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This story is the second feature in a Vox special project, Changing With Our Climate, a limited-run series exploring Indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history — and the future.
Silas Yamamoto’s favorite part of his job is starting fires.
As a prescribed fire technician with the Karuk Tribe and the Mid Klamath Watershed Council based in Happy Camp, a small town in Northern California, Yamamoto sets controlled burns — smaller, deliberate fires that can help prevent bigger wildfires, reduce habitat for invasive species, and improve plant and soil health. Yamamoto has been setting a lot of fires in his ancestral homelands and lately, he’s been traveling around the country to help set fires in other communities, too. The goal is to decolonize our relationship to wildfires, remove barriers to using good fire, and prepare us for a world more impacted by the effects of climate change.
But he’s still not burning nearly as often as he would like to.
Across the country, wildfires are getting worse. In addition to the billions of dollars in damage from destroyed homes and infrastructure, these fires are increasingly deadly: Every year, wildfire smoke contributes to thousands of deaths in the US alone, not to mention other health impacts like reduced lung function and increased risk of dementia. And climate change makes extreme wildfires all the more likely as landscapes become warmer, drier, and more flammable.
All of this means that understanding how to control wildfires is more important than ever.
For Yamamoto, fire is a way of connecting with his tribal community and land, but he has bigger ambitions, too: He wants to organize major collaborative projects — between different states, sovereign Indigenous nations — that would spread fire across arbitrary property lines.
One of the barriers to effective fire management is the tangled web of property ownership across the country. Good fire mitigation techniques — like clearing flammable understory on corporate-owned land — aren’t as effective if the family land next door doesn’t do the same. To truly confront out-of-control wildfires and climate change, fire management will have to transcend those lines, which means understanding the land we live on as a shared responsibility, rather than a collection of individual properties.
“Fire doesn’t recognize property lines, right?” Yamamoto said. “That’s a very human construction.”
Fire has always been a part of Yamamoto’s Karuk culture, but until recently, state and federal authorities saw all fires as bad — a force of nature to suppress, not live with. For decades, the US embraced a policy of fire suppression, underscored by Smokey Bear’s “Only you can prevent forest fires” ads, that caused forests to become denser, and fires more frequent and powerful. Fire suppression in California, for example, undid generations of Indigenous land stewardship, which cultivated a landscape where fire, people, and plants could coexist. By lighting frequent, smaller fires, they created a sustainable cycle that cleared underbrush, regenerated plants and soils, and prevented the sort of “mega fires” we see today. But that stewardship was mercilessly extinguished in the 19th and 20th centuries: According to Bill Tripp, the director of natural resources and environmental policy for the Karuk Tribe, up until the 1930s, Karuk people were shot by white settlers for starting fires.
“Fire doesn’t recognize property lines, right? That’s a very human construction.”
Today there’s been an important and encouraging shift back toward more Indigenous burning practices. But even as Indigenous fire management finally begins to gain more respect, Indigenous fire practitioners are still limited by restrictive burning policies, land access, resources, and bureaucracy.
We’re caught in a negative feedback loop of scarier and more destructive fires. Yamamoto believes we should be spreading fire — not suppressing it: That’s why Yamamoto is working to spread Indigenous fire culture to non-Native fire practitioners across the country and develop partnerships that can tackle these challenges together.
“Prescribed fire isn’t going to be the one way that we’re going to be able to get out of this, it needs to be a variety of different factors,” Yamamoto said. “Whether or not we’re going to be able to start doing all of that before the whole forest burns down is something that’s on my mind.”
It’s not just fire — it’s healing
When he was around 10 years old, Yamamoto’s mother started taking him to burn bear grass for regalia and baskets. Those more positive experiences shaped the way he thinks about fire just as much as the negative impacts he has seen. “It’s always been a part of our culture,” Yamamoto said. “Always has been, always will be, but folks outside of it are just now starting to realize the importance of it.”
In 2020, Silas Yamamoto’s family home burned down in the Slater fire, a devastating blaze that destroyed over 100 homes in his hometown of Happy Camp, California. The Slater fire was part of a record-breaking fire season in California that saw thousands of fires burn millions of acres across the state, leading to dozens of deaths and billions in damage.
Yamamoto and his parents were forced to live out of a hotel room for over a month. After Red Cross money for the hotel ran out, they moved to a rental trailer that he says was way too small for three adults and their dogs. Yamamoto eventually moved out, renting a room from a local family. Yamamoto’s parents are still living in a trailer and have considered leaving the area completely. “It’s hard to live in an area that used to be so lush and green and beautiful that is now brush and standing matchsticks that will burn in the future,” he said. “It’s going to burn in the future. It’s just when.”
These days, Yamamoto is constantly juggling a busy schedule — traveling across the country or quickly shifting gears from a meeting with Cal Fire to helping out with an Indigenous Women-in-Fire Training Exchange program or heading out on fire assignment somewhere in state.
Starting this fall, with funding from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Yamamoto plans to lead a crew dedicated to prescribed burns in California, but they will also travel three months out of the year, learning from communities across the country. Yamamoto also hopes that his crew can bring an Indigenous perspective of cultural fire to areas that may be comfortable with fire but less familiar with an Indigenous approach to it. As fire risk and intensity increases, this kind of collaborative approach may be the key to surviving a more fiery world.
“Fire is just a part of the natural order of things, and if you remove that for long periods of time, you get these devastating mega fires where absolutely everything is burned up,” Yamamoto said. “You can’t fight nature, and it’s pointless to try to fight something that we don’t fully control.”
Although fire has always been a part of Yamamoto’s life, Indigenous-controlled burns have steadily gained wider acknowledgment in recent years. These practices work because they embrace the beneficial role that fire can have on plants and land. Prescribed burning can clear the landscape of fuels that might lead to larger and less controllable wildfires. Fire can also help soil health and seed germination.
But Indigenous fire has long been about more than just reducing the risk of a destructive wildfire.
“It’s not just fire,” said Melinda Adams, a member of the N’dee San Carlos Apache Tribe and an assistant professor at the University of Kansas. Adams’s research focuses on cultural fire, particularly in California and the Midwest. “It’s healing a lot of trauma that our peoples went through, and healing the landscapes that have also gone through degradation and trauma.”
For Indigenous people, cultural and community fire has always been a way of building a relationship with land and each other. “Not only are you tending to that space with fire, but then you’re coming back in and utilizing and having a relationship with that space because of the fire stewardship,” said Don Hankins, a Miwkoʔ (Miwok) traditional cultural practitioner and a professor of geography and planning at California State University, Chico.
As climate change continues to threaten our way of life, Hankins says that these relationships will become even more essential. If you understand the land and the fact that you cannot control it, you are more likely to find ways of adapting to it, rather than trying to force it to adapt to you. Hankins says that Indigenous people have always embraced this kind of evolution, responding to different conditions in the climate.
So even as climate change and the legacy of fire suppression present new challenges, he believes Indigenous ways of thinking are ready to meet the moment. But that means that policymakers need to start listening to Indigenous people more.
Hankins is working to push for changes like recognizing the role of Indigenous stewardship and prescribed burning under the National Environmental Policy Act, the law that requires federal agencies to assess the environmental impacts of their actions, and the Endangered Species Act and Clean Air Act. These changes could make more space for Indigenous fire management, and pave the way for more resources and freedom for Indigenous fire practitioners.
One idea that Yamamoto is especially keen to get moving is cross-boundary burns. The Forest Service, for example, might start a burn on federal land that continues onto private land, where a partner organization like the Mid Klamath Watershed Council can take it over. But developing processes and systems to coordinate those projects requires a level of collaboration that is unfamiliar to some partners more used to operating on their own.
As land co-management agreements pop up between tribes and government agencies, Indigenous experts stress that while these partnerships are a good step, they only work if tribes are not treated as junior partners. “We will never achieve what we need to do at scale until everybody’s participating together,” Don Hankins said. “I think that’s a really important thing, but it has to be Indigenous-led.”
To ensure that happens, Hankins, Yamamoto, and others are working to find the kind of scientific evidence that policymakers might find more convincing than generations of successful Indigenous stewardship. To do that successfully, Indigenous experts say a mindset shift is needed just as much as a policy shift.
“There’s definitely a lot of education that needs to happen with the public understanding the importance of Indigenous knowledges and not just conceptualizing them as a trope or as something that’s in the past,” Melinda Adams said. “This is something that’s going to save our planet.”
