‘Fire Teaches Us Many Lessons’

Bill Tripp, Karuk, has been a cultural fire practitioner nearly his entire life. 

He remembers being 4 years old, cracking acorns as he waited for his great-grandmother to wake up so they could talk in the mornings. Eventually he turned his attention toward the woodstove and tried to build a fire.

His great-grandmother heard him and joined him in the main living area.

“She came out and she told me, ‘If you’re going to be playing with fire, you’re going to do something good with it,'” Tripp recalls.

She took him outside underneath the black oak trees and told him to burn a straight line. Tripp was left with a small pack of matches and good weather for a slow-burning fire. 

“I remember laying on my belly using those matches,” he told ICT. “I could at least get a light, but I couldn’t get it to burn completely, you know? I started doing different things, arranging the fuels different, lighting in multiple places, and using heat to draw together — just with little 4-inch flame links. I learned a lot that day.”

He went back inside to tell his great-grandmother.

“I used every last match, but I did it, and I was just so proud of myself,” he said. “And she said, ‘Okay, I’ll teach you.’ So she started telling me the stories. I’m just so grateful that I passed that test that day, because I might not have learned anything if I hadn’t.”

Tripp has been a cultural fire practitioner ever since. He still uses cultural fire to care for the land around his home.

Today, he’s also the director of natural resources and environmental policy for the Karuk Tribe in northern California. For years, the tribe has worked toward decriminalizing cultural fire and creating legal protections for cultural fire practitioners in the state.

In late February, in the aftermath of the devastating Los Angeles fires, the tribe signed a first-of-a-kind agreement with the state to remove bureaucratic barriers for cultural fire practitioners.

The agreement comes at a time of growing recognition that Indigenous knowledge of land stewardship could reduce the amount of undergrowth that fuels wildfires in California, according to Indigenous activists, scholars and cultural fire practitioners.

It’s time, Tripp said, to shift the focus to using cultural fire, or “good fire.” 

Hot, Dry Conditions

Ash, grief and loss are the remnants of the recent fires in Los Angeles, the deadliest and most destructive wildfires in California’s history.

More than 11,500 homes were burned across 60 square miles, and 30 people lost their lives as of April 15. 

It will likely take months for the debris to be cleared and years for the area to recover, according to research from the Urban Institute. Even then, affordable housing could be drastically reduced, the National Low Income Housing Coalition reports.

The fires also have drawn attention to the fact that California’s ecosystem is largely fire-dependent, having relied on fires over the centuries to kill out undergrowth that can fuel the spread of wildfires.

Climate change has modified the dynamics, however. Starting in 2020, the state experienced a severe drought that ended in December of 2022, when the first of nine so-called atmospheric rivers dumped huge amounts of water from the tropics onto the West Coast.

The dramatic increase in rainfall over the next two years encouraged the growth of vegetation and resulted in a wildflower superbloom. Record-breaking heat then returned with reduced levels of precipitation that led to dry conditions again in late 2024, turning the lush vegetation into a tinderbox.

The hot, dry weather increased the intensity of the wildfires by 6 percent and made them 35 percent more likely to occur, according to a report from the World Weather Attribution.

On Jan. 7, the first of the Los Angeles fires erupted, with stronger-than usual Santa Ana winds accelerating their spread.

Carrying on Traditions

For thousands of years, Indigenous people across the world have used cultural fire to bring vital nutrients back to the soil, promote the growth of cultural plants and clean the land.

In the area now known as California, cultural burning goes back centuries, according to Jessa Calderon, the land, water, and climate justice director at Sacred Places Institute for Indigenous Peoples in Los Angeles.

“There is documentation from the Spanish diaries that talked about an area near San Pedro, and they called it the Bay of Smokes. What was happening at that time was traditional burning,” Calderon said.

“When the Spanish made their way back, what they described was a place that was like an untouched paradise,” she said. “But it, in fact, had been very manicured, because the peoples have always carried on that tradition of taking care of the land, preventing disease with fire, allowing new growth and new shoots with fire. It’s important to keep those traditions.”

For more than 150 years, however, the state of California explicitly banned the use of cultural fire. Article 10 of an 1850 law called Government Protection of Indians, stated, “If any person or persons shall set the prairie on fire or refuse to use proper exertion to extinguish the fire when the prairies are burning, such person or persons shall be subject to fine or punishment, as a Court may adjudge proper.”

The law contained 20 articles, which are legal rules, and it didn’t apply to white people. Its main purpose was to remove Indigenous people from their land, Indigenous children from their families and impose forced, indentured servitude to white people, according to a report by the California Research Bureau.

As late as the 1930s, Indigenous people were killed for using cultural fire to take care of the land, said Karuk Tribal Chair Russell Attebery.

Despite this ban, Karuk people would still work secretly to put fire to land.

“I know from speaking with elders, that they would know that an area needed to be burned, and they would go out and jerry rig something that would ignite when they were back in town,” Attebery told ICT. “(The fire) would burn off an area where they knew needed to be burned to reduce the high brush, and the fuels for the fires. They couldn’t use their cultural burning ways.”

Fire was essential to growing the beargrass needed to weave their baskets, and Karuk people risked their lives to maintain this practice. 

The threats caused some Native people, however, to lose their knowledge of cultural burning, Tripp said. 

“Some individual families have been able to maintain the practice at smaller scales, close at home, but to manage our food, fiber and medicinal groves out there across the landscape, we just simply haven’t been able to do that without, back 100 years ago, getting potentially killed, or in more recent years, being cited fines for arson,” Tripp said.

Fire reduced plant material — such as dead leaves, fallen pine needles or dry grass that can fuel wildfires — allow beneficial native plants to grow.

“For the plant life, it is a blessing,” Calderon said, “because there are a lot of plants that we utilize that actually need fire.”

Melinda Adams, San Carlos Apache, a cultural fire practitioner who is also a scholar and researcher, said she tapped into Indigenous knowledge and the history of cultural burning while enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of California at Davis.

“I have learned from my own tribe how we placed fire to the landscape for our cultural medicines, for ceremonial ways,” Adams told ICT. “We have the tribes in California that placed fire purposely for ecological benefits and, from what I’ve learned, they call it ‘cleaning up their forests.'”

The use of fire, however, can be heavily restricted in some areas, Adams said.

“Fire restrictions are very prevalent within our fire management systems,” Adams said. “As a fire practitioner, it’s really hard to get fire on the ground in fire-prone communities and fire-prone places such as Southern California.”

‘Good Fire’

More than 80 percent of the Karuk Tribe’s cultural and medicinal plants are reliant on fire, according to a report, “Good Fire II,” co-authored by Tripp that was released by the Northern California tribe last year.

Some of the medicinal plants are acorn-bearing oak trees, natural tobacco, hazel tree and beargrass.

“Karuk people have been using fire to enhance our traditional food, fiber and medicinal resources since time immemorial,” Tripp said. “We’ve gone more than a century now without being able to freely practice this at meaningful scales.”

Cultural fire is different from prescribed burns, according to practitioners. Cultural fire is given to the land in a spiritual and holistic way that aligns with an Indigenous nations’ cultural values. Prescribed burns lack any cultural connection or element.

The Karuk Tribe has been at the forefront of defending tribal sovereignty when it comes to cultural burning and protecting cultural fire practitioners.

Although cultural burning by Indigenous people was outlawed in 1850, private landowners were able to apply for burning permits but not without heated debate. 

At the turn of the century, there was huge controversy over the use of good fire, even on private land. The U.S. Forest Service, in 1905, formally adopted the policy of fire exclusion — meaning all types of fire, prescribed and natural, would be banned, prevented or suppressed, according to a 1999 book, Prescribed Burning in California Wildlands Vegetation Management by Harold H. Biswell.

The Red River Lumber Co. in Shasta, California, advocated for the use of good fire but faced pressure to stop in 1913 and ultimately complied. In 1924, the California Department of Forestry adopted the same fire exclusion policy as the federal government. 

By 1945, the negative impact of these policies on the fire-dependent California ecosystem prompted the state to allow private landowners to apply for burning permits. Unfortunately, the permit system had one weakness: It left landowners with the bill for any fire suppression costs or damages caused by escaped fires, which are prescribed burns that go out of control. The California Department of Forestry continuously reminded landowners of this, partly, as a scare tactic.

The fear of paying fire suppression costs, coupled with the boom in housing development, effectively stifled the use of prescribed burns by private landowners. 

The prescribed burn provisions required tribes to apply with the state for permission to conduct burns on their lands, in the same way that private landowners could apply. The Karuk Tribe saw that as diminishing tribal sovereignty and never used the process.

“We’ve had to establish partnerships with other entities that are covered under the state and don’t have sovereignty,” Tripp said. “They’ve agreed to help us protect our sovereignty by being applicants for the permits.”

This historical wrong was corrected last year. 

On Sept. 27, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Cultural Burning bill. For the first time in California history, the state recognized and affirmed tribal nations’ inherent right to oversee cultural burnings. The only caveat was that the tribes had to reach an agreement with the California Natural Resources Agency and local air quality officials first.

The Karuk Tribe worked with the agency and air quality officials to become the first Indigenous nation to use the new law to form a sovereign-to-sovereign agreement with the state to oversee and manage its own cultural burnings. 

“I feel a little bit anxious because we’re not getting out there and getting more done fast enough,” Tripp said. “I’ve known the benefits all my life, growing up in my traditional village and getting out there and burning with my family at 4 years old.”

He’s seen first-hand the benefits of cultural fire on the land, and is excited to see the benefits put to use in coming years. 

“I remember some of the early lessons of burning underneath the white oak trees that hadn’t burned in 10, 15 years,” Tripp said. “The next year you had trilliums, you had wild ginger, you just had all these other [plants] you never saw before coming up, and it didn’t take a lot of fire.”

Despite the historic agreement, damage to the land has already been done and there is a lot of work ahead, said Calderon, who is Tongva, Chumash and Yaqui.

“Within that time of it being outlawed, there were invasive species that Europeans had brought with them that started to become rampant,” Calderon said. “Our own traditional plants, along with these plants, are now becoming mass fuel for any fire that would come through. So, you’ve got all of this land that stopped being cared for and tended to by outlawing our culture and traditions, and it just becomes a devastation.”

Adams said the public should learn that fire can be beneficial.

“For so long, the public narrative of fire has been one that’s rooted in fear, one that’s only connection to fire is sources of destruction, of loss,” Adams said.

“Perhaps by changing our interrelationship with fire, how we think about it, how we interact with it, to a more stewardship view — that there are ecological benefits, cultural benefits, relational benefits that fire presents.”

Incorporating Indigenous Practices

Cultural fire could be an important tool to help mitigate the devastation and intensity of wildfires in California and beyond, but Indigenous people have to be at the forefront of the conversations.

The traditional homelands of the Chumash people were along the Malibu coast and went nearly 200 miles north to Paso Robles, California before they were forcibly displaced by the state. Those who were able to stay did menial labor on farms and ranches. Today, there are many Chumash people who still call this coastline home.

“Tragedy sometimes provides opportunities to revisit past decisions that need updating, and it is important that Indigenous communities be heard on that,” Chumash elder Toni Cordero, said in a statement to ICT. “We can try to make sure any rebuilding is in appropriate places and done appropriately.”

Cordero, a member of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation, said the California Environmental Quality Act statute and guidelines cannot be overlooked in the rush to rebuild after the Los Angeles wildfires. The 40-year-old law established a state policy to ensure that people and nature can exist in harmony “to fulfill the social and economic requirements of present and future generations.”

“We now have a chance to ensure that rebuilding along the Malibu coast is more consistent with public access, exempting rebuilding from environmental laws like CEQA, without a chance for public [comment] on that, and it suggests that the public may be overlooked in the race to help fire victims rebuild,” Cordero said. “Of course, we acknowledge that we sympathize with people who have lost their homes, but it would be compounding the tragedy to just repeat past poor decisions.”

The Los Angeles area wasn’t designed to be fire resilient. The urban landscape is filled with homes that aren’t built with fire-resistant material and the close proximity of homes allows fire to jump from one to another.

The county underutilizes prescribed burns because of public opposition. But that is slowly changing. 

Since Newsom was elected, the state has invested $2.5 billion to implement the Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan, and the number of prescribed burns more than doubled in the state between 2021 and 2023, according to his website.

Newsom recently signed a bill that would allocate an additional $170 million to clearing brush, thinning forests, creating fire breaks and conducting prescribed burns. 

And the state has pledged to provide $10 million in funding to build a fire resiliency center for the Karuk Tribe. 

Since the Los Angeles fires, the county has conducted two prescribed burns on the lands it manages, burning a total of 16.6 acres, according to CAL FIRE Fuel Reduction Projects. These two burns were about an hour north of Los Angeles.

Near the city, fuel reduction projects tend to focus on manual removal or thinning of vegetation. 

Freddie Romero, a member of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, understands the benefits and positive effects of cultural fire on his traditional homelands in the Malibu area. 

“The absence of Indigenous peoples when it comes to prescribed/cultural burning planning, although this is beginning to change, it still is a slow process… Indigenous peoples have used fire for thousands of years to steward these lands and promote sustainable development and growth, and this is not only for themselves, but for all of the earth’s ecosystem,” Romero, a Chumash elder, said in a statement to ICT.

The devastating Los Angeles wildfires brought together crews from Indigenous nations from as far away as Arizona to assist in fire suppression and, once the fire was contained, in recovery efforts. 

“We respond to these incidents… like the Eaton and the Palisades fire,” said Ralph Tovar, assistant fire chief for the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians. “Knowing that people are experiencing tremendous loss, not only for themselves, but for their community, as firefighters, we’re sympathetic to that fact. Man, we feel for these people, and we really think about them in this time of need, and we do our best to try and help them.”

Looking Ahead

In October, the U.S. Forest Service halted all prescribed burns on federally-managed lands in California for the foreseeable future in an effort to preserve staff and equipment for fighting wildfires — making the agreement with the Karuk Tribe even more important. The tribe’s traditional homelands are located in what is now known as the Klamath National Forest.

Attebery is excited about the future of the Karuk Tribe with the agreement in place. The tribe already has planned a number of wildfire prevention projects that include prescribed burning but also logging. The hope is to once again have clean forests.

“Our job is what it was thousands of years ago. It’s to protect the lower areas, create a better snowpack, food security, our culture items that we need, water for our rivers and our fish,” Attebury said. 

Decades of advocacy by the Karuk Tribe to gain oversight over cultural fire has come to a close, but the next battle is funding for wildfire prevention projects.

“This is something that tribes have been doing for thousands of years, we need the opportunity to take the lead. We need the opportunity to access the funding that’s coming in,” Attebery told ICT.

“Our goal is to work hard and use the knowledge that we have,” he continued, “but… (we’re) adamant that tribes need to take the lead.”

This story was first published by Indian Country Today. Pauly Denetclaw, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, is Haltsooí (Meadow People) born for Kinyaa’áanii (Towering House People). She is Indian Country Today’s climate correspondent.

This article appears in ‘Fire Teaches Us Many Lessons’.