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href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/21/wildfire-prescribed-burns-california-native-americans?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other">https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/21/wildfire-prescribed-burns-california-native-americans?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">'Fire is medicine': the tribes burning
California forests to save them</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Susie Cagle - November 21,
2019<br>
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<p><span><span>W</span></span>hen Rick O’Rourke walks with
fire, the drip torch is an extension of his body. The
mix of diesel and gasoline arcs up and out from the
little wick at the end of the red metal can, landing on
the ground as he takes bite after bite out of the dry
vegetation in the shadow of the firs and oaks.</p>
<p>“Some people are like gunslingers and some people are
like artists who paint with fire,” he says. “I’m a
little bit of both.”</p>
<p>This is the kind of land management O’Rourke grew up
with on the Yurok reservation in the Klamath mountains
of northern <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/california"
data-link-name="auto-linked-tag"
data-component="auto-linked-tag">California</a>. Now,
lighting the forest on fire to save it – and his tribe’s
culture along with it – has become his life’s work, as
fire and fuels manager of the Yurok Cultural Fire
Management Council. On this day, he’s working the drip
torch alongside a few dozen cultural practitioners from
tribes across the US, and firefighters from around the
world.</p>
<p>He draws the can back and forth across the green,
turning it red and then black. The lines of little
flames creep along the forest floor, ebbing and growing
with the contours of the land.</p>
<p>This fire will chew out the underbrush and lick the
moss off the trees. It will blister the hazel stalks and
coax strong new shoots that will be gathered and woven
into baskets for babies and caps for traditional
dancers, and it will tease the tan oak acorns to drop.
It will burn the invasive plants that suck up the rain,
letting more clean, cool water flow through the black,
into the watershed and down the Klamath river for the
salmon.</p>
<p>Soon all that black will be dotted with bear grass and
huckleberries pushing up for the sunlight and down for
the water they couldn’t reach when they were crowded out
by tall scotch broom and dense twists of blackberries
and the ever-encroaching fir trees. Even sooner, animals
will flock here to roll in the ash, a California dust
bath.</p>
<p>For more than 13,000 years, the Yurok, Karuk, Hupa,
Miwok, Chumash<strong> </strong>and hundreds of other
tribes across California and the world<strong> </strong>used
small intentional burns to renew local food, medicinal
and cultural resources, create habitat for animals, and
reduce the risk of larger, more dangerous wild fires.</p>
<p>This is “good fire”, traditional practitioners and
firefighters would say.</p>
<p>For most of the last 100 years in California, however,
government agencies have considered fire the enemy – a<strong>
</strong>dangerous, destructive element to suppress and
exclude from the land. Traditional ecological knowledge
and landscape stewardship were sidelined in favor of
wholesale firefighting, and a kind of land management
that looked like natural conservation but left the
ground choked with vegetation ready to burn. As the
climate crisis creates hotter, drier, more volatile
weather, that fuel has helped drive <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/01/california-wildfire-season-2019"
data-link-name="in body link">larger</a><a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/01/california-wildfire-season-2019"
data-link-name="in body link"> wildfires</a> faster
and further across the west.</p>
<p>After decades suppressing small and gigantic fires
alike, California is slowly embarking on a course
correction. Alongside huge expenditures on firefighting
staff and gear, the state is making new investments in
prescribed burning. But who gets to decide where that
fire goes, what it burns, why it burns – who is the
steward of a natural element – remains contentious.
These native people are trying to revitalize their right
to indigenous cultural burning, a practice that was
criminalized long before California became a state,
before their culture dies out.</p>
<p>“Our first agreement with our creator was to tend the
land,” says O’Rourke, 52, resting for a moment on a log
in the green, lit drip torch still in hand. “It was
taken away from us, and now we’re trying to reclaim it.”</p>
<figure data-alt="Yurok fire practitioners">
</figure>
<figure data-alt="Yurok fire practitioners">
</figure>
<h2><strong>How the US waged war on fire</strong></h2>
<p>The Spanish were the first California colonizers to
prevent indigenous people from burning the land. In
1850, the US government passed the Act for the
Government and Protection of Indians, which outlawed
intentional burning in California even before it was a
state.</p>
<p>Early National Forest Service officials considered “the
Indian way” of “light-burning” to be a primitive,
“essentially destructive theory”. Championed by the
Forest Service, ecologists and conservationists, new
colonial notions of what is “natural” won the day. The
valuable timber trees would be protected and burns would
be extinguished at all costs. Fire was a killer, and
America would make war on this new enemy for most of the
next 100 years.</p>
<figure
data-interactive="https://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/iframe-wrapper/0.1/boot.js"
data-canonical-url="https://interactive.guim.co.uk/maps/embed/nov/2019-11-21T00:16:54.html"
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<p>“They said if we suppress all these fires, we end light
burning, we will have great new forests,” said the fire
historian Stephen Pyne. “And we did – we had so much
great new forest that we created a problem.”</p>
<p>In 1968, after realizing that no new giant sequoias had
grown in California’s unburned forests, the National
Park Service changed its prescribed fire policy. In
1978, so did the Forest Service.</p>
<p>Since then, some state agencies have made prescribed
burning a central part of their land and wildfire
management strategies. The south-east leads the way: in
Florida, landowners and government agents burn more than
2m acres a year.</p>
<p>But many in California, where millions of homes have
sprawled into the mountainous and flammable wildlands,
still fear fire in all forms. They fear it will destroy
lush, natural forests and turn them into barren
shrubland; that it is a tool of timber companies and a
friend of clearcutting old growth; that it will produce
oppressive, toxic smoke and emissions year-round. More
than anything, they fear the flames will jump holding
lines and run across the land and into communities, as
they sometimes do – an escaped fire killed three people
in 2012 in Colorado.</p>
<p>They fear fire cannot be controlled. On this, at least,
firefighters and firelighters would agree – which is why
most no longer use the term “controlled burn” to refer
to something as powerful as fire, usually opting for
“prescribed”, “cool” or “light” burning to distinguish
between good fire and the wild kind.</p>
<p>After a string of disastrous fire seasons, though,
California is growing bolder. In 2018, the state made
plans to triple the amount of <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/03/wildfires-drones-controlled-prescribed-burns"
data-link-name="in body link">prescribed burning</a>,
“creating a culture where fire is a tool, not a threat”.
Now, according to the state air resources board, 125,000
acres of wildlands are intentionally burned each year in
California – which still comprises <a
href="https://assets.climatecentral.org/pdfs/2019Wildfires_kolden_prescribed_fire_trends_embargoed.pdf"
data-link-name="in body link">a tiny fraction</a> of
all the prescribed fire in the US.</p>
<h2><strong>The burn, part I: ‘Putting fire on the ground’</strong></h2>
<p>Catching the good-fire windows in climate-changing
California weather is an intricate proposition. For the
best burn, the prescription has to be just right: a
little humidity in the air, low winds, the leaf litter
dry and crunchy underfoot.</p>
<p>For native people, the land is a renewing resource, and
they feel a responsibility to keep it healthy. Light,
frequent burning of the forest understory maintains oak
tree health, and the acorns and huckleberries for food,
hazel and bear grass for weaving, and pepperwood and
wormwood for medicine. Fire clears and maintains prairie
landscapes as habitat for elk and deer, and visibility
through the dense woods for hunting them. It promotes
better spring flow and drought tolerance. The smoke from
the burns in turn reflects sunlight and helps cool the
river water, benefiting the salmon.</p>
<p>Indigenous people here essentially co-evolved with the
landscape they tended.</p>
<p>“It’s selective manipulation through millennia to
foster a more resilient, diverse and productive
landscape,” said Frank Lake, a US Forest Service
research ecologist with Karuk heritage and Yurok family.</p>
<p> The burn units are identified ahead of time for their
resources and carved out to manageable size. Clear 3ft
holding lines on each side serve as paths for
firelighters on the move, bumping up and down the steep
terrain, and controlling boundaries for the fire itself.
This unit is about 90 acres, but they’ll only burn half
today, a little more than 30 football fields worth – the
rest is still too damp from an unexpected rain shower
earlier in the week. Engines full of water are staged in
the slim shoulder of Highway 169 at the bottom edge of
the unit.</p>
<p>The cultural burn begins in a small clearing, under a
golden sliver of early afternoon sunlight from a break
in the pine canopy. Harold Myers of the Yurok tribe and
Chris Villarruel of the Pit River tribe hold wormwood
branches, dried and bound into torches. The Yurok tribe
member and secretary of the Cultural Fire Management
Council, Elizabeth Azzuz, lights them.</p>
<p>“Creator, we’re here today to do work for the land, for
the people,” Myers begins, crouching low to the earth
with his torch. “Give us guidance, clarity of mind,
purity, and we may carry this out with the best
intentions. We apologize for our brothers and sisters
who are living here, but we are here to help you and
help us.”</p>
<p>He gently repeats the Yurok word for thanks, “<em>wokhlew,
wokhlew, wokhlew</em>”, just above a whisper, and
gratefully touches his torch to the leaf litter.</p>
<figure data-alt="photos">
</figure>
<figure data-alt="photos">
</figure>
<h2><strong>How ‘good fire’ is returning</strong></h2>
<p>“I’ve been burning since I was four – my grandfather
and my father taught me,” said Azzuz. “For us, when
little kids start playing with matches is when they need
to learn about the importance of how we use fire and why
we use fire.”</p>
<p>Margo Robbins, the executive director of the Yurok
Cultural Fire Management Council and head of tribal
education for the local school district, remembers a
childhood spent sledding down the wide grassy meadows in
the Klamath foothills. Now, after decades without fire,
nearly all that formerly open space is dense with pine
trees and blackberry brambles.</p>
<p>“The fire suppression and the rules that govern who can
put fires on the land pretty much criminalized the
average person from burning,” said Robbins.</p>
<p>“It’s called arson now if you want to go out and do any
burning,” said Bill Tripp, deputy director of
eco-cultural revitalization for the Karuk tribe
Department of Natural Resources. “It has been a
continual practice, but there may be only a few
individuals or families doing it on a small scale here
today.”</p>
<p>“When you have colonization removing native people,
disrupting that social structure around fire use,
outlawing fire, and then actively using every construct
in a militaristic way to suppress and exclude fires,
then we have the conditions that we have now,” said the
research ecologist Frank Lake.</p>
<p>Without fire, the Yurok art of basket weaving had begun
to die out. What was once a mixed landscape of conifer
forest and open prairie grew dense, and weevils and
Sudden Oak Death took hold in the Klamath, leaving the
land vulnerable to future wildfires. The vegetation that
would benefit from low, slow intentional burns has
suffered from higher, hotter wild burns, carried by that
extra fuel. <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/wildfires"
data-link-name="auto-linked-tag"
data-component="auto-linked-tag">Wildfires</a> used to
burn a couple of thousand acres a year on average in the
region – by the beginning of the 21st century, they were
burning hundreds of thousands of acres.</p>
<p>The return of good fire plays a central role in the
climate adaptation plan for the Karuk tribe, who
self-describe as a “fix-the-world people”. “Across
California, the increasing frequency of high severity
fire points to the need to re-examine human
relationships with fire,” the plan reads.</p>
<figure
data-interactive="https://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/iframe-wrapper/0.1/boot.js"
data-canonical-url="https://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/from-tool/photo-collage/index.html?vertical=News&opinion-tint=false&left-image=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.gutools.co.uk%2Fimages%2F0cc2778aa389a70f613b1fd20ba4773dec6f1388%3Fcrop%3D0_0_3000_2003&left-caption=&right-image=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.gutools.co.uk%2Fimages%2Ff06274fdaed265868b9f760b3ad6e708354a76f1%3Fcrop%3D0_0_3000_2003&right-caption=&always-place-captions-below=false"
data-alt="Left: Acorns in northern California in
October. Right: Detail of a Yurok cap started by the
grandmother of Margo Robbins">
<figcaption class="caption">
<em>Left: </em>Acorns in northern California in
October.
<em>Right:</em> Detail of a Yurok cap started by the
grandmother of Margo Robbins. Photographs by Alexandra
Hootnick/The Guardian
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Eight years ago, the California Endowment’s Building
Healthy Communities initiative surveyed hundreds of
Yurok tribe members to find out what they wanted and
needed to improve their lives.</p>
<p>“The community identified bringing fire back to the
land as the number one most important thing,” said
Robbins.</p>
<p>In 2014, fire practitioners from the Yurok and Karuk
tribes began working with the environmental
not-for-profit Nature Conservancy’s Prescribed Fire
Training Exchange, Trex, a global network of events
designed to expose more firefighters to the concept and
practice of prescribed burning.</p>
<p>The first year, the Yurok Trex burned 57 acres. The
next year, 167.</p>
<p>“We have our babies in baskets again,” said Robbins.</p>
<p>“In the last five years, everything just started
falling in place,” said Azzuz.</p>
<p>At this fall’s Yurok Trex, 30 local<strong> </strong>indigenous
practitioners and firefighters from federal, state and
private agencies from as far away as Canada and Spain,
some brand new to fire, some with decades of experience,
gathered together in the tribe’s community center in the
tiny town of Weitchpec to start their cultural burn
training week. They began by covering the 10 Standard
Fire Orders of organization and safety. The final point:
“Fight fire aggressively.”</p>
<p>Robbins raised her hand in objection.</p>
<p>“I think it should be <em>light</em> fire
aggressively,” she insisted.</p>
<p>“We train fire<em>lighters,</em> not fire<em>fighters</em>,”
Azzuz added, grinning.</p>
<h2><strong>The burn, part II: ‘Accept some risks’</strong></h2>
<p>According to this day’s prescription, they’ll have 90
minutes to put fire on the ground. The tools of choice
vary. The stalwart drip torch is a small metal can with
a wick at the end, filled with a mix of one part
gasoline (the starter) and three parts diesel (the
carrier). When you walk with the drip torch, “you’re
taking fire with you,” says the Nature Conservancy’s<strong>
</strong>Jeremy Bailey, a firefighter for over 25 years
who envisioned the Trex model. “You basically have a
loaded gun.” The hand-held fusee is a fire-starting
flare. Sometimes, if conditions are perfect, all it
takes is a lighter held up against the brush.</p>
<p>As the fire begins to grow, the crew moves into their
positions, one team on each flank: line-holders at the
edge with their shovels and axes, firelighters at the
ready to begin the burn, fire effects monitors with
instruments to check the weather conditions.</p>
<p>A couple of flicks from O’Rourke’s drip torch and a few
moments later, the California laurels spark up.</p>
<p>“The only thing I could see that might create a problem
is if we had a wind anomaly,” he says as he checks over
his work.</p>
<p>As the smoke grows thicker, the crackle and chatter of
radio traffic picks up, and the firelighters hoot up and
down the hill to signal where they are.</p>
<p>“Having a good time?” asks Gabriel Cortez, the Yurok
wildland fire captain. Cortez first trained O’Rourke in
prescribed burning seven years ago.</p>
<p>“Yeah, it’s all right,” O’Rourke responds, smiling. He
hands his drip torch off to Raven Parkins for the second
half of the burn, saying he’s tired. He looks up at the
gaps in the forest canopy, where the afternoon sun is
shining lower, casting interrupted beams through the
smoke.</p>
<p>“Divine light for sure.”</p>
<p>The mood is relaxed, confident but vigilant. A pile of
heavy logs catch and start putting off large plumes of
smoke; they have to be chainsawed and doused. If the
fire gets “sporty”, it’s quickly handled with a backpack
pump full of water. There are brief moments of tension,
as firefighters lose each other temporarily in the
smoke. Someone’s snagged in the black, caught in a
thicket of blackberries with large hooking thorns.
Someone’s pants momentarily catch on fire.</p>
<p>Everything is fine. In over 10 years of Trex burns, no
one has ever had to fight a fire.</p>
<p>“You can mitigate the danger but you can’t eliminate
it,” says Bailey. “You have to accept some risks.”</p>
<p>The predominant collective concern is less that the
fire will slop over the holding lines and escape, and
more that it won’t burn the unit thoroughly and
completely. As the firelighters work their way down the
hill, neighbors and family members drive by on the
narrow, winding Highway 169 and cheer, honk and stop to
check on the team’s progress.</p>
<p>This unit burns so well, under conditions so ideal, it
doesn’t need to be extinguished with water from the
waiting engines. They’ll continue to monitor it for two
days until it’s “cold out”, but for now the crew can
walk away with the brush lightly smoking, little flames
still working their way down into the ash.</p>
<h2><strong>How tribes are leading the way</strong></h2>
<p>There is fire on the ground here again, but the work is
far from done. While the ends may look similar, this
version is not the true vision of indigenous burning.</p>
<p>“Although we’re burning for cultural purposes, this of
course is not the way we did it,” said Robbins.
“Traditionally, we didn’t dress in green pants and
yellow shirts with helmets and have fire engines.”</p>
<p>In 2015, Robbins, Lake, Tripp and other indigenous fire
practitioners began collaborating on a strategy to bring
back native practices. Together they authored a “healthy
country plan”, laying out the ramifications of fire
exclusion and a path to returning indigenous burning to<strong>
</strong>Karuk, Hupa and Yurok land in order to renew
and maintain cultural resources, create sustainable
economic opportunity, and make the land more resilient
in the face of the climate crisis.<strong> </strong>That
work has grown into the Indigenous Peoples Burn Network.</p>
<p>“The goal of the network is to get back to true
traditional burning, where the average person can go out
and burn their gathering spot or burn around their home
to keep their home safe,” said Robbins.</p>
<p>It’s a goal Robbins is working toward today. The
council obtains permits from Cal Fire that allow them to
help families burn their properties.<strong> </strong>They’re
overwhelmed with applications from local landowners
hoping to put fire on their ground.</p>
<p>“These are forever people who care about these forever
places, and they’re never going to give up on fire,”
said the Nature Conservancy’s Mary Huffman, who
facilitates the Indigenous Peoples Burn Network. “If
their cultures are tied to fire, if they shaped the
landscapes for thousands and thousands of years with
fire, why would they?”</p>
<p>Despite California’s fire-suppressing legacy, the
indigenous fire history in the Klamath region has helped
make it a hotspot for good fire.</p>
<p>In 2018, the fire ecologist Lenya Quinn-Davidson
founded the Humboldt County Prescribed Burn Association,
a firelighting co-op of landowners who manage each
others’ properties – the first like it in the west.<strong>
</strong>“People really want prescribed fire in their
toolbox,” she said. “Their grandpas used it, they’ve
heard of the tribes using it historically. People are
really curious and excited about it.”</p>
<p>After suppressing fire in all forms, and the
traditional ecological knowledge that went along with
it, California’s top politicians and fire officials are
now seeking out tribal guidance on fire policy as state
agencies gear up to burn more than ever before. The
state’s air quality managers are tasked with outreach to
educate the public on the benefits of fire, as regions
hand out more and more burn permits. In one particularly
busy month in 2018, the north coast air quality
management district permitted over 250 prescribed fires
in the region.</p>
<p>But the tribes still do not fully control their own
elements on their own land.<strong> </strong>A week
after the Yurok Trex, a regional Cal Fire office shut
down a burn during the fall Trex on Karuk land, citing
elevated wildfire risk. The conditions were perfect,
said Tripp. It didn’t matter.</p>
<p>Indigenous people don’t eschew the use of modern
science – they just know this land, burned it and
benefited from it for thousands of years. But convincing
all the fire-fearful is still an uphill battle.</p>
<p>“A lot of them just still think we’re all arsonists,”
said O’Rourke.</p>
<p>And the growth of support for prescribed burning at
large is not necessarily all good news for native
people, either. Tripp worries that transferring
traditional ecological knowledge could mean being wholly
co-opted, losing control of burning their land in a
different way.</p>
<p>“We don’t have a problem teaching about our principles
behind our practice and where, when, why, how,” said
Tripp. “But we’re not interested in doing that if five
years down the line they say OK, we’ll do it for you
now, and you can just stay in poverty. That doesn’t work
for us. If our culture’s going to die, we’ll just die
with it.”</p>
<h2><strong>‘Fire is in our DNA’</strong></h2>
<p>The morning after the last burn, each Trex firefighter
reports back to the group on their greatest lesson of
the week. “It’s not just healing our lands, it’s healing
our people,” says O’Rourke, beaming at the other
firelighters.</p>
<p>No one outside the tribes has ever seen anything like
this. One fire veteran with decades of experience is
brought to tears.</p>
<p>The land may need more burning, but skeptics say we
also can’t burn our way out of the climate crisis. And
that preventive fire may be no match for more extreme
wind-driven fire events like the ones California has
seen more and more frequently in recent seasons.</p>
<p>Californians are learning what it means to coexist with
fire – a lesson indigenous people have known roughly
since the ice age – but doing so under the new extremes
of global heating. Indigenous people aren’t promoting
light burning as a panacea for the climate crisis. But,
they say, it is one piece of the process. And it is
their responsibility.</p>
<p>“Prescribed fire is medicine,” said Lake. “Traditional
burning today has benefits to society as well as
supporting what the tribes need.”</p>
<p>There is still burning on native land that is not
permitted by Cal Fire, which is technically illegal.
Sometimes it’s in a known gathering place, sometimes
it’s just in the brush on the side of the road. Despite
decades of criminalization, said Robbins, people just
cannot and will not stop using fire here to the best of
their abilities, knowledge and instincts.</p>
<p>“I think perhaps fire is in our DNA, because we’ve used
it for thousands and thousands of years,” said Robbins.
“When they refer to epigenetics, they say that the
trauma is in our genes. But, you know, if the trauma’s
in there, the other good stuff is there too.”</p>
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