earlier this year, several dozen small fires burned through 50 acres in the small unincorporated community of mariposa, california. over 100 people watched the flames, yet no one complained or rushed to put out the fire.

that’s because these weren’t your typical fires — instead, it was a cultural burn, conducted by tribal cultural burners to rejuvenate native species like the oak tree and stimulate regrowth of resources for medicinal and cultural uses. cultural burning involves small-scale burns often targeted toward a specific plant resource and is careful not to destroy the vegetation outright.“

nobody in the valley even knew we burned,” the honorable ron w. goode, tribal chairman of the north fork mono tribe in central california, said. goode has led countless cultural burns, all of which are intended to produce minimal smoke and create defensible space, or an area of less flammable plants. this practice mitigates fire risk amid intensifying fire seasons without detrimental impacts to surrounding areas.

but throughout his 40 years as tribal chairman, goode says he has encountered relentless resistance to cultural burning from federal and state agencies that manage wildfires, like the u.s. forest service (usfs) and the california department of forestry and fire protection (cal fire). 

goode is no stranger to these federal agencies, having worked on the dinkey collaborative, an alliance between the usfs and various tribes in california to restore the landscape in the sierra national forest. however, these agencies won’t budge when it comes to cultural burning, as they’ve continued to restrict its practice and it still isn’t permitted on most federal lands. 

at first glance, this resistance might seem surprising: cultural burning has been shown to yield positive impacts for the environment and bears significance for indigenous populations in california and across the country. 

yet these agencies’ stringent regulations on cultural burning aren’t a surprise to goode, given the long history of institutional disparaging of this practice. the u.s. government throughout the 19th and 20th centuries criminalized cultural burning, alleging that indigenous communities were “the hand of the incendiary.”

instead, state agencies have mainly championed the prescribed burning method, which is markedly different and creates a spate of negative effects. this involves compiling huge piles of fuel, a collection of dry brush “as big as a house,” according to goode. 

this strategy can lower the risk of a wildfire occurring in an area, meaning there will be less material that could start or exacerbate one. however, these prescribed burns, according to goode, could be significantly harder to control due to their size, especially when combined with high winds. for example, the 2022 calf canyon/hermit’s peak blaze in new mexico, which started as two prescribed fires, jumped containment lines and burned 341,000 acres — the state’s largest wildfire in history.

in addition, the devastating heat from the large amount of material burned in prescribed burning destroys soil microbes, resulting in a hostile environment for plants. the destruction of these microbes, while invisible to the naked eye, can have visible, cascading impacts on an entire ecosystem — starting with the absence of plants, which depend on microbes for basic functions such as nitrogen fixation and nutrient cycling.

with all these risks, why do the usfs and cal fire still practice prescribed burning in this way? to goode, these policies are reflective of the agencies’ role as managers of the land who make decisions based on economics. in fact, their budgets increase based on how much acreage they can burn in a year. not to mention that these entities still grapple with their historical precedent of deprioritizing indigenous ecological knowledge.

“until the economics mindset changes, we’re not going to make vast changes on the land and we’re always going to have extreme wildfires,” goode said.

this difference in mindset triggers distinctions in approach downstream.

“when you do cultural burning, you’re burning for the resources and in a much different manner than burning for acreage,” goode said. the pernicious misconception is that they’re one and the same — when their philosophies and methods are fundamentally different and distinguishable.

for cultural burners, small piles are the key to prevent the soil-scorching impacts of prescribed burns and to keep the flames from ever burning out of control.

“our piles, we call them ‘beaver huts.’ if i see one that’s over six feet tall…someone’s going to be getting in trouble,” goode said. “my leaders, who have been training for years, can’t make those kinds of mistakes.”

goode and other cultural burners will often conduct 45–70 small-scale burns each outing, with acreage limited to 50 acres at most. he is adamant that the small scale is evident that “we get the job done and we get the job done right.”

because tribal cultural burners aren’t conducting large burns for acreage, they don’t need to have extensive firefighting gear and multiple fire trucks waiting in the wings. according to goode, the fact that federal and state agencies have all this equipment at the ready for prescribed burns, in contrast, shows that they actually shouldn’t be burning in the first place because they are already at risk.

“you are already saying that if you light a fire, you have to have this much personnel, and this much equipment, to fight the fire that you just lit,” goode said. “therefore you shouldn’t be lighting a fire. but they won’t touch a prescribed fire unless they have that.”

instead, “you need to get naked. you need to get to the point where you strip all your yellow outfits, and your fire trucks,” he said. “and then you go out and light your fire.”

but organizations like the usfs and cal fire are not following suit. they continue to burn over 100 acres per outing, which goode says greatly affects the health of those in local communities.

“when the agencies put their fires on the ground, immediately the smoke, the particles, all affect the local neighbors, and down in the valley, in the urban areas. people with health issues are stricken,” he said.

in contrast, as seen with the cultural burn in mariposa, people are often unaware when a cultural burn takes place — again, a testament to the effectiveness of burning small piles and intimately understanding the properties of fire.

even still, the usfs and cal fire haven’t made the necessary inroads to collaborate with indigenous cultural burning practitioners. even worse, as mentioned earlier, cultural burners often cannot even practice burning on federal lands and when attempting to do so, face arduous bureaucratic obstacles, like going through the permit application process.

for goode, the ideal future is one where there is more space for cultural burns, and especially where cultural burners can have a “playground” to conduct their burns. “if we had tribes doing that in their areas, in their homelands, we would have a lot more defensible space,” goode said. “you would think that would become more important to the agencies, but it hasn’t, not yet.”

goode pointed to the cost share master agreement in 2018 between the north fork mono tribe and the sierra national forest as an example of what cooperation between indigenous tribes and federal agencies could look like. through the agreement, the north fork mono tribe will be able to help restore meadows through cultural burning. “more of that needs to happen not only in the meadows, but throughout the forest,” he said.

it is becoming increasingly important that the usfs and cal fire step up in crafting these agreements. california’s fire seasons are only getting longer and hotter, and the need for collaboration between managers and stewards has never been more apparent.

“we need to learn how to play together, work together,” said goode. “when i have my burns, which is either private land or tribal land, and i invite all of the agency people to come and learn what we do…that’s the future that i see, us working together. but it can’t be on their terms, and not necessarily solely on our terms either.”

note: this piece discusses violence and genocide against indigenous communities.

my dad’s hands gripped the steering wheel as we drove along the winding, narrow roads of yosemite national park –– eyes trained ahead, he explained that though he wanted to see the scenery, he was both terrified of heights and of crashing the car. so i described to him what i saw: trees for as far as the eye could see, packed together in what my younger self thought was the perfect vision of a forest. pure nature, i thought to myself. what an escape.

but these landscapes concealed an unsettling truth behind the park, which the u.s. national park service (nps) has controlled since 1864. tourists’ cameras now point at lands that indigenous communities lived on and managed for thousands of years before they were forcibly removed by the government. and the densely packed trees that define their photos are live wildfire risks, evidence of the land’s changes without indigenous tribes’ stewardship.

the park is rife with signs extolling the nps’s conservation efforts and the achievements of john muir (1838–1914), the “father of the national park system” who is credited with leading the campaign to “preserve” yosemite as a national park. but what the signs won’t tell you is that he and the nps were active proponents of forcibly expelling yosemite’s vital indigenous communities, like the ahwahneechee people.

the smothering of “good fire”

the land the ahwahneechee people called ahwahnee or “big mouth”, now coined as yosemite, was a wonder to western settlers in the 19th century: it was an area of “broadly spaced trees, open meadows, and abundant wildlife.” when the settlers encountered the ahwahneechee people, they failed to connect the dots between the well-tended environment they saw and the involvement of the ahwahneechee, who practiced cultural burning to revitalize the land.

cultural burning involves lighting small-scale burns in a specific area to promote plant and resource renewal, with the ash from the burn combining with topsoil to create a nutrient-rich soil that promotes fresh plant regrowth. these burns prompt the germination of fire-activated seeds, which play an important role in local food chains and ecosystem processes. this includes native shrubs whose berries have major cultural, medicinal, and culinary implications. cultural burns can also be used to selectively remove invasive plants that are poorly adapted for the frequent flames of the native biome. in the context of cultural burning, the flames provide rejuvenation rather than destruction.

for the ahwahneechee and other indigenous communities, this “good fire” reflects “spiritual and ethical obligation to care for the land.” but to the settlers, all fire was dangerous, threatening to destroy the natural landscapes they suddenly felt an urge to “protect” –– or in other words, exploit. they used this as justification –– masking their racist and capitalist motivations –– to embark on a genocidal campaign to remove the ahwahneechee people and their practices from the land. throughout the mid-1800s, armed vigilantes attacked the ahwahneechee, bolstered by laws which outlawed cultural burning and calls for a “war of extermination.” and as recently as 1969, the nps burned down the remainder of ahwahneechee homes, explaining this heinous action as nothing more than a “fire fighting drill.”

adding fuel to the fire

under the eyes of an unsuspecting public, yosemite valley has continued to experience the consequences of both the removal of the ahwahneechee and the nps’s “fire suppression era” from 1850 to 1970. during this period, the nps and u.s. forest service followed the “10 a.m. policy,” which mandated that fires “must be contained and controlled by 10 o’clock the morning after their initial report.” however, after 1970, the nps finally recognized that this focus on suppression drastically changed the fire regimes, or the “patterns of fire characteristics” in yosemite, leading to deleterious effects on the lower mixed conifer vegetation there.

a 2010 study conducted by researchers at pennsylvania state university revealed that as a result of fire suppression policies based on muir’s philosophy, biodiversity had significantly decreased within the bounds of the park. in the absence of regular fires, flammable tree species such as the white fir crowded out shade-intolerant, fire-resistant trees like the native california black oak, which saw significant population declines. consequently, yosemite valley became “two times more densely packed than it had been in the nineteenth century” –– a number which might even be higher now.

without the sparsely-spaced trees and open vegetation that the ahwahneechee people’s fire regime cultivated — and amidst worsening climate change –– the land has become increasingly susceptible to intense wildfires. and we have seen the results of this in real time: in 2022, the creek fire and oak fire burned tens of thousands of acres within the park.

since 1970, the nps has practiced prescribed burning to try and manage the landscape, which is a marked improvement in policy and has set the standard for other national parks. but prescribed burning and cultural burning are different. “prescribed burning” refers to using intentional fire to reduce the amount of fuel, or “combustible biomass” like dead trees and brush, thereby lowering the likelihood of a wildfire occurring there.

however, it involves the compilation of large piles of vegetation gathered across maximum acreage, which burn at high temperatures and “cook the soil” (goode et al., 2022). the intense heat damages soil microbes and therefore does not allow for a quick recovery of soil health and the plants that depend on it. in contrast, cultural burning involves a smaller accumulation of brush and is more deliberate about what is burned. this allows the ecosystem to regenerate, creating a “defensible landscape” against wildfires in the process (goode et al., 2022). while both methods may reduce the risk of severe wildlife, cultural burning has far greater benefit for the ecosystem.

calling for a new yosemite

while the nps’s turn toward prescribed burning is a start, it isn’t enough to rectify historical injustices or to promote ecosystem health in yosemite. at present, indigenous tribes like the ahwahneechee are still not allowed to practice cultural burning on federal lands like yosemite. the nps needs to acknowledge the holistic relationship that cultural burning practitioners have with fire and the ecosystem. furthermore, they need to recognize that the guidance of these practitioners is key to a successful and sustainable strategy moving forward.

by working in tandem, perhaps visitors to yosemite will begin seeing landscapes characterized not by packed trees and devastating wildfires but by open meadows teeming with biodiverse life. but if the nps fails to take steps toward building these relationships with indigenous tribes, the lands within the park will continue to be a tinderbox waiting for a match.