To Combat Raging Wildfires, California Turns to Native American Knowledge

As of early September, over two million acres have burned in California this year—a number that has been described as the worst in state history. Up and down the state, from mountainous forests to coastal shrublands, fires are burning with a frequency and severity never before seen. A glance at the CAL FIRE map shows that the entire state appears to be ablaze, with historic fires in Oregon and Washington State occurring in tandem. What was once an occasional event has now become an annual, often deadly "fire season" that devastates human lives and property, biodiversity, and air and water quality while stretching the state’s resources thin.

And yet, history shows fire as an integral part of the California landscape. Ethnographic studies and tree-ring data reveal that before 1800, about 4 to 12 million acres burned annually. That’s 5 to 12% of the state every year. With variations between bioregions, California’s ecosystems evolved with and for fire. In fact, most of the state’s ecosystems are either fire-dependent or fire-adapted. Fires are essential to biodiversity, as they can enrich the soil with nutrients, stimulate new plant growth, and create habitats for animals.

This doesn’t mean recent conflagrations are comparable to the fires that came before, however. While the present-day fires are often large and severe, prehistoric fires occurred frequently but with a low to moderate intensity. What changed? From colonialism to development and climate change, it could be summed up as a shift in humans’ relationship with fire and with land.

Indigenous Fire Science

From Spanish colonialists to environmentalists like John Muir, many Euro-Americans arrived in California to "discover" a pristine, untouched "wilderness" that had coevolved with Indigenous peoples who developed relationships with the land and used management techniques to encourage the growth of plants for food, medicine, fiber, basketry, and other cultural practices. 

Ethno-ecologist M. Kat Anderson has studied these complex resource management techniques. In Tending the Wild, Anderson writes that "fire was the most significant, effective, efficient, and widely employed vegetation management tools of California Indian tribes." Deliberate burning practices increased the abundance of plants for food and tools, enhanced wildlife grazing areas, and controlled insects and diseases. Burning also removed dead vegetation and promoted plant growth.

In contrast to the out-of-control infernos today, cultural burning is a form of Indigenous science and is intentional about when, where, and how fires are burned. Traditional knowledge has accounted for the effects of fire on plants, animals, and fungi; timing related to plant cycles, seasons, and moisture; and control of fire behavior and spread. By managing landscapes and preventing the buildup of dead biomass, cultural burning can also mitigate the spread and severity of natural lightning fires.

"Fire takes care of us and we take care of fire," says Leaf Hillman, director of natural resources and environmental policy for the Karuk Tribe’s Department of Natural Resources. In the Karuk ancestral territory of the Klamath River Basin, cultural burning practices encouraged an abundance of natural resources like salmon, deer, elk, acorns, huckleberry, hazel, and willow, creating "pyrodiversity," a coupling of biodiversity with fire regimes and food webs.

Colonial Fire Suppression

Just as fire is intimately connected to Indigenous science and the landscape, the history of modern wildfires corresponds with the timeline of land settlement, from Spanish colonization to post–World War II urban sprawl and current-day practices. Besides forcibly displacing Native American tribes from the lands they had tended, Euro-Americans brought a very different relationship to fire.

Spanish mission colonization and ranchos arrived in California in the mid-18th century, and with this came the perspective of fire as the enemy. "The Spaniards wanted to suppress fire because they saw it as dangerous and did not necessarily understand what purposes people were putting the fire to. They saw it as careless application of fire by what many of them referred to as ‘primitive people,’" says historical ecologist Jared Dahl Aldern. "So fire suppression is very much tied up with social and political oppression of Native American people."

"Fire suppression is very much tied up with social and political oppression of Native American people."

—Jared Dahl Aldern, historical ecologist

By the late 19th century, the United States Congress established forest reserves, and in 1905 the U.S. Forest Service was created to manage them. Soon after, a major wildfire in the Northern Rockies (aka The Big Blowup of 1910)—along with concerns about "understocked" timber reserves—drove policies of fire suppression. Although many Indigenous peoples and the ranchers who learned from them continued to practice controlled burning, this was effectively outlawed in 1924 when the Clark-McNary Act withheld funding from state forestry agencies if they allowed burning.