Woman wearing yellow throwing acorns on scorched earth

‘There’s good fire and bad fire.’ An Indigenous practice may be key to preventing wildfires

For thousands of years, North American tribes carefully burned forests to manage the land. The future may lie in a return to that past.

Karuk Tribal member Kathy McCovey tosses black-oak acorns to reseed her land in Happy Camp, California, after a wildfire incinerated her home. The acorns, a traditional Karuk food, are prized in part because they can be stored for months. A retired Forest Service anthropologist, McCovey belongs to a Karuk fire-lighting brigade that sets carefully controlled fires to manage the forest as her ancestors did. For years, she and other tribal members have begged authorities to let them burn the adjacent forest. Tragically, their pleas have had little impact—a story repeated in much of the North American West.

In Margo Robbins’s home, the first thing you notice is family: portraits of children and grandchildren in a crowded display on the wall. The second thing you notice is accomplishment: lines of academic and athletic trophies from those children and grandchildren. The third thing is baskets—Robbins is a Yurok basket-weaver, part of a tradition in her northern Californian nation that stretches back centuries upon centuries.

What you don’t see is that her home is one of the nerve centers of a cultural and political struggle that has been slowly changing the North American West. Her living room is where she co-founded the Indigenous Peoples Burn Network, a growing collaboration of Native nations, partnered with nonprofit organizations, academic researchers, and government

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