These are photos of Native Americans in Yosemite Valley before it was a National Park. Today,
National Parks like Yosemite are prized for being untouched landscapes, as if to say that people are
separate from nature — that real nature is a place we can visit and take photos of, but ultimately,
leave. Recently though, nature has reminded us that we aren't really separate. In California,
unhealthy forests have collided with climate change and it's led to a deadly situation. But
native tribes across the state —who have been stewards of the land for generations— they know
how to make the landscape more resilient and surprisingly, it involves a little bit of fire.
When Euro-American settlers first stumbled upon Yosemite Valley, it looked different than
it does today. There were wide open meadows with flowers. The trees were further apart. "These were
not natural landscapes. These were created and curated by indigenous peoples." This is Beth Rose
Middleton Manning. She's a professor of Native American studies at UC Davis. The settlers assumed
that this is just what nature looked like on its own. But really they had walked into a garden that
was thousands of years old and sustained by Native Americans. And one of the tools that these tribes
used to care for the land was low-intensity fires, known today as cultural burning. This might seem
counter-intuitive, right? We've seen how deadly wildfires can be, but it's not the full story.
"We're burning to restore the land, restore the resources, restore water." This is Ron Goode.
He's the tribal chairman of the North Fork Mono Tribe and he practices cultural burning.
Fire plays an important role in keeping an ecosystem healthy. For thousands of years,
tribes around the world have used low intensity fires to renew the land. These small fires make
room for new plants to grow, they release seeds trapped inside pine cones and they also clean
up overgrown and dying vegetation — the kind of thing that fuels catastrophic wildfires. But with
colonization indigenous people were forced out of their homelands. "Their land stewardship was
outlawed — actually made illegal on public lands and on private lands, so I believe that's a strong
contributor to the unhealthy forest conditions that we see today." Beginning around 1770, Spanish
missions across the west coast prohibited burning they didn't understand why Native Americans were
using fire and established severe penalties for it, including death. After the gold rush, settlers
were preoccupied with what they could extract from the land. in 1850, California outlawed
cultural burning in a cruel set of laws that also removed tribes from their homelands. After that,
there were several major forest fires in the west which led to a national fire suppression policy.
"So remember, only you can prevent forest fires." The message was clear: all fire is dangerous.
Alongside this extreme fire suppression, timber companies and foresters began planting trees in
dense groves like crops. It's easy to assume that a healthy forest should be crowded with trees,
but that isn't right for every ecosystem. "You have to have a segment of openness
in the sense that sunlight, rain, snow — all that can get through to the ground, to the surface."
Too many trees can create water stress, especially during a drought. It's too many straws in the
ground. Plants with shorter roots end up drying out. And after planting these dense forests,
people just left them alone. Trees would rot and plants would become overgrown. "Who grows a garden
like that? You know, you don't grow a garden like that. You got a garden, you got to tend it."
So we had these crowded forests that started to build up with plant debris: the perfect fuel for
uncontrollable wildfires. Climate change has only made this worse. The weather is getting hotter and
drier. When you combine this with nearly a hundred years of bad forest management, it's a recipe for
disaster. By 1970, the National Park Service realized their mistake. Without small fires to
open up pine cones and make room for new growth, there were no new sequoias. So they shifted
course. But you can't fully shift course without the knowledge of native tribes who have managed
land for generations. "Indigenous people yet have been excluded from many of these conversations
led by state federal agencies and sometimes private companies that are large landowners."
Agencies are beginning to do more prescribed fires, but these are different from the cultural
burns developed by native tribes. Prescribed burns are used primarily to just get rid of
the plant debris that feeds a wildfire. "Your primary focus is I'm burning for acreage and I'm
burning to reduce fuel loads. Well that's exactly what you do, but then your land is not restored."
Cultural burning on the other hand is part of a longer term engagement between native people and
the land. For example after a burn, the ashes are raked into the soil to encourage plant regrowth.
If the goal is restoration, the entire process looks different. You don't just burn and leave.
That's why Beth Rose takes her classes out to learn from Ron So they can see firsthand his
caretaking process. Restoring our forests doesn't mean making them hands-off protected spaces where
nature runs wild. The forests need us to actively care for the land in order to be healthy and
resilient as Native Americans have done for thousands of years. "Many of the bushes that
we're now burning haven't actually been burned for about 120 years and they're crying. And yes,
they need us as much as we need them. They need us to come out here and put fire on the land."
Have you been affected by any of the recent wildfires? Let us know in the comments below
and if you want to learn more about cultural burning you can check out our full article.
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