Managing Wildfires Using A Centuries-Old Indigenous Practice

This article is part of The State of Science, a series featuring science stories from public radio stations across the United States. This story, by Murphy Woodhouse, was originally published by Boise State Public Radio.

In late September, firefighters in flame-resistant Nomex were strung out along a fireline. It ran midslope through a pine and hardwood forest above the Klamath River and the small northern California town of Orleans.

Several members of the Karuk tribe were laying down strands of fire with drip torches.

Aja Conrad, who runs the tribal natural resource department’s environmental education field institute, was the firing boss trainee. She kept a close eye as the strips burned together and smoke filled the air.

“Can you just keep an eye on that and maybe not put too much fire below it?” she told one of her burners.

“Copy that.”

Pikyav

Conrad’s grandparents – who helped raise her – worked in fire themselves.

“I grew up kind of a little bit of a fire camp brat living off their snacks and Gatorade and all that,” she said. “So it’s a little bit in my blood in more ways than one.”

For millennia, the Karuk have set fire to their territory to actively manage forests, and plant and animal species critical for sustenance, ceremonies, and other cultural purposes. The name of the field institute Conrad runs comes from the Karuk word pikyav, which means “to fix,” she explained. Restoring balance with the natural world and keeping traditions like burning alive are key goals.

“It’s a real big part of our cultural identity and who we are, and so it feels damn good to be out here doing that,” she said. “It’s not just knowledge for knowledge’s sake. It’s about how to steward this place, it’s about actively, physically tending to this place and rebuilding these sacred relationships.”

The Bacon Flat burn was the first of several during this year’s Klamath Prescribed Fire Training Exchange – or KTREX. Dozens of similar TREX events have been held around the world, training thousands of people since the late 2000s.

As with many prescribed burns, one of its key purposes was to protect nearby communities from wildfire. But listed right along with that in the burn plan is supporting cultural objectives – like promoting oak woodlands and plant species used for basketry.

‘A life-giving force’ 

Down at the bottom of the burn, pumps were moving water uphill to help keep flames in check. Posted up nearby was Karuna Greenberg, one of several co-leads of the Western Klamath Restoration Partnership, which puts on the training. The Karuk Tribe itself, the nearby National Forest and several local groups are all part of the effort. Greenberg, who is not a tribal member, said several things distinguish KTREX.

“We are really trying to build a local workforce, building that capacity to even be able to take on wildfire events, to be able to have that capacity here to really scale up our prescribed fire to much more of a landscape level,” she said. “But it’s also just very Indigenous-led. It has such a strong cultural aspect to it.”

Greenberg grew up in the area, and has had a complex journey with fire. In the late 1980s, a major blaze took out her whole neighborhood.

“We were visiting my grandparents on the East Coast and got a phone call that said, ‘you know your house is going to burn. What do you want out of it?’” she recounted.

“I came back to this landscape that was completely changed,” she added. “And it’s hard not to think of fire as this incredibly destructive force.”

But in the wake of the devastation, wildflowers surged back. And then – more slowly – black oak woodlands, berry species and other plants returned, drawing more wildlife back to the area. She described the process as a “rebirth.”

“When you start to pay attention, you can really recognize that fire is a life-giving force,” Greenberg said. “And that switch in your mindset is really transformative.”

Burning as a community

The next morning, Greg Moon – the tribe’s fire management officer and incident commander – praised the assembled firefighters for the long, hard shifts they put in the day before.

“You guys (can) understand now what you’re doing by building that buffer on the mid slope, and then the units below that, setting us up for success for the next few days,” he said. “So that we can burn a little more liberally, with a little more intention as far as getting those acres.”

“So, I’d like you to just make a fist like this,” he added. “And give your neighbor right there a fist bump.”

In his nearby office at the Karuk Department of Natural Resources, the 36-year fire veteran and member of the nearby Hoopa Valley Tribe said that in KTREX’s early years, they had to bring in people from outside of the area to put on burns.

“Well now, this many years later, our folks are certified, our folks are qualified and they have the experience to pull off these burns as leadership,” he said. “Now, we are at the level where we can start putting these burns on ourselves as a community.”

But capacity is only a part of the equation. He said the Bacon Flat burn was one of the larger KTREX operations to date.

“This one is over 100 acres on very tough land,” he explained. “It’s around structures, and so that tells you that we’ve gained the trust of the community to burn around their property.”

Moon said the Karuk are “leading the way” in Indian Country when it comes to collaborative, community-based burning.

“We learned that we can’t do it alone,” he said. “You could have all the money in the world, but … if you’re by yourself, you can’t do it. So, working with the nonprofits in the community, working with the community itself and the agencies around us, the Karuk Tribe has found a key way to move forward.”

And he sees the idea “spreading across the country.”

Stepping stones

For many, KTREX and burns like this are not the end goal, just waypoints en route to something far more ambitious.

Tribal Natural Resources Director Bill Tripp was part of a research team that tried to calculate the scale of pre-colonization burning among his ancestors. They estimated some 7,000 annual ignitions that burned 15% of a large swath of the Karuk’s territory.

“It’s a whole societal system that used to be in place here that we’re trying to get back to some semblance of as soon as we can,” he said.

In centuries past, Karuk people – using their deep knowledge of the landscape and climate – would conduct burns solo. That’s a sharp contrast to the dozens of people involved with Bacon Flat.

“The biggest thing that I think people have a hard time grasping is, you know, people perceive that you have to do all these things like build fire lines and … have so many people,” he said. “And in all reality, just a few people could do a lot of really good work with fire just by knowing that hour in the day to light a certain specific type of thing in a certain place.”

He said getting there requires legislative and policy changes, as well as more social acceptance and burning – though he noted that some parts of Karuk territory have seen so much fire in recent years that this sort of burning is starting to look feasible.

In 2022, the California legislature passed a bill establishing a claims fund that could be used for losses that occur during prescribed or cultural burns by nonpublic entities, including “cultural fire practitioners.” Its explicit purpose was to “increase the pace and scale of the use of prescribed fire and cultural burning … and to reduce barriers for conducting prescribed fires and cultural burning.”

And then, shortly after Tripp spoke to the Mountain West News Bureau, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 310. It allows the state natural resources agency to enter into written agreements with federally recognized California tribes that would exempt them from state permitting and regulatory requirements for cultural burning.

In an opinion piece before its passage, Karuk Chairman Russell Attebery called the measure “an opportunity for California to ‘walk the walk’ when it comes to healing and reconciliation of a violent history towards Indigenous peoples and the misguided exclusion of fire.”

“Imagine if you had two people burning in 20 different places, and burning 3 or 4 acres,” Tripp said of the potential impact of the reforms. “That’s significantly more return on your investment of time and resources. And so having systems in place to back that up and govern that to where it’s not putting others at risk becomes the challenge. That’s where the claims fund comes in, that’s where the in-lieu-of-permit agreement process comes in.”

It’s taken a lot of work to get to where the Karuk are now, and a lot of work remains.

But efforts like KTREX, Tripp said, are “stepping stones.”