Maintaining the Mosaic: The role of indigenous burning in land management

Abstract

This article highlights the findings of the literature on aboriginal fire from the human-and the land-centered disciplines, and suggests that the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples be incorporated into plans for reintroducing fire to the nation's forests. Traditional knowledge represents the outcome of long experimentation with application of fire by indigenous people, which can inform contemporary policy discussions.

Full text

Journal of Forestry •November 200136
Every landscape reflects the his-
tory and culture of the people
who inhabit it. The worldview
of a society is often written more truth-
fully on the land than in its docu-
ments. The current American land-
scape represents the historical legacy of
one worldview superimposed on an-
other, the colonial overlaying the in-
digenous. Nowhere is this history more
apparent than in the attitudes toward
fire, attitudes made manifest on the
landscape.
Euro-Americans arrived in North
America bearing their folk knowledge
that held fire in forests to be destruc-
tive and hazardous to humans (Arno
1985; Lewis 1982). This view con-
trasted sharply with the traditional
knowledge of the indigenous inhabi-
tants, who embraced the benefits of
burning and were skilled in applica-
tion of fire technology.
Fire suppression began soon after
colonization, and its effects followed the
expansion of the frontier westward. An-
thropogenic fire all but disappeared
from eastern forests by the early 1700s
and from the West by 1899 (Arno
1985). The consequences of suppres-
sion are written on the landscape today,
creating what former Secretary of Inte-
rior Bruce Babbitt (1997) called “a crisis
in forest health.” Fire suppression was a
“catastrophic disturbance for those
ecosystems which had been influenced
by anthropogenic fire throughout their
development” (Packard 1993).
The results of fire suppression have
been well documented for ecosystems
throughout North America (e.g.,
Botkin 1990; Wilson 1992; Pyne
1995; Williams 2000a). Parklands
were replaced by dense forests (Biswell
1989; Lewis 1993), prairies and savan-
nas disappeared (Lewis 1993), and re-
Robin Wall Kimmerer and Frank Kanawha Lake
This article highlights the findings of the literature on aboriginal fire from the human- and the
land-centered disciplines, and suggests that the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples
be incorporated into plans for reintroducing fire to the nation’s forests. Traditional knowledge
represents the outcome of long experimentation with application of fire by indigenous people,
which can inform contemporary policy discussions.
Keywords: biodiversity; fire; history; policy; traditional knowledge
ABSTRACT
The Role of
Indigenous Burning
in Land Management

generation patterns were dramatically
altered. Fire suppression has promoted
stand homogeneity and the associated
problems of insects and disease, dis-
rupting the age-class mosaic that was
historically maintained by burning
(Barrett 2000).
The loss of fire in the American
landscape is inextricably linked with
the history of federal Indian policy that
removed tribal people and, therefore,
indigenous land management. In the
words of Williams (2000a),
The basis for much of our forest
health crisis nationwide lies in the al-
most complete cessation of burning by
Indians in fire-adapted ecosystems.
The crisis is commonly attributed to
the advent of systematic fire suppres-
sion and the Smokey Bear mentality of
the 20th century. To fully come to
grips with our forest health crisis
today, we must go back to much ear-
lier land management decisions that
ended thousands of years of Indian in-
teractions with the land, especially
through the use of fire.
Policymakers are struggling with the
outcome of that history and trying to
develop new management policy to re-
store forest health and biodiversity. The
policy pendulum has now swung back
from fire suppression to recognition that
fire regimes are an important part of
ecosystem health. However, the role of
humans in a “natural” fire regime con-
tinues to be debated (Kilgore 1985).
National forest policy now calls for
managers to recreate forests of the pre-
settlement type. Babbitt (1997) pro-
posed that fire be reintroduced for
restoration of ecosystem health and
productivity. If we are to manage for-
ests with the intent of restoration of the
presettlement condition, then it is im-
perative that we understand the role of
indigenous practices in shaping the
landscape (Kimmerer 2000).
Every ecosystem in North America
has been affected in some way by a fire
regime (Pyne 1982; Gruell 1985;
Williams 2000a) manipulated by in-
digenous people. Much forest science,
including ecological classifications of
vegetation types, arose from observa-
tion of forests that were essentially in
transition from conditions of indige-
nous fire management to post-colonial
fire suppression. Our understanding of
forest processes may thus be based on
an anomalous, transitional landscape
(Phillips 1985). “Humans have been a
part of the ecosystem over the past ten
centuries of major climatic change, so
that all forests have developed under
some kind of human influence. This
influence must be accounted for as an
important part of any study of forest
structure and dynamics” (Russell
1997). Further, Anderson (1997) sug-
gests that
a full understanding of wild plant pro-
duction will be achieved only through
the development of a better rap-
prochement between the social, his-
torical and biological sciences. It
would require the sustained and coop-
erative efforts of scholars using both
human- and land-centered avenues of
research.
Extent of Indigenous Burning
In contrast to the romanticized view
of native peoples living with minimal
impact on unspoiled nature (Botkin
1990; Martinez 1998), the presettle-
ment landscape was strongly influ-
enced by indigenous land management
to enhance productivity (Botkin 1992;
Wilson 1992; Blackburn and Ander-
son 1993; Pyne 1995). The most pow-
erful tool for landscape manipulation
was fire. Fire was used by indigenous
people throughout North America
(Kilgore 1985; Williams 2000a), and
its presence or absence strongly shaped
the presettlement vegetation. For ex-
ample, evidence suggests that the dom-
inance of oak and chestnut in Ap-
palachian forests was enhanced by vig-
orous resprouting after indigenous
burning (Abrams 1986, 1992; Del-
court and Delcourt 1997). The extent
of tallgrass prairie of the Midwest is
thought to be largely a result of Indian
fires (e.g., Axelrod 1985).
Western forests, often thought to be
shaped primarily by wildfire, may be
more the product of indigenous burn-
ing than previously thought. For exam-
ple, the distribution and historical
dominance of sugar pine cannot be ex-
plained by frequency of “natural” light-
ning ignition alone. Cultural data pro-
vide evidence that sugar pine stands
were managed by tribal groups who
took “ownership” of individual stands
and applied fire to reduce encroach-
ment by competing species (Schenk
and Gifford 1952). Dated fire scars on
sugar pine offer the best evidence of
heightened aboriginal fire frequency in
the Sierra Nevada (Lewis 1993), which
altered the distribution and abundance
of numerous species.
So ubiquitous was Indian burning
that its absence also shaped forest com-
position. The coastal forests of the Pa-
cific Northwest have a very low inci-
dence of lightning fire. Williams
(2000a) notes that coastal redwood
forests were little affected by burning,
although small clearings were made.
He argues that fire was less prominent
among peoples who relied primarily on
marine resources for food and materi-
als. However, a few miles inland even
the coastal redwoods contained patches
of prairie “too numerous to mention”
which
if left to themselves would doubtless
soon have produced forest, but the In-
dians were accustomed to burn them
annually so as to gather seeds. These
prairies were of incalculable value to
the Indians, not alone for their veg-
etable products, but for the game
found upon them (Loud [1918]
quoted in Lewis 1993).
Resource-rich patches in the old-
growth coastal forests were created by
indigenous manipulation of the fire re-
turn interval.
Goals of Indigenous Burning
Fires were intentionally ignited to
fulfill a wide variety of purposes, from
clearing village sites (Brown 2000) to
long-distance signaling. Lewis (1993)
documents more than 70 uses of fire,
including treefelling, clearing travel
corridors, fireproofing settlements, and
hunting. Burning also was used to re-
duce pest populations, including ro-
dents and biting insects, as well as for
collecting edible insects such as Pan-
dora moths and grasshoppers. Burning
37
November 2001 •Journal of Forestry

in oak woodlands reduced the popula-
tion levels of acorn weevils and yielded
a more abundant acorn crop, which was
easier to harvest after burning (Mc-
Carthy 1993). Riparian areas com-
monly were burned to attract game an-
imals to the new grass and tree sprouts
(Williams 2000a). Fire still is widely
used in management of basketry plants,
to provide a consistent crop of straight,
slender shoots and roots (Ortiz 1993).
From crop management to range man-
agement, fire was a ubiquitous tool.
Indigenous people used fire to
modify the environment for their own
survival. The most important out-
come of fire use was the intentional
creation of a mosaic of habitat patches
that promoted food security by ensur-
ing a diverse and productive landscape
(Lewis 1985; Williams 2000a). Pro-
ducing such a mosaic promoted sta-
bility in the food supply by creating
multiple resource patches. Maintain-
ing a diversity of habitats buffers the
impact of natural fluctuation in a sin-
gle food species and increases overall
productivity. For example, fire was
used to create prairies which would at-
tract elk, deer, and other game. In-
digenous people skillfully modified
the fire regime to create a range of for-
est openings in many different stages
of postfire succession, which en-
hanced the diversity and yield of
game, berries, root crops, edible seeds,
and medicinal plants. In contrast, fire
was often used by the colonists with a
different intent—uniformity, such as
production of pastures, cropland, and
plantations (Williams 2000a).
Philosophy
The policy of fire suppression in
Western society arises from the myth
that nature can be controlled. Ironi-
cally, trying to control nature through
fire suppression has led to greater un-
predictability. The indigenous world-
view emphasizes the dual nature, cre-
ative and destructive, of all forces. Fire
can be a force for good as it warms
homes and stimulates grasses, but it
can also be immensely destructive. The
role of humans is not to control nature,
but to maintain a balance between
these opposing forces.
This balance is based on recognition
of reciprocal relationships between
human and nonhuman members of
the ecological community. As co-
equals, humans are dependent on non-
humans, and the reverse is also true
(Pierotti and Wildcat 2000). Human
application of fire is part of that inter-
dependence. The ethic of reciprocal re-
sponsibility underlies the indigenous
use of fire, an adaptive symbiosis in
which humans and nonhumans both
benefit from burning. For example, in-
digenous people of the Northwest rou-
tinely burned grasslands and savannas
to increase the yield of root crops, such
as camas and other geophytes. The
people realized a direct benefit from
burning, and so did the plants, as the
fire frequency and extent produced ex-
pansion in the patch size and popula-
tion density of the geophyte species
(Anderson 1997).
Meeting the responsibility for reci-
procity among members of the ecosys-
tem is understood to be simultaneously
pragmatic and spiritual. Application of
fire is viewed by many indigenous
groups as a spiritual responsibility to
the land, a tool that was given to peo-
ple to fulfill the caregiving responsibil-
ities for the land (Martinez 1998) and
to promote world renewal (Krober and
Gifford 1949). The Karuk people of
northern California burn ritually in
New Year ceremonies. Silas Whitman
of the Nez Perce tribe states, “We burn
because it is good for the land; fire
brings more life.” For example, the
prairies of Walpole Island First Nation
have been ritually burned since time
immemorial by the Potawatomi,
Ojibwe, and Ottawa peoples who ac-
cept this as their responsibility and
name themselves the “keepers of the
fire.” The prairies of Walpole Island are
renowned among ecologists for their
species richness, which far exceeds the
diversity where the indigenous fire
regime has been interrupted.
Evidence
Sophisticated application of fire
technology has been a major compo-
nent of indigenous land management
for millennia. The landscape encoun-
tered by colonists was largely shaped by
indigenous burning, yet until recently,
few people acknowledged that Indian
fire use had an impact on the land
(Pyne 1995; Williams 2000a). A for-
estry textbook published as recently as
1973 portrayed the view that “no ha-
bitual or systematic burning was car-
ried out by the Indians” (Williams
2000a). This marginalization of tradi-
tional knowledge arose partly out of ig-
norance and prejudice, but also be-
cause of the fragmentary nature of the
evidence (Williams 2000a). Accounts
of aboriginal burning are found in
notes, journals, and the oral tradition.
These are qualitative, anecdotal sources
that are not readily accepted by West-
ern scientists whose training is usually
limited to interpretation of quantita-
tive data. Much traditional knowledge
has been lost to time and forced assim-
ilation, but much persists in the oral
tradition and practices of contempo-
rary native communities, who are only
rarely consulted as equal partners in
land management.
The correspondence between tradi-
tional ecological knowledge of fire re-
sponse and later scientific evidence is
very strong. Examination of traditional
knowledge offers an opportunity for
crosscultural verification of scientific
hypotheses concerning fire manage-
ment. There is an increasing body of ev-
idence noted by Brown (2000) that val-
idates the oral tradition, through data
collected from historical documents,
dendrochronology, charcoal profiles,
archeological evidence, and statistical
analysis of land survey records. Paleo-
ecological data also support interpreta-
tion of widespread Indian burning and
its effects on vegetation composition
(e.g., Clark and Royall 1996; Delcourt
and Delcourt 1997). However, it must
be acknowledged that there are many
pitfalls in the interpretation of such in-
direct evidence (Williams 2000a). The
widespread significance of indigenous
burning is by no means universally ac-
cepted. Kilgore (1985) summarizes the
arguments critical of the importance of
aboriginal burning, which focus primar-
ily on issues of scale.
The main impediment to scientific
acceptance of the wide impact of abo-
riginal burning arises from a lack of un-
derstanding of the cultural context in
which it took place. For many peoples,
manipulation of the landscape through
38 Journal of Forestry •November 2001

November 2001 •Journal of Forestry 39
skillful application of fire was critical to
cultural survival, and enhanced food
productivity made agriculture unneces-
sary (Biswell 1989).The material cul-
ture of many tribal peoples simply
could not have been sustained without
extensive use of fire (Blackburn and An-
derson 1993). In terms of energy effi-
ciency, fire was the most potent land
management tool available to indige-
nous people. Millennia of experimenta-
tion and detailed empirical observa-
tions led to a sophisticated application
of fire technology. Coupled with a
worldview that emphasizes the role of
humans as active participants in nature,
fire was integral to many cultures.
The Practice
A careful examination of the philos-
ophy and practice of Indian burning
reveals that it differs from a nonan-
thropogenic fire regime (i.e., wildfire)
in five important respects: seasonality,
frequency, extent, site, and outcome
(Williams 2000a).
Seasonality of burning varied with
the tribe and the ecosystem in question,
but in general fire was applied at a care-
fully considered time that would mini-
mize its destructive nature while har-
nessing its creative power. Numerous
studies confirm that the timing of in-
digenous burns differs significantly
from the seasonality of natural light-
ning ignitions (Barrett 1980; Barrett
and Arno 1982; Lewis 1982; Arno
1985; Brown 2000; Williams 2000a).
Lightning fires are most abundant in
the late summer, but indigenous fires
were set in seasons less conducive to
wildfire. For example, in the boreal for-
ests of northern Alberta, fire was ap-
plied in the early spring when the grass
was dry but the soil was still moist and
the surrounding forests were too wet to
carry a fire. The small-scale, low-inten-
sity burns created openings in the forest
where regrowth was accelerated on the
newly blackened earth, extending the
growing season in this harsh environ-
ment by several weeks and attracting
abundant game (Lewis 1982).
The season of burning also de-
pended on the desired outcome. For ex-
ample, people in the Southwest would
burn the chaparral in the fall to increase
forage for deer. The lower temperatures
and increased soil moisture favored vig-
orous resprouting, which was beneficial
in attracting deer in the winter. In con-
trast, if the intent was to clear land for
tobacco cultivation, the chaparral was
ignited in the spring, when a hotter
burn would discourage resprouting and
prepare a suitable seedbed. In the Great
Plains, Indians rotated the seasonality
of burning as a tool to influence sea-
sonal movement of bison, in synchrony
with their own semi-nomadic move-
ments. In the mosaic of tallgrass prairie
and aspen parkland, the prairie was
burned in the fall, forcing bison into
the parklands that the people inhabited
during the winter. In spring, the park-
lands were burned, which stimulated
movement of the bison out onto the
open prairies (Lewis 1982). This so-
phisticated application of fire required
extensive knowledge of the vegetation
response, the life history of herbivores,
and their interactions with predators.
Williams (2000a) reports an excep-
tion to the general pattern of burning
in the spring or fall, when fire intensity
would be reduced. In northern Califor-
nia and in the Willamette Valley of
Oregon, Kalapuya people burned the
grasslands in the summer, when fire
might be expected to be more intense
and potentially destructive. This un-
usual midsummer burn created a sec-
ond flush of growth in the fall when
the rains returned, a dual cropping sys-
tem that maintained local herbivore
populations. However, the intensity of
the summer burns was quite low be-
cause of their high frequency, which re-
duced fuel accumulation. Appropriate
season of burn was thus understood in
interaction with fire frequency.
Frequency. Most wildfires are started
by lightning strikes; however, scholars
of aboriginal fire agree that anthro-
pogenic fire far exceeded the frequency
of natural lightning strikes. “Lightning
in fire-adapted ecosystems does not
usually cause fires. Lightning tends to
strike…high rocky points, individual
trees, or other places where no ignition
occurs. Most snag fires are soon extin-
guished by the rain that usually accom-
panies lightning” (Williams 2000b).
Indigenous people enhanced fire fre-
quency not only with more ignitions
but in creating fuel piles so that areas
would burn that ordinarily might not
carry a fire. Several studies of fire return
intervals (Barrett 1980; Blackburn and
Anderson 1993; Brown 2000; Williams
2000b) indicate that fire scars are much
more abundant in areas of Indian habi-
tation than in comparable regions not
managed by indigenous people.
The frequency of fire application
generally was based on the manage-
ment goal. Land was burned annually
if the intent was to increase game by
providing new grass forage. Berry
patches were maintained by burning
on a cycle of three to five years, de-
pending on the ecology of the target
species. A 10- to 12-year fire interval
was typically observed around beaver
ponds to maximize regeneration of
aspen and willows to feed beaver
(Lewis 1982; Williams 2000a). The re-
sult of altered fire frequency was to cre-
ate a mosaic of successional patches,
varying in species composition and age
structure, which ensured a diversity of
plant foods, medicines, game, and ma-
terials for the subsistence of the people.
Extent. Aboriginal burning also dif-
fers from wildfire in its extent. Most
burns were of a modest scale, designed
to maintain small successional patches.
Large-scale burns could be viewed as
maladaptive, disrupting the diverse mo-
saic, disrupting ecotones, and decreas-
ing productivity and stability of the
food supply (Lewis 1993). Extent of
fires was controlled by careful timing,
increased fire frequency and reduced
fuel load, and the use of natural fire
breaks. The mosaic of patches differing
in successional age and flammability
would itself limit the extent of fires.
Ironically, trying to control nature through fire
suppression has led to greater unpredictability.

Journal of Forestry •November 200140
Without doubt, fire control was not
uniformly effective, just as we experi-
ence today, and some fires escaped,
with unintended consequences. One
notable exception to the general pattern
of small-scale burning is the huge con-
flagrations traditionally set by peoples
of the northern Great Plains. Prairie
fires would extend for miles and were
used to influence the distribution of
buffalo. This large scale of burning re-
flects the very different ways of Plains
peoples, whose food security arose not
from a mosaic of diverse patches in a
local area, but from maximizing pro-
ductivity of a single species, the buffalo.
A broad range of effects is seen, de-
pending on the resource needs of the
people and the flammability of their
landscape.
Site. Indian fires also differ from
lightning-ignited wildfires in the sites
at which they occur. For example, ri-
parian areas that might not burn with-
out assistance were regularly ignited to
improve waterfowl habitat and encour-
age growth of basketry materials and
certain medicines. Locations of fires
might reflect annual migrations along
the elevational gradient, which enabled
people to take advantage of seasonally
available foods. By understanding dif-
ferential burning conditions, Indians
were able to restrict fires to certain
areas, matching the fire regime to the
ecological conditions and life history of
the target species and thus enhancing
productivity.
Application to Current Goals
Aboriginal use of fire to create and
maintain a landscape mosaic is an an-
cient practice that can be a key to
meeting contemporary land-use goals.
Fire was used as a pragmatic tool to
meet the goals of indigenous practi-
tioners, to increase the yield and diver-
sity of subsistence foods. These practi-
cal goals were also coupled to a spiri-
tual responsibility to carefully use fire
to multiply life. The “natural” fire
regime was manipulated to produce a
richly diverse mosaic of vegetation
types differing in successional age and
species composition.
The intent of contemporary forest
management is no longer to support
the subsistence economy of human be-
ings but to enhance ecosystem health,
productivity, and biodiversity. It is in
this capacity that indigenous knowl-
edge of fire is an invaluable resource for
forest managers. The same indigenous
strategy that was used to increase bio-
diversity and productivity for subsis-
tence can also be used to enhance and
maintain biodiversity for goals of eco-
system health.
For example, indigenous Kalapuya
people of Oregon’s Willamette Valley
routinely burned savannas and mead-
ows to increase the yield of food plants
such as camas and tarweed (Williams
2000b). Other postfire species in-
creased as well, among them the Kin-
caids Lupine, a legume that is vital to
the life cycle of the Fenders blue butter-
fly (Schulz and Crone 1998). At least
24 species of butterflies once inhabited
these meadows; since cessation of in-
digenous burning, seven have become
extinct and six, including the Fenders
blue, are listed as endangered species
(Schulz and Crone 1998). Restoration
of the indigenous fire regime and the
mosaic it created can have significant
impacts on biodiversity.
Restoration of indigenous-style
burning is not a panacea for problems
of fuel accumulation and structural
changes that have accompanied a cen-
tury of fire suppression, but it should
be part of the strategy for restoration of
forest health. Pyne (1995) states that
to restore natural conditions without
the Indians and the things they did,
including burning, is to construct an
artificial landscape that is historically
and ecologically incomplete. The rea-
son for reinstating fire is not to try and
restore pre-Columbian vistas, but be-
cause we cannot sustain the landscape
we value without it.
The suppression of traditional care-
giving practices has contributed to the
current state of forest health; resump-
tion of human responsibility for fire
can be part of the solution. Indigenous
practice and philosophy offer us an al-
ternative view of the “natural” fire
regime, in which humans regain their
role as “keepers of the fire” and the
symbiotic relationship between hu-
mans, forests, and fire is reestablished
for mutual benefit.
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Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi)
(rwkimmer@syr.edu) is associate profes-
sor, SUNY College of Environmental Sci-
ence and Forestry, One Forestry Drive,
Syracuse, NY 13210-2778; Frank
Kanawha Lake is graduate research assis-
tant, Pacific Traditional Ecological
Knowledge Program, Intertribal Pro-
grams Office, College of Oceanic and
Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State Uni-
versity, Corvallis.
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November 2001 •Journal of Forestry