Taking lessons from the original stewards of the Pacific Northwest landscape could help Oregon avoid disastrous wildfire seasons
This past wildfire season was one of the most destructive on record. Over a million acres of Oregon burned, and 40,000 people fled their homes. A dozen have died. The fires caused an estimated $1 billion in property damage.
The Indigenous practice of regular prescribed burns, according to experts, could stop this from happening again. Natives use controlled burns in land management. Small, regular burns keep forests from becoming overgrown and combustible.
“A lot of the Indigenous ways and a lot of the knowledge that is retained can be beneficial,” said Colby Drake, Fire Program Manager for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. “And it is beneficial from what I’ve seen on the ground — being the person that’s putting fire actually on the ground. It’s really helping our land. And I do think it can really prevent a lot of these large fires that we just saw this summer.”
Frank Kanawha Lake, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service, agrees. He told Street Roots that applying regular prescribed burns to 25% to 40% of the landscape would be enough to reduce the spread of uncontrollable wildfires. The burns would be needed in varying intervals, depending on the terrain, he explained. In the Coast Range, for example, forests of Douglas fir, coastal spruce and cedar might require controlled burns every 50 to 100 years.
“That then breaks up fuel continuity across watersheds,” he said, explaining that wildfires will have nowhere to go. “Even when they’re driven by wind, if there’s nothing there to burn up because it’s fuel limited, the fire’s going to drop out. It’s going to calm down. It’s going to take a different route. It’s going to hit that area you burned two years ago or three years ago, and go around that. If that’s 5 acres, it has less of an effect. If it’s 500 acres, you might be protecting that whole side of town.”
Lake has been working for 15 years to get Western academics to acknowledge historical uses of fire, so tribes can have a place in contemporary land management leadership.
He earned his doctorate, focused on wildland fire and fuels research, from Oregon State University in 2007. “There generally was a bias, I would say. And I kind of frame it now as a Western-academic-colonial bias.” He said this bias included the discrediting of oral histories, the dismissal of evidence and ethnographic work as anecdotal, as well as “the wilderness narrative,” which assumes Natives didn’t use fire or influence the landscape.
“If we were able to demonstrate the importance of fire management and forest stewardship to tribes historically,” Lake said, “that also provides justification for why tribes should be at the table today, and helping create the best available science to inform management and to be a part of the (leadership) in that management and restoration approach.”
A 2009 study in the International Journal of Wildland Fire found, “Effective fire suppression and land use practices over the last century have altered forest structure and increased fuel loads in many forests in the United States, increasing the occurrence of catastrophic wildland fires.”
Its authors studied prescribed burns in eight Northern California forests. They found burns reduced fuel loads by 23% to 78% without changing the structure of the forests. Tree mortality actually decreased after burn treatments.
“The most effective methods to change potential fire behavior are to reduce surface fuels,” the study reads.
Lake and Drake agree that for the benefit of everyone, tribes should be involved alongside state and federal agencies where wildfire and forest management decisions are made.
Fire’s long-term relationship with Willamette Valley lands
In his article "Early Fire Use in Oregon,” the late U.S. Forest Service national historian Gerald W. Williams 20 years ago wrote: “The basis for much of our forest health crisis nationwide lies in the almost complete cessation of Indian burning in fire-adapted ecosys-tems. ... To fully come to grips with our forest health crisis today, we must go back to much earlier land management decisions that ended thousands of years of Indian interactions with the land, especially through the use of fire.”
Prior to the 1850s, the Kalapuya and other Indigenous people managed the Willamette Valley with regular prescribed burns. These burns changed the order of plant growth, favoring certain Willamette Valley foods. Ash-rich soil encourages the growth of crops like camas, bracken fern, Oregon white oak acorns, California black oak acorns, hazelnuts, mountain huckleberry and blackberry. Burns also promote the growth of basketry crops like bear grass and hazel shoots, and provide new forage to support herbivore communities, including game populations like deer and elk.
The Oregon Historical Society notes that under Native stewardship, the Willamette Valley was a sprawling, park-like savannah, “grasslands interspersed with occasional oak and conifer stands.” But Kalapuya fire management waned by the 1850s, as settlers moved in and took over. It took with it populations of the Oregon white oak, which gave way to the Douglas fir forests we know today.
Controlled burns in Oregon serve many purposes beyond wildfire protection. They remove weeds, kill pests and promote biodiversity. Historically they also cleared pathways between communities, drove game into the hunt, and even roasted sugar pine nuts, tarweed seeds, grasshoppers and crickets for later gathering.
Lake noted that deer and elk will roll around in the ash, which gets rid of ticks and mites. They nibble on charcoal while eating new shoots, which prevents internal parasites like tapeworms. Healthier forests mean healthier animals, and healthier meat for families.
Traditional prescribed burns are farming, ranching, landscaping, conservation and wildfire management all in one. And they were outlawed in 1911.
Settlers had moved west and wanted to use Oregon hillsides for grazing sheep and other European-style homesteading practices incompatible with local land management. The parklike savannahs became ranches and tree farms. The manicured game forests became dense, overgrown tinderboxes.
In 1910, 3 million acres in Idaho lit up in a wildfire that killed 72 firefighters and about a dozen other people. The next year, the Taft administration passed the Weeks Act, which banned the ignition of fires in public forests. Natives could no longer manage the land through prescribed burns. The forests continued to devolve into overgrown tangles.
On its website, the U.S. Forest Service still calls the Weeks Act “one of the most successful pieces of conservation legislation in U.S. history.”
But now, the United States is taking a second look at what they once considered the primitive practice of controlled burns.
“The Indigenous burning community is alive and well,” Drake said. The Grand Ronde fire program works with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and a multitude of other official agencies to plan and implement controlled burns throughout Oregon.
“We’re active. We want to be participants,” he said. “There’s a lot of knowledge that we have throughout the Indigenous fire community in Oregon and Washington that can really benefit a lot of the current situation that’s happening with our forests and our lands.”
Tribes are working together — and with state and federal agencies
Drake said he’s visited Oklahoma, Florida and Northern California to learn from other tribes about their fire management programs.
“The Southeast does a lot of prescribed fire. We worked with the Seminole tribe down there,” he said. He traveled to the Yurok tribe, where he received his designation as a “prescribed burn boss.” He said, “It was one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had.”
He said the Yurok have brought together their cultural department with their fire program for prescribed burns that are cultural instead of only ecological. “That was awesome. We were doing prescribed fire for acorn harvesting, and hazel shoots for basket weaving, and that was the purpose. It wasn’t just forestry. It wasn’t just agriculture. It wasn’t just restoration. It was for first foods and material and medicine, and that was super cool.”
Drake said he would like to bring the cultural and fire programs together in Grand Ronde as well. “I definitely give them mad props, cause they know what they’re doing,” he said. “It was a really neat thing, and gave me a goal to shoot for with our program.”
Through intertribal trainings such as these, Drake was promoted to Prescribed Burn Boss Type 2, which allows him to write and implement burn plans of moderate complexity.
“We’re definitely active in partnering with groups and agencies throughout the Willamette Valley,” he said, naming partners like Willamette National Forests, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services, the Oregon Department of Forestry and Metro, the Portland area’s tri-county regional government.
Last year, Grand Ronde joined Metro for a 40-acre controlled burn on Quamash Prairie Natural Area, a piece of land west of Tigard off of Southwest Scholls Ferry Road, along the Tualatin River.
Metro and the city of Portland bought this property and have been working with Native communities to restore first foods on it and make space for Indigenous people. They can gather resources and plants, host ceremonies or use the space to have solitude, Drake said.
Quamash is the Nez Perce word for camas, a flowering hyacinth with a bulb that’s sweet when roasted. They thrive after prescribed fires, which burn small, emit less smoke and often go around green plants.
These burns leave the forest canopy intact, without damaging fire-adapted trees like white oaks. Drake notes that these small, controlled fires are different than the damaging, destructive ones we usually see in the news.
“It was really neat to go through there and show a lot of people that a lot of it just scorched, or gave opportunity for tarweed seeds to be harvested,” Drake said of the Quamash Prairie burn, “just renewing the ground for new things, and still seeing animals like snakes and insects moving around through it.”
He said the tribal fire program’s focus right now is on education, training tribal members and employees to participate in prescribed burns. And its biggest obstacle is that their efforts aren’t scalable.
“We’re just one group. And even with all these partnerships, it’s difficult to cover this large land mass,” he said. “Forty acres this year, maybe 40, 60 acres next year. The maintenance, of coming back and maintaining that, it gets to a point where your capacity can’t go any larger. You can’t do any more than 300 acres per year, is probably our capacity. So how do we keep moving that progress forward? Because eventually we hit a wall, until we get more partners or more people buying into it and doing it on their own.”
Another obstacle is convincing the non-Native public that more fire is a good thing, especially as the climate is changing.
“Trying to get people to buy into that is starting to become a little bit more difficult, with climate change happening,” Drake said.
Climate change is narrowing the annual window for prescribed burns, which he said is October and November. But otherwise, the burns are still effective, and traditional techniques are adaptable to changing climate conditions.
Drake said the results speak for themselves, if only the public could see the results. “It’s good stuff. It’s working. I’m not hearing very many controlled burns getting out of control.”
But their message may have finally reached the right ears.
Allies call for Congress to fund prescribed burns
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has introduced The National Prescribed Fire Act of 2020, a bill asking Congress to “make a serious investment in hazardous fuels management by increasing the pace and scale of controlled burns” through cooperative agreements between states, tribes, counties, fire districts, nongovernmental agencies such as the Nature Conservancy and private entities.
The bill allocates $300 million each to the U.S. Forest Service and Department of Interior to implement controlled burns on county, state and private lands.
“That’s in alignment with what tribes are doing,” Lake said of the bill. “You put the cohesive strategy together that tiers across jurisdictions, it’s all fire management agencies and organizations together, recognizing tribal sovereignty and self-governance to be part of that fire management system. And then you have the legislative support to help increase the pace and scale of the prescribed cultural burns that are desired.”
Lake, who’s a Karuk descendant of mixed white and Native North American tribal ancestry, said the U.S. Forest Service already has agreements with the Karuk Tribe for cooperative burning on national forests within the tribe’s ancestral territory in Northern California.
He also personally manages his family’s land using controlled burns.
“I use my property as a demonstration site,” he said. He spoke with Street Roots after a weekend spent there deer hunting, and gathering huckleberries and acorns. “What took 20 people to burn five years ago, now I can do with my kids.”
“If we’re going to learn to live with wildfire, we have to learn to use fire proactively,” Lake said, adding that the ability to gather nuts and hunt in burn areas near low-income communities such as his has the added benefit of making healthier food more accessible. “To me, that’s a form of justice for tribal families, and for the community.”
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