioned the continuation of their burn program after running it for three years without much progress. But through the vast members in the Indigenous Peoples Burning Network, she found how it took one tribe 20 years to burn freely without the Forest Service heavily monitoring them.
She realized it was just the beginning of a long, but fulfilling, process and decided to carry on.
“As Indigenous people, we ultimately are a community based family. To work with other Indigenous people and share some of the same stories, some of the hurdles we had, is really just heartening and reinvigorating to see. It’s like okay they did it we can do it too,” she said.
Margo Robbins, one of the cofounders for Indigenous Peoples Burning Network, said it was created in 2015 by fire practitioners and cultural leaders of the Karuk, Hoopa and Yurok tribes to support the revitalization of traditional fire culture. The network is guided by its advisory team of 15 Indigenous fire practitioners and cultural leaders and is administered by The Nature Conservancy’s North America Fire Program.
Traditional fire burning has been a practice used by Native Americans, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians for thousands of years. Its uses were to clear areas for crops and travel, land management for specific species of both plants and animals, to hunt game and for many other uses.
But the practice of cultural burning decreased in the 20th century due to land management agencies’ enforcement of western cultural practices.
“Without cultural burns, organic matter built up, putting forests at risk of devastating fire. Suppression, along with urban development and climate change has led to more large, uncontrolled fires that can quickly spread through areas with lots of underbrush,” the National Park Service said.
However, the discussion of cultural burning has progressed recently. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland spoke at the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties in 2021 about the importance of incorporating Indigenous knowledge concerning climate change. She introduced a video produced by The Salish Kootenai College that discussed the use of Indigenous use of fire. In 2019, the Bureau of Indian Affairs partnered with Injunuity to produce an educational video about how prescribed fire is used in modern-day practices.
“Our whole culture depends on fire. All of our traditional food, medicine, basket weaving materials, healthy water, healthy soil, healthy habitat, all of that needs fire in order to be healthy,” Robbins, Yurok, said. “Our ecosystems have been so degraded due to lack of fire on our land.”
Robbins, also co-founder and executive director of the Cultural Fire Management Council in Yurok territory, said they started working with the Nature Conservancy about 10 years ago. She said the network grew even more when someone from the conservancy contacted a few people from the local tribes.
John Waconda, Indigenous Partnerships program manager at the Nature Conservancy’s New Mexico chapter, said the network was made to develop and create a workforce that other tribes can use for assistance with the intent of cultural connection to fire.
“There will always be places that do burn. We live in a fire environment where fire is good. We need to understand fire in an Indigenous perspective — on how we work with fire, what we associate with fire and how we use fire, and what is our fire culture,” he said.
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Jones said having the Nature Conservancy involved has really helped with funding and pushing for the Indigenous communities to have a platform like never before.
The network has an annual workshop where members share information, discuss where they are at with fire in their homelands and exchange information for tribes that are in the beginning stages of building their fire programs.
In 2023, over 20 tribes across the United States came together in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Even people from Canada and Australia came to share their fire practices. They also visited the nearby Jemez Pueblo and Valles Caldera, learned how they managed their burns and different techniques. Jones said it was particularly interesting since piñon pines, although a different species, similarly grow in the Washoe area.
“Fire has been excluded from the forest for over a hundred years. Our forests are very unbalanced, very unhealthy. There is more acceptance now than in previous years to bring cultural burning back into the hands of people,” Robbins said.
She added it’s an enormous workload that won’t be accomplished any time soon.
“It is part of our history for thousands of generations that we burned from the high mountain tops to the oceans, and that legacy needs to be carried on through the generations,” she said. “The tide has changed, and the door has opened for us to reclaim our traditional fire practices.”
(Photos from the annual Indigenous Peoples Burning Network workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Photo courtesy of Rhiana Jones)
Strengthening the stance for cultural burning
The Washoe Tribe conducts culture burns like the burning of the willow patch for straighter and better basket making materials and the burning of meadows that are used for basket materials, medicines and plants to rejuvenate the land and prepare it for the next harvest.
Jones, Washoe and Salt River Pima Maricopa, said since their tribe is located in a high fire danger area, near the border of Nevada and California, they have not been allowed to burn for at least 100 years.
They have to go to the Bureau of Indian Affairs regarding fire and the rules are different for burning on private land. Jones said they are able to burn on agricultural land which side steps the process of going through the BIA and Forest Management plans that need a technical advisor. But they do plan to work with the BIA when they identify more areas on tribal land and on their homelands.
This year Jones is working to get staff and Washoe tribal citizens excited about fire and burning. In the fall, they plan to bring a TREX or training experience, which are prescribed fire training workshops, to the Tahoe Basin.
Additionally, she plans on getting more burn certifications and to send some of the staff to more burns, perhaps with other tribes like the Ojibwe Anishinaabe, in order to attain their burn boss certification. A burn boss can write burn plans, take on the liability if a fire gets out of control and work with other agencies to check the burn windows.
“As a sovereign nation, all Indigenous tribes want to be able to have control over what they do on their own tribal lands, so this is kind of an effort also to see how we can have more control over what we do on our tribal lands and how we can manage our homelands in a way we see fit,” Jones said.
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