For over 100 years, it has been illegal for Indigenous tribes in California to practice traditional burning to prevent catastrophic wildfires. Now, the Karuk Tribe in Humboldt and Siskiyou counties is bringing fire back.
Julia Muldavin’s 11 minute film is entitled: This California Tribe Is Fighting Wildfires With Fire. Karuk spokespeople include Herman Albers, and Chook Chook Hillman, Karuk Department of Natural Resources. The film was posted on YouTube in October 2019.
Sadly the message and cultural fire practice did not spread fast enough to lessen the catastrophic impact of the 2020 record-setting California wildfire season. It burned 4 1/4 million Acres.
In an extraordinary case of symmetry that shows that cultural intentional burning is a shared practice among indigenous peoples – the next segment of this program takes you to Australia. For decades now Aborigine elders and their young students have campaigned to bring back the practice of cultural burning. And they warned if nothing was done to protect the forests, bush and grass lands there would be devastating wildfires across Australia.
The world watched in horror and grief when 46 million acres burned in the 2019/2020 fire season and over 1 1/4 billion wild animals perished.
ABC, the Australian public broadcast service, produced a moving film entitled: How Indigenous Fire Management Practices Could Protect Bushland. It was posted in the aftermath of the fires in April 2020. This radio program contains excerpts.
The guide through the film is Victor Steffensen, author of the 2020 book: Fire Country: How Indigenous Fire Management Could Help Save Australia. The film opens with him setting a humble fire with one match. Victor Steffensen is connected to Aboriginal culture through his mother and two elders who taught him: Tommy George and George Musgrave.
In a decade of workshops across a range of different ecosystems, Steffensen advocates for a return to cultural burning and indigenous-led fire and country management.
Podcast (file2): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)
