OUTCOME: Fire Resilient Forests

Problem

Cultural, regulatory, and legal barriers limit Tribal cultural practitioners' ability to use cultural fire and other Indigenous knowledge and practices, including TEK, to steward natural areas and improve forest ecological function and resilience.

Solution

Tribal Cultural Fire - Support Tribal co-management of public lands and increased opportunity and capacity to use cultural fire and other Indigenous knowledge and practices.

Background and Context

Local Indigenous knowledge and practices, including TEK and Tribal land stewardship, are not only part of the California landscape, but these practices developed the diversity and resilience of these fire-adapted landscapes. These techniques remain key to forest restoration, revitalization, and cyclical stewardship for watershed, forest, and community resilience, especially now in the face of environmental collapse caused by climate change. The legacy of industrial mining, logging, fire suppression, and other alterations of landscapes has created environmental degradation which has been exacerbated by the extirpation of Tribal stewardship practices and strategies, including the suppression of both cultural fire and the purposeful stewardship of fire-resilient species and ecosystems.

Tribal Nations across the United States are recognized leaders in how to implement beneficial fire most effectively for a range of ecological, cultural, and social benefits. This is especially true in California, where Tribes have utilized fire as a tool for millennia to shape and steward forested landscapes (Knight et al, 2022). Yet California Tribes still largely lack the resources and political, agency, public, community, and policy support needed to practice cultural burning. Cultural fire practitioners have valuable, place-based knowledge that is critical to successful stewardship of watersheds and landscapes. Partnerships with Tribes and application of their traditional cultural knowledge can add flexibility to project planning, implementation, and monitoring. As sovereign nations, Tribes are not bound by regulatory requirements in applying cultural fire within their constitutional jurisdiction, especially when not using state and federal funds for a specific action, and when they can show they are meeting the intent of such regulations (i.e., by improving long-term forest health and reducing long-term smoke impacts).

Indigenous knowledge and practices emphasize appropriate-scale actions for the stewardship goal and using beneficial fire to restore and encourage native plant communities. Cultural fire is used to maintain, regenerate, and enhance ground cover and desired brush species, as well as to develop stands and groves in biodiverse forest settings that enable maintenance of an Indigenous fire regime that can be considered natural to the ecosystem. Tribal cultural fire is used to steward ecosystems to provide Tribes with the plants and animals that are used to continue their cultural traditions. Ecosystems are stewarded to provide edible, medicinal, and ceremonial items. Fire changes the physiology of plants that are used for cultural purposes (see Tribal Cultural Fire Resources).

Tribal Co-management

“The term ‘co-management’ is subject to inconsistent interpretations, applications and politics. It is thus important to carefully scrutinize conceptions of co-management and pay more attention to how it is operationalized. Though definitions are important, especially for the purpose of creating mutual understanding and common expectations, what matters most are the core principles or attributes of a comanagement approach. These include: (1) Recognition of tribes as sovereign governments, (2) Incorporation of the federal government’s trust responsibilities to tribes, (3) Legitimation structures for tribal involvement, (4) Meaningful integration of tribes early and often in the decision-making process, (5) Recognition and incorporation of tribal expertise, and (6) Dispute resolution mechanisms. These core principles can be configured into creative and accountable ways of governing that fit unique historical and legal contexts, political realities, and landscapes.” (Mills & Nie 2020)

“’Cooperative’ or ‘collaborative’ management has been applied to varying forms of tribal and federal influence on land management in an area, with the phrase ‘comanagement’ often used when there is a legal mandate for shared management responsibilities (Nie 2008, Diver 2016). Collaborative partnerships with tribes, encompassing consideration of native knowledge, in planning, researching, implementing, and monitoring treatments within an adaptive ecosystem management framework fosters adaptive capacity of tribes and the partnering institutions. Such partnerships can build upon the foundations in the Tribal Forest Protection Act (U.S. Public Law 108-278) and many other laws and policies that provide for explicit tribal engagement and cooperative management, but they have to reckon with legacies of mistrust and inequity (Cronin and Ostergren 2007)” (Long & Lake 2018).

“One of the things that I have found is that fire peels back the layers of time and reveals what was there before . . . We used to be the fire managers, the tribal people, we were the firefighters in the 1900s up to the 1980s. We are here, the Tribe is here, we have always been here and we will always be here. So why not use the local talent to manipulate the vegetation to provide the forest that we want for the future, to provide forests that are more fire resilient, to be the firefighters again, to be the fire managers again. We need more of our young men realizing that there is a future out in our forests just like it was for thousands of years. It’s a little bit different than it was, but it’s a future of working with and in our forests and re-evolving as a people and as a community in the evolution of our forests. We see the future and we can make it happen if we all work together.”

Kathy McCovey, quoted in River on Fire: Impacts and Adaptations in a Fire Prone Landscape. Salmon River Restoration Council Winter 2021-22 Newsletter,  p. 6

Recommendations

Tribal cultural practitioners’ rights to use fire for stewardship of their lands and for co-management of federal and state lands surrounding them, and capacity to do so, is central to ecocultural restoration. The Good Fire Report recommends changes to support the ability of cultural fire practitioners to implement cultural fire projects and increase the pace, scope, and scale of cultural burning and prescribed fire. These recommendations should be advocated for and implemented. SB 332 (2021-22) and AB 642 (2021) recognize Cultural Fire Practitioners and will afford gross negligence protections for cultural burning and establish a statewide Cultural Fire Liaison, while respecting Tribal sovereignty to the greatest extent feasible. The Biden Administration released two critical statements in November 2021 that could greatly facilitate indigenous co-management of federal lands, including beneficial fire. The first is an MOU entitled Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Federal Decision Making, and the second is Order No. 3404: Joint Secretarial Order on Fulfilling the Trust Responsibility to Indian Tribes in the Stewardship of Federal Lands and Waters. In addition, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) passed a resolution calling for the advancement of meaningful Tribal co-management of federal lands. These measures should be fully implemented and supported by federal, state, and local governments and agency leadership and staff in the North Coast region.

Line officers and agency staff should receive the proper training for working with Tribes. The Forest Service Handbook has a section with directives on American Indian and Alaska Native relations (FSH 1509.13). It requires that Forest Service Line Officers and all USFS employees attend trainings on Tribal Consultation. This training “covers basic areas of tribal relations competencies, with a specific focus on the context of the Forest Service Unit.” CAL FIRE has a Tribal Community Relations policy. One of the directives in the policy is to “encourage the participation of tribes in obtaining grants, or otherwise conducting activities, for improvement of Forest Health and Community Safety.”

Actions

Support Tribal efforts to expand the use cultural fire through legislative and policy changes, specifically by supporting recommendations from the Good Fire Report and California’s Strategic Plan for Expanding the Use of Beneficial Fire (See Fire Resilient Forests – Beneficial Fire Barriers Solution).

  • Advocate for the recognition of tribal jurisdiction over their lands, members, and territory. 

Develop partnership agreements with Air Districts to foster smoke management coordination with Tribal cultural burn planning.

  • Restore conditions conducive to cultural burning as a long term programmatic restoration and maintenance Tribal action as part of the natural background, as opposed to a federal or  state action or other form of permissive use.

  • Support development of Tribal approval processes for cultural fire practitioners (i.e., for project permitting).

Support the development of Tribal facilities to set up cultural fire training centers (See Fire Resilient Forests – Beneficial Fire Capacity Solution).

References and Resources

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