Prescribed Burning in Northern California

For many, the mental image of a burning forest has an association with the climate crisis. However, for the Karuk and other Indigenous tribes on the West Coast in what is now called California, the controlled (or prescribed) burning of trees is used to improve the health of the forest and surrounding ecosystem. The legacy of colonialism in North America has left many forests with diminished ecological function, and many tribes without the autonomy to remedy these ecosystems. As the world faces anthropogenic climate change, forests remain one of our greatest assets to combat the crisis and its effects. According to one study, forests worldwide absorb 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions from industry and fossil fuel extraction. Additionally, deforestation and forest degradation account for 11 percent of carbon emissions.¹ Additionally, deforestation and forest degradation account for 11 percent of carbon emissions. This degradation is occurring as Land Back, a movement advocating for land stewardship to be returned to Indigenous groups, pushes to reestablish land management practices suppressed by colonialism. As the Land Back movement gains increasing momentum and the ecological utilities of forests are needed more than ever, prescribed burning can be examined for its environmentally restorative and anti-colonial benefits. Additionally, more than just praxis, perhaps an examination of prescribed burning as a pedagogy can reveal insights into other effective anti-colonial forestry methods. 

Prescribed burning and other Indigenous forestry methods have long stood in opposition to the US government’s National Parks system. The first national forest was established with the first national park at Yellowstone in the northwestern United States.² Human activity was restricted in Yellowstone—which would become one in a series of national parks, established on violently seized land in a concerted effort to “protect” the landscapes. The Western colonial imagination’s notion of “inappropriate” land use is the justification for the creation of these parks, as is written about by Indigenous studies scholar Joshua Reid: “They [colonists] described the pre-colonial landscape as a wilderness, a vast landscape that Indians wasted and had only lightly populated.”³ It is through pervasive ideas of Indigenous land being “mismanaged” that Yellowstone and subsequent national parks were established and Western preservationist philosophy was born. Articulated by early conservationist writers like John Muir, Western preservationist philosophy argues for the separation of human society from “natural” areas, asserting that ecosystems need to be isolated from humans to flourish.⁴ The political conditions that primed the emergence of National parks as protected areas were violent; as environmental historian William Cronon writes, “The movement to set aside national parks and wilderness areas followed hard on the heels of the final Indian wars, in which the prior human inhabitants of these areas were rounded up and moved onto reservations . . . Meanwhile, its original inhabitants were kept out by dint of force, their earlier uses of the land redefined as inappropriate or even illegal.”⁵ While colonialist conservationists argued the land must be protected from Indigenous people, it has instead been colonization that has ravaged and fragmented landscapes through the drawing of arbitrary boundaries distinguishing “wild” land from “civilized” land. This division of land demanded the forcible removal of Indigenous people from their homes by the settler state. In summation, the establishment of protected areas in North America has historically never protected Indigenous people nor ecosystem management practices. 

While the legacy of the earliest protected areas is a colonial one, protected areas and forests today have undeniable environmental utility. As few landscapes have remained unfragmented by extractive industries, protected areas are one of the most effective kinds of management for land and water ecosystems.⁶ In our current historical moment of anthropogenic climate change, forests in these areas are able to perform vital ecological functions like carbon sequestration, micro-climate regulation, and flood-water absorption.⁷ The limits of protected areas are illustrated by the fact that they generally do not eliminate deforestation; still, protected areas have reduced deforestation rates by 41 percent.⁸ When we consider all this, protected areas and forests become both a product of colonialism and one of humanity’s remaining tools against the worst ecological effects of colonialism. As the climate crisis beats on, governments around the world are moving to increase protected areas.⁹ Therefore, to prevent further encroaching on Indigenous autonomy, it is urgent for protected areas to adapt to include reestablished Indigenous land management practices. As a movement advocating for the “return of just relations between the human world and the other-than-human world.”¹⁰ Environmental conservation has long been a goal of Land Back, but now Land Back needs to become central to environmental conservation.

In their book, The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save our Earth, authors from The Red Nation describe the pre-colonial agroforestry management strategy of prescribed burning. “For generations, Indigenous people in what is now called California developed ways of modifying nature to not only benefit themselves but the entire ecosystem. Some of these modifications included the pruning of trees to encourage fruit and nut production, and the burning of meadowlands to create pastures that could support plant production.”¹¹ The Red Nation authors go on to describe the colonial rejection of the prescribed burning practiced by many tribes in the forests of the West Coast. The establishment of national forests was part of an institutionalized colonial effort to suppress prescribed burning practices; through industrial-scale suppression, California state agencies reduced prescribed fire frequency and intensity by 94 percent by the end of the twentieth century.¹² The authors of The Red Deal go on to attest that modern Western science has only begun recognizing the utility of prescribed burning, particularly for wildfire prevention in the last few decades.¹³ Ironically, it seems the environmental conditions that have dramatically increased forest fires have been worsened by colonial governments and their extraction affecting the climate and weather patterns.

An example of Western science’s more recent recognition of Indigenous land-based knowledge can be found in a study published by the Journal of Forestry; the study’s results suggest the traditional prescribed burning employed by tribes in this area produces conditions favorable for acorn gathering as well as the general health of Black Oaks.¹⁴ Unsurprisingly, the study also noted that nationally protected forests in California have affected many tribes’ ability to forage resources vital for traditional diets. The article states that “Many tribes have insufficient land bases to tend or restore culturally significant plant species and communities. Many tribal gatherers contend that because of limited access, lack of fire, and forest densification, they have limited opportunities for gathering high-quality black oak acorns, as well as understory plants and mushrooms that are important for maintaining traditional diets and practices.”¹⁵ As protected national forests continue to impose barriers for foraging, active management through controlled burning for Black Oaks provides a way to improve acorn abundance for tribal organizations for whom it is a staple. Active forestry management techniques such as prescribed burning also have the potential to give Indigenous foresters more oversight of the land in protected areas than other collaborations between US Forest Management agencies and tribal organizations, since the use of fire requires active monitoring. This can be seen in collaborations like one involving the Plumas National Forest and the Greeneville Rancheria, as the organizations collaborate to use prescribed burning in Northern Californian Black Oak groves for general maintenance—not primarily to improve acorn abundance.¹⁶ While it seems undeniable that the inclusion of prescribed burning to maintain Black Oaks is beneficial for different California tribes, could it be that prescribed burning was enabled more by the physical characteristics of Black Oaks than by the collaboration between Forestry agencies and tribes? The study from the Journal of Forestry notes: “These oaks provide buffers to facilitate beneficial use of fire in addition to supporting tribal values.”¹⁷ Mature Black Oaks are resistant to low-intensity “surface” fires;¹⁸ but if other pre-colonial land-based forestry techniques more dramatically altered landscapes, would they be included in collaborations? Employing land-based forestry strategies does not necessarily entail the return of forested land to Indigenous people, so I feel it is necessary to consult other literature to understand forestry as a potential expression of agency for Indigenous tribes under a colonial system. 

In her review of the literature surrounding Forestry Co-Management strategies for government agencies and Indigenous groups, Sybil Diver offers an analytic to compare different revisions made to state forestry policy.¹⁹ Under Diver’s analytic, “pivot points”  describe Indigenous management practices that simultaneously align with governmental agency policies and subvert them.²⁰ Using the co-management relationship between the Karuk Tribe and the US Forest Service in the Klamath Basin of Northern California as a case study, insights into what makes co-managed forestry strategies collaborative, and to what extent they can be collaborative at all, can be found. Karuk land in the Klamath Basin has been fragmented by the establishment of National Forests.²¹ Like many tribes on the West Coast, the Karuk’s practice of prescribed burning was also subject to the fire suppression of mid-nineteenth century California; but unlike many other tribes, the Karuk do not have a reservation, making management of the Klamath forest near them particularly important.²² Management conflicts over protected forested areas in the Klamath Basin characterized Karuk-Forest Service relations throughout the following decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Karuk began invoking precedents established by the state to garner authority over forest management. Among these precedents were the Federal Trust Responsibility, The Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act, and the Tribal Forest Protection Act.²³ All these precedents are state-sanctioned, and thus classified by Diver as state-led. However, this legislation arose as the result of Indigenous-led activism; complicating Diver’s distinctions between state-led and tribal led initiatives. 

Regardless, a pivot from reliance on these precedents occurred in the 1990s, with the Ti Bar Demonstration Project. An initiative to employ Indigenous management techniques and to develop mechanisms for collaboration with the National Forest Service, the Ti Bar Demonstration was a project led by the Karuk Tribal organization to manage the river bar and watershed connecting Ti Creek and the Klamath River, as well as the surrounding forest.²⁴ The Ti Bar Demonstration Project enabled the Karuk tribe to employ “a new eco-cultural restoration approach to land management that included prescribed burning.”²⁵ The Ti Bar Demonstration project was approved through the invocation of state precedents, but the use of prescribed burning subverted the National Forest Service’s typical management, as the agency had previously prohibited burning. By reserving specific sites in the Klamath forest for Karuk management specifically, the Ti Bar Demonstration project dramatically decreased deforestation, reducing the amount of timber harvested by a factor of five.²⁶ Although the project was eventually abandoned, the success of the Ti Bar Demonstration highlights how Indigenous leadership and subversion of state authority is crucial for collaboration. In situations where the full return of land to a tribe is not immediately possible, using prescribed burning under an agreement that wouldn’t typically allow it can recover partial autonomy for a tribe. 

1. Duncan Brack, UNFF14 Background Study, Forests and Climate, 3.
2. Sarah Wald, “The Conservation Movement,” in Encyclopedia of the Environment in American Literature, eds. Geoff Hamilton and Brian Jones, 1st ed. (McFarland, 2013), Credo Reference.
3. Joshua L. Reid, “Replacing Rights with Indigenous Relationality to Reclaim Homelands,” Bridging Cultural Concepts of Nature: Indigenous People and Protected Spaces of Nature, ed. Rani-Henrik Andersson, et al. (Helsinki University Press, 2021), 264.
4. Wald, “The Conservation Movement.”
5. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Environmental History 1, no. 1 (1996): 15.
6. Nigel Dudley, “National Parks with Benefits: How Protecting the Planet’s Biodiversity Also Provides Ecosystem Services,” Solutions, Feb. 22, 2016, 2.
7. Ibid., 1.
8. C. Wolf, T. Levi, W.J. Ripple, et al. A forest loss report card for the world’s protected areas, Nat Ecol Evol 5 (2021): 520, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01389-0
9. Dudley, “National Parks,” 1.
10. The Red Nation, The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth (Common Notions, 2021), 29.
11. The Red Deal, 117.
12. Tony Marks-Block and William Tripp, “Facilitating Prescribed Fire in Northern California through Indigenous Governance and Interagency Partnerships,” Fire (Basel, Switzerland) 4, no. 3 (2021): 3, https://doi.org/10.3390/fire4030037.
13. The Red Deal, 117.
14. Jonathan Long, et al., “Managing California Black Oak for Tribal Ecocultural Restoration,” Journal of Forestry, vol. 115, no. 5 (2017): 427, 429, 432, https://doi.org/10.5849/jof.16-033.
15. Ibid., 427.
16. Long, et al., “Managing,” 433.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 426.
19. Sibyl Diver, “Co-Management as a Catalyst: Pathways to Post-Colonial Forestry in the Klamath Basin, California,” Human Ecology 44, no. 5 (2016): 534, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44132344.
20. Diver, “Co-Management,” 535.
21. Ibid., 537.
22. Ibid., 536-37.
23. Ibid., 537.
24. Ibid., 537.
25. Ibid., 537.
26. Ibid., 538.
27. K. Prach, “Ecological Restoration: Principles, Values, and Structure of an Emerging Profession,” Restoration Ecology, 16: 73, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1526-100X.2008.00491.x.
28. Prach, “Ecological Restoration,” 73.