Indigenous Fire Futures: Anticolonial Approaches to Shifting Fire Relations in California (original) (raw)
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Fire Oppression: Burning and Weaving in Indigenous California
Humans: Terra Foundation Essays Volume 5, 2021
Climate-changed California is the contemporary staging ground for the long-standing collision and entanglement of the Indigenous and Euro-American fire regimes explored in this essay. Specifically, I consider how baskets handwoven by Native women from two distinct, flame-sculpted regions index the shifting political ecology of fire in California. My account concentrates on Chumash territory on the southern coast, where Spaniards first prohibited Indigenous fire-setting in 1793, and concludes in Yurok territory in the northern Klamath River Basin, where cultural burning and weaving are undergoing an entwined revitalization. Woven vessels are the foundation of customary Indigenous cultures in California, notably women’s landcare practices that entail the application of fire. Robin Wall Kimmerer and Frank Kanawha Lake assert that across North America, “the ethic of reciprocal responsibility underlies the indigenous use of fire, an adaptive symbiosis in which humans and nonhumans both benefit from burning.” People and plants are seen as coequals, codependents, and even cocreators, woven together by pragmatic and spiritual threads. Baskets embody this multifaceted, mutually constitutive relationship. Woven from roots, stems, feathers, and shells, they assemble more-than-human collectives. Together, they catalog the radical transformations of colonialism on the habitat and habitus of Native Californians—a process that I argue is driven by conflicting fire imaginaries that differentially define relationships between humans and land.
Society & Natural Resources, 2014
This article explores the potential impact of training and employment with wildfire management agencies on the retention of Indigenous fire knowledge. It focuses on the comparative knowledge and experiences of Indigenous Elders, cultural practitioners, and land stewards in connection with ''modern'' political constructs of fire in New South Wales and Queensland, Australia, and California in the United States of America. This article emphasises the close link between cross-cultural acceptance, integration of Indigenous and agency fire cultures, and the ways in which knowledge types are shared or withheld. While agency fire fighting provides an opportunity for Indigenous people to connect and care for country, it simultaneously allows for the breaking of traditional rules surrounding what knowledge is shared with whom in the context of Indigenous cultural burning. By highlighting how privilege intersects with ethnicity, class, gender and age, this article demonstrates how greater cross-cultural acceptance could aid ongoing debates on how to coexist with wildfire today.
Environmental Sociology, 2021
Over the last century, the United States Forest Service (USFS) has reversed its stance on the ecological role of fire – from a militant enforcer of forest fire suppression to supporting prescribed fire as a management tool. Meanwhile, the Karuk Tribe has always prioritized cultural burning as a vital spiritual and ecological practice, one that has been actively suppressed by the USFS. This article examines the discursive evolution of USFS fire science through the critical lens of settler colonial theory. A content analysis of agency discourse reveals how the USFS deployed anti-Indigenous rhetoric to justify its own unsubstantiated forest management agenda. USFS leadership racialized light burning by deridingly referring to it as ‘Piute Forestry.’ The agency has also discredited, downplayed, and erased Indigenous peoples and knowledges in ways that invoke tropes of the ‘Indian savage,’ the ‘Vanishing Indian,’ and the concept of ‘Terra Nullius.’ It wasn’t until the 1960s – in the context of the Civil Rights and American Indian Movements – that the USFS began contemplating the value of prescribed fire. This research illustrates the complicated relationship between the settler state and Western science, as well as the malleability of scientific discourse in the face of changing social contexts.
Centering Indigenous Voices: The Role of Fire in the Boreal Forest of North America
Current Forestry Reports
Purpose of Review Indigenous perspectives have often been overlooked in fire management in North America. With a focus on the boreal region of North America, this paper provides a review of the existing literature documenting Indigenous voices and the historical relationship of Indigenous peoples in northern North America to fire and landscapes that burn. Recent Findings Early research on the topic explored how Indigenous people used fire in the boreal forest, with most research coming out of case studies in northern Alberta. Emerging research in the last two decades has broadened the geographic focus to include case studies in Alaska, Ontario, Labrador, and other regions in North America. This broadening of focus has shown that the diversity of Indigenous peoples in North America is reflected in a diversity of relationships to fire and landscapes that burn. Of note is an emerging interest in Indigenous fire knowledge in the wake of settler colonialism. Summary Indigenous peoples in...
Chapter 4 . 2 — Fire and Tribal Cultural Resources
2014
Native American tribes regard plants that have evolved with frequent fire and other natural resources as living cultural resources that provide, water, food, medicines, and other material goods while also sustaining tribal cultural traditions. Collaborations between management agencies and tribes and other Native American groups can incorporate traditional ecological knowledge to facilitate placed-based understanding of how fire and various management practices affect tribal cultural resources and values. Collaboration approaches reviewed in this chapter and in chapter 9.6, “Collaboration in National Forest Management,” can foster restoration opportunities that would benefit tribal communities and broader values. A strategy to promote socioecological resilience may include efforts to reestablish frequent fire regimes by emulating traditional burning practices, and to learn how larger highseverity fires may affect cultural resources and associated values.
Returning Fire to the Land: Celebrating Traditional Knowledge and Fire
Journal of Forestry, 2017
Indigenous peoples' detailed traditional knowledge about fire, although superficially referenced in various writings, has not for the most part been analyzed in detail or simulated by resource managers, wildlife biologists, and ecologists…. Instead, scientists have developed the principles and theories of fire ecology, fire behavior and effects models, and concepts of conservation, wildlife management and ecosystem management largely independent of native examples. (Lewis and Anderson 2002, p. 4) North American tribes have traditional knowledge about fire effects on ecosystems, habitats, and resources. For millennia, tribes have used fire to promote valued resources. Sharing our collective understanding of fire, derived from traditional and western knowledge systems, can benefit landscapes and people. We organized two workshops to investigate how traditional and western knowledge can be used to enhance wildland fire and fuels management and research. We engaged tribal members, managers, and researchers to formulate solutions regarding the main topics identified as important to tribal and other land managers: cross-jurisdictional work, fuels reduction strategies, and wildland fire management and research involving traditional knowledge. A key conclusion from the workshops is that successful management of wildland fire and fuels requires collaborative partnerships that share traditional and western fire knowledge through culturally sensitive consultation, coordination, and communication for building trust. We present a framework for developing these partnerships based on workshop discussions.
Boom, 2014
This article is about the benefits of fire in the context of traditional land management, the devastating effects a zero-tolerance fire policy has had on ecosystems, and what happens when fire is sensitively returned to the land. Hannibal discusses research into how the cultural burning practices of the Plains Miwok people in California have historically affected tribal livelihoods. The article also suggests how returning fire to the land could affect California Indian communities and cultures in the present and into the future. In addition to looking at the traditional uses of fire by the Plains Miwok, the article considers the experience of the Martu in Australia, and the attempt to restore the landscape at Quiroste by the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band in Año Nueva State Park.
Geoforum, 2023
In recent years settler governments have begun to seriously engage with Indigenous peoples’ fire and other ecological knowledges in the context of managing natural hazards and resources. In Australia, Aoteroa New Zealand, Canada and the United States, Indigenous peoples and their ecological knowledge have become increasingly involved in combating such naturally—and socially constructed—threats as wildfires, floods, and storms. Nevertheless, while there has been significant research into the sociocultural dimensions of Indigenous peoples’ ecological knowledges, until recently little analytic effort has been directed to understanding the other side of this intercultural interaction: what can be conceptualised as settler natural hazard management bureaucracies. Taking the emergence of government engagement with Indigenous peoples’ fire knowledge in the southeast Australian state of Victoria as a case study, this paper contributes to the nascent body of ethnographically informed research focusing on the interaction between state natural hazard bureaucracies and Indigenous peoples. We do so by asking what motivated this change in government interest in Indigenous peoples and their fire knowledge. Informed by engagement with experienced fire sector staff, our findings reveal the presence and importance of affect and other more-than-representational qualities that animate state engagements with Indigenous peoples and their cultural burning knowledge.