indigenous fire stewardship

Indigenous Peoples have been stewarding lands with fire for ecosystem improvement since time immemorial. These stewardship practices are part and parcel of the ways in which Indigenous Peoples have long recorded and protected knowledge through our cultural transmission practices, such as oral histories.

With the growing scale of wildfires, many First Nations are demanding a stronger role in wildfire response.

In the face of global climate change, Indigenous communities around the world have increasingly gained recognition as significant actors in the fight for environmental justice and sustainability.

The Yurok Tribe, along with other tribal communities in northwest California, non-profit organizations, universities, and governmental agencies are working to restore forests and woodlands to be more resilient to wildfires, drought, pests and diseases.

Our understanding of forest dynamics and successional pathways in coastal Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var menziesii) forests with relatively frequent mixed-severity fires is limited by a lack of annually precise dendroecological reconstructions that combine records of historical fires and tree establishment.

The climate crisis has exacerbated many ecological and cultural problems including wildfire and drought vulnerability, biodiversity declines, and social justice and equity.

Background

Historical and contemporary policies and practices, including the suppression of lightning-ignited fires and the removal of intentional fires ignited by Indigenous peoples, have resulted in over a century of fire exclusion across many of the USA’s landscapes.

The US faces multiple challenges in facilitating the safe, effective, and proactive use of fire as a landscape management tool. This intentional fire use exposes deeply ingrained communication challenges and distinct but overlapping strategies of prescribed fire, cultural burning, and managed wildfire.

Fire is a key disturbance process that shapes the structure and function of montane temperate rainforest in the Pacific Northwest (PNW). Recent research is revealing more frequent historical fire activity in the western central Cascades than expected by conventional theory. Indigenous peoples have lived in the PNW for millennia.