I am an adjunct faculty at Yakima Valley College, and I also run a blog called Native Friends. We hadn't had any huge fires like we saw in 2015, so smoke in the air was something that was still kind of accepted, and not necessarily recognized as a bad thing.Įmily Washines, CEO of Native Friends and adjunct faculty member at Yakima Valley College, Yakima Valley: I'm a Yakama tribal member. There was obviously less people around 20 years ago, so you have less risk of impacting your neighbor, or burning down a structure. You usually got a good “green-up” afterwards, which was good for deer and elk and horses and cattle and whatever else you had there, and it reduces your fuel risk later in the summer. It was a common practice to go out and, if there were dead grass and brush, burn it because it reduced fire risk. It was just people in the community that had just grown up that way. That was just something you did, and lots of people did it around the community. When I was young, it was very common to do a lot of burning in the spring. Where did your personal connection to fire start?Ĭody Desautel, natural resource director of the Colville Tribes, Colville Reservation: I've been fighting fires since 1995. We asked them to share more about its importance - how it can both preserve indigenous culture and offer solutions in the West under a changing climate. Here in Washington, some tribes have continued their usage of indigenous land management practices by conducting controlled burns on a local scale.Ĭrosscut spoke with a group of researchers, land managers, policymakers and firefighters who make indigenous wildfire management in Washington a part of their daily lives. Others, like the Fort Apache in Arizona, were able to bring back the practice of controlled burns as a means of fuel reduction even earlier. Some tribes in Northern California have recently partnered with the Forest Service to implement Native approaches to controlled burns. That’s changing: Research from more recent decades has realized the merit in controlled burning. For hundreds of years after, fire suppression became the favored means of management, which brought back woods dense with fuels and higher wildfire risks. One of the most important was controlled burning, which cleared areas of crowded trees, undergrowth and pests, making space for new growth and wildlife.īut European settlement and disease upended Native populations and culture, stifling these practices. The indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest shaped their lands with many intentional practices long before settlers came to the continent.
The annual salmon return and its celebration by the tribes assure the renewal and continuation of human and all other life.Over a dozen longhouses and churches on the reservations and in ceded areas still use salmon for their religious services.
Salmon are part of our spiritual and cultural identity.
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