Tribal members take responsibility toward the land by reviving ancestral cultural burning.
WORDS AND IMAGES Jeanine Pfeiffer
AUDIO AND VIDEO Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance
Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance (TERA) crew completing a cultural burn among tule reeds along Big Valley Rancheria’s Clear Lake shoreline. Photo: Ronald Montez Sr.
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In Northern California’s Lake County, young and young-ish Tribal women and men are reclaiming their eco-cultural heritage four generations after their great-great-grandparents were massacred, enslaved, and ousted from their homelands, shamed into not speaking their languages, and forbidden from following customary lifeways. For Pomo Tribes whose ancestral territories surround Clear Lake — California’s largest and most ancient lake — fire lies at the heart of those traditional lifeways and is embedded in their languages. Northern Pomo, for example, one of several Pomo languages spoken in the region, has many words for fire: ho miye:din, “fire burning along”; seʔe malijin, “brush fire”; kadi malijin, “grass fire”; kako malijin, “forest fire”; and so on. Fire, then, also lies at the heart of current efforts to revitalize Indigenous biocultural diversity.
Ronald Montez Sr., Tribal Elder and Tribal Historical Preservation Officer of the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians, remembers his Aunt Elvina setting fires behind the Elem Indian Colony reservation where he grew up. “During certain times of the year, when the weeds reached a given height, Auntie would gather all the kids, give us soaking wet gunny sacks and buckets, and light a fire in a big square — just big enough for us to contain it. When the fire got near to us kids, we would start slapping the ground with our wet sacks, chasing the fire, smothering it. By the time the fire trucks showed up — and they always did because people who didn’t understand what we were doing would report us — the fire had burned out.”
Throughout the western United States, most people fear fire because they have no history with “good fire” — the art and practice of cultural burning. Instead, they grew up with the misguided Smokey-the-Bear mantra conceived by the U.S. Forest Service: “Only you can prevent forest fires.” As a result of that approach, California’s woodlands, once intensively and extensively managed by thousands of Tribal bands, lapsed into neglect, becoming overgrown and, with the extended drought that the state has long been experiencing, extremely dry: a statewide tinder box.
Most people fear fire because they have no history with ‘good fire’ — the art and practice of cultural burning.
It took over ten million acres burned in catastrophic megafires between 2002 and 2021 for California to recognize that 120 years of ecologically ignorant fire suppression policies needed to be reversed. Recent executive orders by California Governor Gavin Newsom and legislation passed by the state assembly supporting prescribed fire are allowing good fire to experience a renaissance. Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, Pomo, Maidu, Wintun, Nisenan, Plains Miwok, North Fork Mono, Mechoopda, Luiseño, Pala, and Tule River Tribes and Tribal members all held cultural burns in 2022.
The Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance (TERA), formed in 2019 in Lake County, has a mission “to cultivate land stewardship, livelihood, and leadership skills that weave collaborative relationships between Tribal members and the community at large for the benefit of all lands and beings.” Centered in a small office donated by the Robinson Rancheria Pomo Indians of California, TERA aims to build Tribal capacity to manage ancestral lands by offering paid employment and certification programs in prescribed burning, emergency medical response, and environmental hazards.
Good fire is being applied by TERA on Tribal, private, county, state, and federal lands along with agencies that in the past opposed cultural burning — and arrested or imprisoned Tribal members who attempted it — but now embrace collaborative cultural burning events. Following several seasons of returning good fire to oak woodlands and tule reed marshes, using willow bioengineering to restore eroded streambanks, and replanting hillsides with native species, TERA’s crew is now inundated with requests for their expertise.
Through TERA, dozens of Indigenous recruits from California and beyond are receiving and applying hands-on training in fuels reduction, cultural burning, traditional ecological knowledge, invasive species removal, and riparian restoration. Two federally recognized lakeside Tribes with significant landholdings — Robinson Rancheria Pomo Indians and Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians — hosted cultural burns in the past year. The Big Valley Pomo recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Clear Lake State Park, facilitating future Indigenous comanagement of parkland containing Big Valley’s original village site (Xabenapo), burial grounds, and hundreds of acres of culturally significant plants and animals. Plans include cultural burning, to be performed in partnership with TERA, alongside traditional tending of oak, manzanita, and tule reed habitats.
Today’s Pomo generations are learning how to apply ancient practices to cultivate native foods, traditional medicinal and basketry plants, and steward flora and fauna used in ceremony and regalia by carefully setting and monitoring fires. Culturally significant species, such as edible acorns, sacred angelica root, willow and sedge for basketry, and elderberry, whose branches are made into clapper sticks to accompany traditional Pomo songs, all depend on routinely set fires to prosper. Although much of the traditional ecological knowledge and in situ tending practices held by Tribal aunties and Elders died when they passed on, oral histories and remembrances, combined with hands-on experimentation and intertribal expertise sharing, are empowering Pomo Tribes to reignite good fires that lay dormant for far too long.
Culturally significant species all depend on routinely set fires to prosper.
TERA’s services are desperately needed, as climate change has hit Lake County — one of California’s most impoverished regions — especially hard. Over sixty percent of the county’s landmass has been subjected to catastrophic wildfire in the past seven years, harmful algal blooms plague its overly warm waterways, and after years of unrelenting drought, a sacred fish — the Clear Lake hitch — teeters on the brink of extinction. Good fire simultaneously restores biocultural diversity and addresses climate change impacts by reinstating Indigenous stewardship practices that make landscapes more fire resistant, protect watersheds by restoring streambanks and reducing excess vegetation (which raises the water table), and rehabilitate endangered lakeside tule reed beds that serve as vital habitat for Clear Lake hitch juveniles and adults.
Good fire simultaneously restores biocultural diversity and addresses climate change impacts by reinstating Indigenous stewardship practices that make landscapes more fire resistant.
Here, eleven Tribal staff members and leaders talk about why they have chosen to be affiliated with TERA, why they are investing time and energy in TERA field training sessions, and what this training means to them as parents, husbands, workers, leaders, and small business owners. For each person, we see how promoting and cultivating good fire is radically different from “fighting” or “suppressing” fire and how engaging in cultural burning enables Tribal members to align land management practices with the deepest parts of themselves.
TERA crew undertaking a cultural burn in the oak woodlands on Robinson Rancheria Pomo Indians’ ancestral lands.
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TERA crew undertaking a cultural burn in the oak woodlands on Robinson Rancheria’s ancestral lands.
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Chris McCloud
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Daniel Driskell
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Diana McCloud
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Don Calit
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Lance McCloud
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Loren Uriarte
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Rachael Campbell
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Richard White
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Stoney Timmons
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Tim Nelson
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Tyrone Earl Mitchell
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TERA crew undertaking a cultural burn in the oak woodlands on Robinson Rancheria’s ancestral lands.
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Watch TERA Cultural Burning – Thoughts from the Field, a video of the TERA crew undertaking a cultural burn.
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Jeanine Pfeiffer, PhD, is an ethnoecologist focusing on biocultural diversity. Her award-winning essays (five of which have been nominated for a Pushcart prize), research articles, poems, and films have been published in major media and journals, anthologized, radio broadcast, and exhibited in art galleries. Follow Jeanine on jeaninepfeiffer.com and on Twitter @JeaninePfeiffer
