indigenous fire stewardship
Backfire: the settler-colonial logic and legacy of Smokey Bear
Year of Publication
2024
Publication Type
Since the 1940s, the United States Forest Service’s (USFS) national fire suppression efforts have been bolstered by a public-facing ad campaign led by the Ad Council, most notably through the iconic rise of Smokey Bear.
Blending Indigenous and western science: Quantifying cultural burning impacts in Karuk Aboriginal Territory
Year of Publication
2024
Publication Type
The combined effects of Indigenous fire stewardship and lightning ignitions shaped historical fire regimes, landscape patterns, and available resources in many ecosystems globally. The resulting fire regimes created complex fire–vegetation dynamics that were further influenced by biophysical setting, disturbance history, and climate.
Indigenous pyrodiversity promotes plant diversity
Year of Publication
2024
Publication Type
Pyrodiversity (temporally and spatially diverse fire histories) is thought to promote biodiversity by increasing environmental heterogeneity and replicating Indigenous fire regimes, yet studies of pyrodiversity-biodiversity relationships from areas under active Indigenous fire stewardship are rare.
Solastalgia to Soliphilia: Cultural Fire, Climate Change, and Indigenous Healing
Year of Publication
2023
Publication Type
Wildly destructive fires, wind driven through unmanaged and untended lands, take lives and homes and the solace of familiar places. Ash blankets the remains, trauma takes hold, but even when the smoke clears and communities begin to heal, there is a loss beyond words. These wildfires reveal the ways many are lacking relationships with the land.
Exceptional variability in historical fire regimes across a western Cascades landscape, Oregon, USA
Year of Publication
2023
Publication Type
Detailed information about the historical range of variability in wildfire activity informs adaptation to future climate and disturbance regimes. Here, we describe one of the first annually resolved reconstructions of historical (1500–1900 ce) fire occurrence in coast Douglas-fir dominated forests of the west slope of the Cascade Range in western Oregon.
Using culturally significant birds to guide the timing of prescribed fires in the Klamath Siskiyou Bioregion
Year of Publication
2023
Publication Type
Historically, wildfire and tribal burning practices played important roles in shaping ecosystems throughout the Klamath Siskiyou Bioregion of northern California and southern Oregon.
Indigenous Fire Futures
Year of Publication
2023
Publication Type
Dominant causal explanations of the wildfire threat in California include anthropogenic climate change, fire suppression, industrial logging, and the expansion of residential settlements, which are all products of settler colonial property regimes and structures of resource extraction.
Indigenous fire management and cross-scale fire-climate relationships in the Southwest United States from 1500 to 1900 CE
Year of Publication
2022
Publication Type
Prior research suggests that Indigenous fire management buffers climate influences on wildfires, but it is unclear whether these benefits accrue across geographic scales.