Lessons from the Karuk Tribe.

"The piece that is misunderstood about Indigenous cultural fire is sovereignty."

That was one of the first things Bill Tripp, director of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy for the Karuk Tribe, said to me when I interviewed him for Sightline's research series on wildfire solutions.

Each year, wildfires cost the United States tens to hundreds of billions of dollars. Policymakers are finally acknowledging what Indigenous peoples have been saying for decades: most forests need more fire, not less. Government agencies are scrambling to reverse the dominant paradigm of aggressively suppressing wildfire and its legacy of fuel-choked forests primed to burn. This includes recognizing the role of Indigenous land stewardship and extensive burning. Importantly, this shift is also a doorway to that larger issue Tripp named: sovereignty.

This article explains the relationship between cultural burning and Tribal sovereignty for the Karuk Tribe, whose homelands straddle the California-Oregon border. It describes recent wins in their struggle for others to understand and recognize their sovereignty - specifically new policy in the California Legislature and agreements with the US Forest Service that clarify who has a right to burn and where. Interviews with Tripp heavily informed the discussion below.

KARUK FIRE TRADITIONS UNDERGIRD THEIR SOVEREIGNTY

For millennia, like other Native Americans across the United States and Canada, Karuk people have used fire to tend their homelands as an abundant garden landscape. They burn to cultivate tanoaks, acorns, mushrooms, hazel, and elk habitat, to name just a few of the hundreds of species that together support Karuk ways of life. And, along with lightning-sparked ignitions, their low-intensity fires clear out understory ladder fuels that could otherwise kindle severe wildfires that could wipe out their communities.

Colonization, genocide, and ensuing assimilation as well as forest management policies, however, shifted the forest from being productive for people and wildlife to being productive for timber. For more than a century, state and federal laws essentially outlawed Indigenous burning and mandated immediate suppression of natural ignitions. Law enforcement could jail Native people caught burning. Many people still hunt, fish, and gather, but without fire, the habitats and species that are central to Karuk ways of life have significantly diminished.

Hence, even to the degree that the Tribe can make and enforce its own laws and take other actions of self-governance (legal sovereignty), repressing fire has significantly impacted their cultural sovereignty and forced many to assimilate into store-bought foods and Western culture. Karuk cultural biologist Ron Reed explained that

"without fire, the landscape changes dramatically. And in that process, the traditional foods that we need for a sustainable lifestyle become unavailable…so we're not getting the nutrition that we need. We're not getting the exercise that we need."

For food, health, and spiritual connection

Huckleberries, for example, are a first food whose phytochemicals and micronutrients may help prevent cancer and diabetes and may aid eye, heart, and cognitive health. Regular burns boost huckleberry productivity by clearing competing vegetation, opening the canopy to let in more sunlight, releasing nutrients into the soil, removing overgrown branches, and spurring the growth of new shoots. In the past, regular cycles of burning yielded bountiful harvests of two to eight gallons of berries per person per day.

But stewarding first foods and fibers yields more than nutrition and exercise; it also nourishes the spirit and community. As Reed articulated,

[Without fire,] the reason we are going back to that landscape is no longer there. So the spiritual connection to the landscape is altered significantly. …When we don't go back to the places that we are used to, accustomed to, part of our lifestyle is...