ForestFires WildFires | Indigenous Tribal ways
HomeSchool lesson: How well are we (California state) doing on incorporating traditional knowledge into forest management these days? Indigenous people used and continue to use cultural burning to manage California for sustainability, resources, food, fiber, safety, travel, and ceremony. When you talk to tribes, they all talk about being active stewards of the land. They say that this idea of stewardship is actually commanded by creator, to steward their lands for the benefit of everything that’s there—the four-legged, the two-legged, and everything else. This message resonates so well today. We have to become stewards of these lands, or we’re going to continue to have huge problems with climate change, drought, and high-severity fire. I’ve been teaching a lower-division fire culture class at UC Berkeley with Ken Lightfoot for the past five years. We bring in senior indigenous scholars and leaders, and I talk about fire ecology, while Ken talks about archeology. When in
