Cultural Fire on the Mountain: An Introduction to Native Cultural Burning

Dinkey Creek | Photo: Jared Dahl Aldern

The Cold Springs Rancheria of Mono Indians of California, where many members of the Holkoma band of Mono live today, is located in the south-central Sierra Nevada foothills, south of the San Joaquin River and north of the Kings. Due east of the Rancheria, near the center of the Holkoma Mono people's half-million-acre ancestral homeland in the Sierra, lies a creek that outsiders named after a little dog in August 1863. One day that month, a group of non-Indian hunters was surprised by a large, angry grizzly bear. The hunters' pet pug, Dinkey, barked and rushed up to challenge the bear. The grizzly swatted the little dog away, but Dinkey's attack distracted it long enough to allow one of the hunters to grab his gun and shoot the bear. Dinkey died of his wounds from his brief fight, and the hunters named the nearby creek after the little dog to honor its bravery.

As it turned out, those hunters killed seven grizzlies during their month in the Dinkey Creek area, so we know that the Dinkey landscape must have been pretty good bear habitat at that time. Grizzlies require lots of open ground, forests with widely spaced trees, along with some clumps of dense forest - what scientists call a heterogeneous spatial distribution of vegetation. This Dinkey landscape of the past would have provided the bears with plenty of cover for their dens and with rich food sources like acorns, berries, and lots of green meadow plants - plant sources that also made for great foods, medicines, and materials for baskets and tools for the Native people of the area.

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Today there are no longer any grizzlies in the Dinkey Creek area, and the thickly growing pine trees of the current forest, the result of more than a century of fire prevention and suppression, probably could not support too many grizzly bears. The more open, food-rich country where grizzlies thrived had been sustained by frequent cultural fires that were carefully planned and conducted by the Holkoma people of the area. The Gold Rush and Civil War-era commercial hunters who invaded Holkoma lands in the 1850s and 60s were followed by ranchers, soldiers, farmers, miners, loggers, hydroelectric dam and power-line builders, recreational hunters, anglers, equestrians, boaters, climbers, hikers, campers, and off-roaders, and, eventually, forest rangers and firefighters. All these newcomers displaced Indigenous people, and thereby disrupted or destroyed their cycles of cultural fire, profoundly changing the landscape.

Before those changes, the Dinkey landscape - in fact, the whole, forested western slope of the Sierra Nevada - was maintained by strategic cultural burns. Mono and other Native firelighters used local topography, winds, and fuel characteristics to steer and time their fires near their settlements and along an intricate, interlacing trails network, creating a complex, patchy pattern of vegetation along creeks, in meadows, and in the uplands.

Cultural fire is a form of what is now often called prescribed fire, the knowledgeable and skillful application of a planned ignition in specific environmental conditions (e.g., fuel moisture, temperature, smoke dispersion, topography etc.) to achieve [specific] resource objectives, in the words of the Southern Sierra Nevada Prescribed Fire Council. Indigenous firelighters understand fire in the way that engineers understand electricity: as a dangerous, potentially lethal energy source that can be extremely useful when used carefully in a well-designed, well-planned fashion. Indigenous people have employed cultural fires since time immemorial to sustain plant and animal communities, including especially the cultural assets (food and materials, as well as aesthetic and spiritual resources) within those communities.

Bedrock mortars at Dinkey Creek. The existence of these and many other mortars demonstrates long-term Indigenous residence in a productive landscape. | Photo: Jared Dahl Aldern

Among the many benefits of well-executed, well-timed cultural burns for land and water are that they can safely and efficiently clear thick, overgrown vegetation from an area. This means that cultural burns can not only reduce the risk of large, out-of-control wildfires, but they can also help Indigenous people meet aesthetic and spiritual obligations. Cultural burning results in a forest where people can see the movements of animals such as deer and bear at long distances - and where, conversely, those animals can see the people who watch and, sometimes, pursue them. Thus, cultural burning helps to facilitate reciprocal relationships between animals and people, gives-and-takes, mutually beneficial exchanges, or, as Greg Sarris writes, agreements with humans regarding shared habitats. When Indigenous people speak of all their relations, they may not be thinking only of relationships with other people. Cultural fire, as an intricate interaction with land and all its inhabitants, is one way that Indigenous people can foster and renew all their relationships.

Cultural fire is a form of what is now often called prescribed fire.

Prior to the arrival of Europeans and Anglo Americans, the overall effect of year upon year of cultural burning was a bountiful landscape on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, one that John Charles Fr mont described in 1845 as copiously watered with numerous and bold streams, a park-like landscape with towering oaks, cedars, and pines five to twelve feet in diameter, and with abundant grass that was fresh and green all the year round.

True as all that may have been in times past, to ask whether there is a place for cultural fire in today's forests - where management plans are dominated by the often-competing demands of commercial resource extraction, high-impact recreational activities, and the preservation of wilderness

LINK:	https://www.kcet.org/shows/tending-the-wild/cultural-fire-on-the-mount...
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