Oct 16, 2019 7:00 AM

The Quiet, Intentional Fires of Northern California

How the Yurok nation and other indigenous communities use low-intensity burns to shape the landscape and the species that live there.

firefighter surrounded by smoke in a forest

In the wake of catastrophic wildfires like the one in 2018 that burned the California city of Paradise, wildfire management has become a pressing topic, to say the least. Especially under scrutiny is the US Forest Service’s hundred-year policy of suppressing fire—on the surface it makes sense. Fire burns houses and kills people. It’s a terrible, uncontrollable enemy. Right?

Not necessarily. The native communities across California have been practicing traditional, controlled forest burning techniques for 13,000 years. From the great grasslands of central California to the salmon runs of the Klamath River, the Miwok, Yurok, Hupa, Karuk, and other nations have tended and provided for those plant and animal species that were useful to them. To do this, they created a patchwork of different ecological zones using low-intensity fire, creating niches that support California’s unbelievable biodiversity. Some of the California landscapes that look like pristine wilderness to the nonindigenous are actually human-modified ecosystems.

And many species have come to depend on low-intensity fire at a genetic level. “We have fire-dependent species that coevolved with fire-dependent culture,” says Frank Lake, a US Forest Service research ecologist and Yurok descendant. “When we remove fire, we also take away the ecosystem services they produce.”

To understand how indigenous cultural fire management works, I attended a Training Exchange, or TREX, a collaboration between the Yurok-led Cultural Fire Management Council and the Nature Conservancy’s Fire Learning Network. A couple of times a year, firefighters from around the world gather to learn from the best of the best, the Yurok traditional fire managers. We learned about the traditional uses of prescribed fires—they aid the acorn and huckleberry harvests—but we also worked with modern tools like drip torches and atmospheric weather instruments. When everyone returns to manage their own homelands, they bring with them a deeper knowledge of how to use fire holistically to heal the land while preventing catastrophic and out-of-control wildfire.

For me, as a photographer used to working almost exclusively in the Arctic, I found this story to be challenging—it was hot in Northern California in October! The first day I was on assignment, the mercury hit 95 degrees Fahrenheit, and I tried my best to keep making photographs with sweat dripping down my camera. Thankfully, within a day, the weather shifted and I learned to navigate this dry, beautiful landscape with the same sense of wonder as I do up North. It’s hard to walk around inside a Yurok-burned forest without a sense of awe at the renewal of life and the ingenuity of its indigenous caretakers.

Two halves of a forest on Yurok land separated by a fire line near Orleans, California. The charred side is from a recent indigenous prescribed burn by the Yurok community, and it demonstrates the open nature of the forest after a burn, the reduction of fuels, and the sequestration of carbon in the form of charcoal on the ground. In high-intensity wildfires, the trees die and the majority of the carbon in their wood is released into the atmosphere.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

Frank Lake, a research ecologist for the Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station Fire and Fuels Program and Yurok descendant, selects stalks of beargrass from the forest floor, which was culturally burned three months prior. The low intensity of the 6-acre prescribed fire did not kill the beargrass plants, which are used in the weaving and patterning of traditional coiled baskets, but removed older leaves that are unsuitable for traditional weaving.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

Tan oak acorns rest on the charred forest floor, where they stand out for easy harvesting due to the lack of leaf litter and debris. This forest floor was culturally burned by Yurok land managers to reduce tan oak acorn pests like weevils, and to make the harvest of acorns, a traditional food source, more productive. Tan oaks also produce more acorns after a fire.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

Hazelnuts grow on Frank Lake’s property in Orleans, California, which he uses to showcase traditional burning: The hazelnuts don't have to compete for light and space in the undergrowth, and the nuts are much easier to access after fire.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

Traditional materials like evergreen huckleberry, a traditional winnowing tray, and baskets of woven confer roots, maidenhair ferns and beargrass are managed to their ideal harvest state through indigenous fire.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

Sunset over the Klamath River and its forests near Weitchpec, California. “The Klamamth-Siskiyou bioregion has the most diverse conifer forest in the world,” says Lake.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

A Yurok tribal member fishes for salmon using a dip-net at his traditional fishing grounds on the Klamath River in Northern California in late September. Declines in the spring salmon here have, at times, forced closures of the fishery. Historically, it is believed that smoke from indigenous burning shaded regional rivers during periods of the highest water temperatures, increasing the survival rate of spawning salmon. “The few degrees of cooling from the smoke can make a life or death difference for many of those fish,” says Lake.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

Elizabeth Azzuz, a member of the Cultural Fire Management Council, opens an indigenous cultural burn training by lightning a ceremonial fire with sage. The mission of the council is to facilitate the practice of cultural burning on the Yurok Reservation and ancestral lands, which will lead to a healthier ecosystem for all plants and animals, long term fire protection for residents, and support the traditional hunting and gathering activities of the Yurok.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

Margo Robbins, head of the Cultural Fire Management Council and a Yurok tribal member, leads firefighters as they light an indigenous prescribed burn with dried and bundled branches, which are in turn lit from a single coal from a sage bundle.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

Smoke from an indigenous prescribed burn filters through the forest canopy on Yurok lands, near Weitchpec, California.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

Margo Robbins not only leads Training Exchanges, but also weaves her culture’s celebrated baskets. “We use TREX to ensure the continuance of our culture and protect cultural resources. Our culture is fire dependent. Our people are hunters, gatherers and basket weavers,” says Robbins. “Restoration of the land, and preservation of our culture is a number one priority for people living on the Yurok Reservation. We MUST put fire on the ground if we are to continue the tradition of basket weaving.”Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

Firefighters participating in a Yurok-led cultural fire training exchange (TREX), practice controlled burning, coordination, and fire management skills near Weitchpec, CA, in early October. Although the widely used practice of burning brush piles is not traditional, it is a skillset that supports indigenous burning.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

Rhodri Wiseman, a firefighter from Alberta, Canada, participates in a Yurok-led cultural fire training exchange. She is managing the spread of the fire by micro-managing its fuel, wood, and debris.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

Firefighters climb down a steep fire line on their way to a controlled prescription burn area. Fires are generally created at the higher points of elevation and then burned downslope to keep them manageable.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

Firefighters participating in a training exchange refill their drip torches. Drip torches are fuel canisters used to intentionally ignite fires by dripping flaming fuel onto the ground.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

Firefighters cut large debris so that it can be moved into burn piles safely and clear safe zones so that the fire doesn't spread.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

Indigenous culturally prescribed fire is carefully managed on the ground, and the firefighters use precise sprays of water control the spread of this small and low-intensity burning and keep it from moving in particular directions.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

A ring of flame is created around a young hazel plant, burning away competitors during a burn. Hazelnuts are an important food for the Yurok, and this type of carefully managed burning can selectively protect particular important cultural plants.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

A section of forest near Weitchpec, California, burned by a moderate-intensity wildfire shows that the fire has killed all of the trees, even though it stayed below the forest canopy. The low-intensity fires of indigenous prescribed burns, on the other hand, keeps older trees alive and can be specifically used to protect species of value.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

Blaine McKinnon, the TREX “burn boss,” or fire crew commander, reviews the lay of the land with firefighters. Traditional firefighters benefit from using modern fire tools and measurement instruments, and Western firefighters learn some of the deep ecological knowledge like soil and plant types that can be used to manipulate and manage fire.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

Open forests on a ridge show the results of a US Forest Service controlled burn directed by Don Hankins, a Miwok tribal member and professor of geography at California State University, Chico, using indigenous fire management. In the distance are hills illustrating the devastating effects of California's 2018 Camp Fire, the result of a hundred years of USFS fire suppression policy.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

A firefighter runs over the charred ground of a low-intensity indigenous prescribed burn. The small flames of this fire are created and maintained based on factors like humidity conditions, plant species, and soil composition. After the fire is created it is ‘walked’ along, a small section at a time, so that its intensity doesn’t get out of hand.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

Jose Luis Duce watches the burn. Duce leads this type of training exchange in Spain, bringing the traditional ecological knowledge of California tribes to other places. A few Spanish firefighters attend each TREX.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

Don Hankins directed the indigenous burn that created this open grassland on the experimental Big Chico Ecological reserve. Grasslands, which support many animal and plant species, are one of the most endangered ecosystems in North America.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

Hankins harvests grass stems for traditional basketry at the Big Chico Ecological Reserve. The reserve is managed by indigenous prescribed fire, which increases the diversity of native grasses.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

Prescribed burns, though smoky, have few flames and low temperatures, ensuring their spread horizontally rather than vertically through the forest.Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan

The increasing collaboration between the US Forest Service and California indigenous communities is an affirmation by western science that traditional ecological knowledge is both valuable and powerful. Indigenous burning may go back millennia, but it remains a potent technology. It can be used to prevent catastrophic wildfires like those raging throughout the American West, and can be used to mitigate the effects of the warming climate.

Frank Lake reminds us, however, that this indigenous technology is inseparable from the culture. The nuanced understanding of prescribed fire comes from the constant feedback of indigenous community members, from huckleberry gatherers to deer hunters. “For the conservation of endangered species to ecosystem management to an indigenous holistic management, fire is the central tool in the cultural toolkit,” he says. “Humans can use fire, so stewardship of the land becomes our responsibility.”

Updated 10-17-19, 4:02 PM EST: This story has been updated to correctly identify a firefighter.