Fire and Collective Futures
The LA fires have drastically amplified the features of climate collapse in the fire-prone terrain—not least the tragedy of people losing loved ones, communities, and homes. Meanwhile, media coverage continues to politically weaponize the current moment as the unfolding stories focus on who is to blame. There is an echo of Mike Davis’ observation that the “[p]olitical as distinct from scientific discourse has long been obsessed with identifying an ‘incendiary Other’ responsible for fire destruction.”[1] While there are disproportionate impacts across the region, which have the potential to be unevenly developed, this article proposes how we might collectively imagine a future with fire.
Present-day Los Angeles is part of the ancestral homelands of Indigenous Peoples, including the Tongva, Chumash, and Kizh People (Figure 1). While there is a pained feeling for a present dominated by the practice of sacrificing life, time and time again, it is necessary to remember that although the recent fires further debilitate the life-making processes of these places, they are not irreparable if attention is given to what is required for living. That is, what is required of us for life to flourish. It calls for contending with the reality that the damaged environment talks back, and it does so rather loudly. However, as we witness communities coming together to reassess their surroundings, it is a humbling moment to collectively think about centering life, ways of living on Indigenous homelands, and learning to live with fire. One may be compelled to think about stretched time. As in the varying and contrasting life cycles within ecosystems, environments, and place-specific fire regimes. As is the case of occupied Indigenous homelands now called California, Indigenous People adapted burning “on both ecological and evolutionary time scales"[2] to form desired fire regimes “as coupled socio-ecological systems.”[3]
Figure 1. Map of Indigenous homelands, western United States. Source: Native Land Digital, Native Land CA, accessed January 24 2025, https://native-land.ca/.
Cultural Burning
While fire regimes vary from place to place, diverging across biomes in forests, savannahs, grasslands, and shrublands, fire’s life-giving capacities become evident under Indigenous stewardship practices of cultural burning. Defined as the “[intentional] use of fire by a cultural group (e.g., family unit, Tribe, clan/moiety, society) for a variety of purposes and outcomes,” fire and cultural burning have long been a part of living on these lands—producing and shaping Indigenous worlds for millennia.[4] Indigenous communities developed deep, intimate, and site-specific knowledges of their homelands, understanding fire as an inherent element of the terrain and cultivating generations of fire knowledge.[5] These knowledges are reflected, implemented, and broadened in their respective daily stewardship as practices of world-making.
Cultural burning was once widespread and formed Indigenous spaces from immediate to larger scales. The practice diminished in the twentieth century due to ongoing land occupation, changing land uses, and its historic criminalization under US governance. The scale of legalized cultural and prescribed burning varied, although it was always much lower than what it was under Indigenous stewardship. Fire primarily came to be seen as destructive to society, leading to fire suppression and expulsion. The marginalization of cultural burning and the limitations placed on prescribed burning marked a notable, albeit gradual, shift from living with fire to the current dominance of the threat of wildfires. Wildfires are assumed to occur amid wildlands and at the wildland-urban interface, an abstraction described as “where humans and their development meet or intermix with wildland fuel.”[6] It fixes the landscape in an imminent wildfire crisis.
State approaches to the wildfire crisis are primarily shaped by entrenched ideologies of property, domination of nature, and securitization of natural resources. These create conditions that place people at risk—especially those most socially, economically, and environmentally vulnerable. In turn, the solutions and subsequent processes within these bounds create false hope. They pander to and perpetuate ideas of, on the one hand, technocratic solutions that do not yield safe communities for humans, trees, fish, or any other life. On the other hand, they fetishize an apocalyptical end of all worlds and an impossibility of collectively thriving presents and futures. A true shift from the threat of wildfires to living with fire requires shifting perspectives—thinking about the movement of people, water, fish, soil, and air across an expanded time—and reconstituting worlds.
Parts of California’s built environments continue to be sites of resistance for many Indigenous people. In many places, stewardship and cultural practices remain. In others, the loss and disruption are countered by Indigenous movements that revitalize stewardship practices. Many Indigenous fire practitioners have reasserted cultural burning on lands they control, including on Southern Sierra Miwok, homelands.
As part of their revitalization efforts, Indigenous communities also collaborate with state and county department agencies, organizations, and universities to grow awareness of cultural burning. Several fire practitioners conduct cultural burns and prescribed burns where they invite those interested to learn firsthand. Yurok and Karuk fire practitioners, Margo Robins (Yurok) and Elizabeth Azzuz (enrolled Yurok member and a Karuk descendent) lead cultural burns on their homelands. Robins and Azzuz are active in the prescribed fire program Training Exchange (TREX). On Yurok homelands, TREX is organized twice a year by the Cultural Fire Management Council (CFMC). During these burns Robins and Azzuz share Yurok culture with the participants, bringing together cultural burning and prescribed burning. Diana Almendariz (Wintu, Nesinan, Hupa) leads cultural burns at the Tending and Gathering Garden in Yolo County, Central California. In Mariposa County, Ron Goode hosts cultural burning workshops where one will meet Indigenous fire practitioners and scholars from across the state, and Non-Native researchers, agency workers and others from different fields (Figure 2). One invited partner is Keepers of the Flame, which originated from a course at the Native American Studies Department (NAS) at the University of California, Davis, and was developed into a project by students and faculty in 2020. The project brings together students, researchers, members of the community, policy makers, and Indigenous fire practitioners for Indigenous communities to share a collective desire to reapply fire and to remake socio-spatial environmental relations where they have been severed. Cultural burning, which is only so within its cultural context and led by Indigenous practitioners, becomes a way of (re)imagining and (re)making place otherwise—of rehearsing with fire.
“Cultural burning was once widespread and formed Indigenous spaces from immediate to larger scales.”
Figure 2. Cultural Burning Workshop. 19 February 2022. Southern Sierra Miwok Homelands (Mariposa County).
Rehearsals
To make life differently, Ruth Wilson Gilmore tells us, requires rehearsals. That “Life in rehearsal is its making.”[7]
Rehearsals with fire enable thinking with Indigenous fire practices to navigate transforming human-environment processes for life to flourish. Indigenous fire practitioners emphasize that cultural burning requires simultaneous thinking at and across various scales. It is a vibrant practice that follows the intricate relationships among living beings to create place(s). The practice embraces responsibility, reciprocity, and interdependence as necessary for living systems by paying attention to the ways in which things are organized—socially, temporally, ecologically, spiritually, and spatially. Thinking with fire is a way to reimagine relations outside of colonial models, to transform with those whose homelands are settled on, to build collective futures.
Rehearsals with fire are the work that Indigenous fire practitioners and those who organize, do, make, change, shift, learn, transform in their everyday lives. It is constant—moving, producing, imagining, reimagining—living as if—as if (re)imagined worlds are in place. As if—what is needed and desired is in process. Being lived out. As if—life in rehearsal is its making. What is needed and desired is perpetually being made and remade when people decide to live otherwise—breaking away rather than waiting, to renew processes differently, gradually.[8] Rehearsals with fire set into practice, in many ways, what is necessary for the health of life cycles, habitats, and ecosystems, sustaining living beings now and for generations to come. It is the activity of life-affirming world-making and of presence—thinking with fire to redescribe this world.
Movement looms large in this task of redescription. It is an intricate part of the practice of cultural burning. Movement of water, animals, light, people, insects, sediment, nutrients, air, fire, smoke. Movement between places. Movement as an approach for (re)organizing the social, spatial, and temporal. Movement as motion, as interconnected paths, as unimpeded flows—to move freely, using richly. Movement as necessary for living, as activity—growing, spreading. Movement as interdependence, with the capacity to evolve, generate—constantly. Movement is a central feature of cultural burning. Learning to live with fire dynamically shapes places and patterns of movement. It dislodges parameters to navigate the continuities and discontinuities of the architectural, urban, suburban, and National Forests, National Parks, while closely looking at the socio-environmental production of movements and the manufactured lack of movements across scales and durations.
Re-imagining
The Indigenous use of fire once produced their desired homelands. By expanding and reintroducing Indigenous fire, it is possible to alter fire regimes once again. This is already underway in places where “good fire” is applied.[9] Indigenous People, communities, and groups have organized for decades to (re)introduce, (re)assert, (re)apply, and extend cultural burning to their homelands while building local, regional, and transnational networks. Their work with people across state departments is most recently reflected in the two California bills that passed in early 2022. Several Indigenous fire practitioners of the state collaborated in determining the framework and wording of the bills. On paper, Assembly Bill No. 642 (AB 642) and Senate Bill No. 332 (SB 332) expand fire practice and reduce liability for cultural fire practitioners.
In 2020, Governor Gavin Newsom unveiled the California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force in “a response commensurate to the challenge.” In 2021, its publication titled California’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan, notes the necessity for cooperations across “federal, state, local and tribal entities and private organizations...for preventing catastrophic wildfires by creating healthier, more sustainable natural environments.” In March 2022, the Governor’s Task Force published California’s Strategic Plan for Expanding the Use of Beneficial Fire. “Beneficial fire” is a new terminology featured in the publication as a category: “prescribed fire, cultural burning, and fire managed for resource benefit—collectively referred to as beneficial fire.” Indigenous stewardship is given considerable space in these proposals and Don Hankins (Plains Miwok) represents the Indigenous Stewardship Network in the Task Force’s executive committee. Even though members of Indigenous communities are participants in planning and decision-making, federal and state agencies continue to wield power.
To make cultural burning effective, for people to transition to living safely, requires (re)imagining. Shifting from occupying Indigenous homelands as property, cultural burning invites those living on these lands to rethink private property, resource distribution, and articulation of differences in other ways, offering approaches to renew relations between Indigenous communities and settlers, and to develop reciprocal relations between settlers and environments.
The possibilities of world-making with cultural burning means embracing the idea of living as guests on Indigenous homelands. Living as guests describes and determines relations between Indigenous people and their homelands and living communities that ensure life for future generations. It transforms settlers into guests. These reformulate principles that determine where and how people live for collective futures: imagining how fire transforms relations; what living with fire could look like; ways in which fire influences movement. It would center life-enriching socio-spatial makings and remakings, reconfiguring how places are made, the way land is used and the ways water moves through places and those who consume it, and how fire caresses grass and smoke whispers to the seeds.
Citation
Anousheh Gul Kehar, “Fire and Collective Futures,” PLATFORM, February 17, 2025.
Notes
[1] Mike Davis, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” Environmental History Review 19, no. 2 (1995): 23.
[2] Harold A. Mooney and Erika Zavaleta, eds, Ecosystems of California (University of California Press, 2016), 27.
[3] Frank Kanawha Lake and Amy Cardinal Christianson, “Indigenous Fire Stewardship” In Encyclopedia of Wildfires and Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) Fires, edited by Samuel L. Manzello (Springer, 2020): 714.
[4] Jonathan W. Long, Frank K. Lake, and Ron W. Goode. "The importance of Indigenous cultural burning in forested regions of the Pacific West, USA," Forest Ecology and Management 500 (2021): 2.
[5] “Burning affects a tremendously wide variety of species and their interactions, including not only biomass removal but also more complex effects on air, soil, water, food webs, and parasitic and symbiotic associations.” Long et. al., "The importance of Indigenous cultural burning," 13.
[6] USDA, Forest Service & USDI, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, and National Park Service, “Urban wildland interface communities within the vicinity of federal lands that are at high risk from wildfire,” Federal Register 66, no. 3 (January 4, 2001): 753.
[7] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Fragments of Repair/Gathering II: "The Body’s Legacies, Pt. 2: The Postcolonial Body," with Kader Attia, Olivier Marboeuf and Maria Hlavajova, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst. Hybrid event. 2 May 2021, published on May 7, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyg1W3wv6mA
[8] Robin Wall Kimmerer and Frank Kanawha Lake, “Maintaining the Mosaic: The Role of Indigenous Burning in Land Management.” Journal of Forestry 99, no. 11 (2001): 36.
[9] “Good fire” is a term used by Indigenous fire practitioners to describe healthy fire, light fire with light smoke, cultural burning. Sara A. Clark, Andrew Miller, And Don L. Hankins for the Karuk Tribe, “Good Fire I: Current Barriers to the Expansion of Cultural Burning and Prescribed Fire in California and Recommended Solutions,” 2021.
