The Prescribed Burn — Fire as Gardening Tool
California, Southeastern, and Great Plains tribes used controlled fire for thousands of years to manage landscapes, improve habitat, stimulate plant growth, and maintain the ecological conditions that sustained their communities.
The Karuk, Yurok, and Hupa peoples of northern California describe their traditional burning practices as 'tending the world' — a responsibility given to them at the beginning of time. Burning stimulated the growth of tanoak acorns, bear grass used for basketry, hazel sticks for tools, and the berries and browse that sustained deer and elk populations. The southeastern longleaf pine ecosystem — which once covered ninety million acres and is now reduced to three percent of its original extent — was maintained by Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek burning for thousands of years. Without Indigenous burning, longleaf pine forests cannot regenerate. The catastrophic wildfires now devastating western North America are the direct consequence of a century of fire suppression policy that eliminated Indigenous burning — creating fuel loads that turn every fire into a catastrophe. The US Forest Service now actively partners with Indigenous nations to restore prescribed burning.
We have always been the ones who tend the fire. We tend the land the same way.
Fire ecologist Scott Stephens' research demonstrates that fuel loads in California forests where Indigenous burning was suppressed are 2-10 times higher than in forests under traditional burning management — directly explaining the increasing severity and extent of contemporary wildfires.
Karuk oral tradition