Indigenous Traditions Show How to Prevent Fires
How should we tackle the wildfires devastating California? By learning from and adapting the practices of the region’s Indigenous people, says Jackie Fielder. The Indigenous woman running for a California state Senate seat who we profiled last December explains what this would look like to AJ+ producer Hangda Zhang.
Indigenous practices are key to fire prevention
“I'm proposing an Indigenous wildfire task force, recentering Indigenous practices of California tribes who have had millennia to protect their lands — cultural practices that have been historically and actively suppressed by the state government, also the federal government,” she said. “Fire is a natural occurring element in our state, and we need to understand how to work with it rather than against it. Part of that means supporting Indigenous tribes in their active and ongoing cultural practices of small controlled burns. Those reduce the flammable fuel on the forest floor, and ensures that we don't have the gigantic wildfires that we're seeing right now.”
Colonization helped create the problem
Things began to change with European colonization, she said. “European settlers largely considered fire as a problem, not a natural element to work with. That’s been exemplified in a lot of the laws on the books [restricting] indigenous people’s ability to practice small and controlled burns. There are tribes up north in northern California who continued to practice prescribed fires, and they go out in small teams. They're highly trained and sophisticated — they are executing years-long plans; they're very thoughtful about it.”
Fielder thinks that the state needs to eliminate the barriers for these groups and ensure they have the resources they need to do this important work. “We need a collaboration between state-level officials and tribes themselves to be able to bridge those gaps,” she said. “There are tribes all across the West Coast and United States who plan out their economies, who plan out their land use. And that is the case here in northern California. They just need the authority and the resources to be able to do [it].”
Climate change leaves us no choice
“The fires are absolutely a result of climate change, but also are happening on top of decades and decades of buildup of layers of fuel because we, as a state, have an approach to wildfires that is largely fire suppression,” Fielder said. “Fires are gaining in intensity and scope. And if we really want to make sure that human life, that the environment is protected, that firefighters, especially incarcerated firefighters getting paid pennies on the hour to do this work, that we have a chance at adaptability and survival here in California, we need to be able to empower Indigenous people to practice the cultural prescribed burns that they have been practicing for millennia. Otherwise, we are in for decades more of catastrophic wildfires that continued to ravage our state.”
Produced by: Tony Karon and Hangda Zhang
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