Fire and its Role in Indigenous Environmental Knowledge
Since the beginning of time, forests have had a vital role in the progress of humankind by providing numerous precious natural resources and necessary goods, including timber, fodder, and fuelwood. Accordingly, forests obtained a significant part in creating individual and collective identities by articulating the concepts of materiality, place, and landscape. In this view, the forest is not merely a natural ecosystem of trees, fauna, and flora, but it is also constructed as a landscape with whole constructions of ecology, economy, custom, policies, culture, legal status, and land use. Carl Sauer in “The Morphology of Landscape” argues that landscapes are culturally produced, and particular cultures produce particular landscapes and by studying such landscapes, we can read the culture of people who transformed the landscape along with understanding how they worked with the environment and how they transformed it to produce a particular landscape. In the context of settler colonialism, which manifests itself in terms of land alteration and alters the relations between –and associated with– land to favor white settlers, Indigenous subsistence rights, customary uses of land, and their particular landscapes have been disenfranchised, undermined, and eliminated. In this context, one of the vehicles of settler colonialism is fire suppression and fire exclusion policies, which target the Indigenous right to subsist, cultural identity, sovereignty, and traditional knowledge. Settler colonialism turns the forest into an objective reality, which creates a working landscape that neglects how the landscape transformed over time.
The settler-colonial state first and foremost alienates Indigenous people from their land. It separates native space from the landscape of nature and the environment to control and secure necessary resources and resource-related activities. The separation of land and customary uses of land have drastic impacts on understanding the environment and the construction of collective colonial and environmental subjectivities among Indigenous communities. Such a concept is embedded in the conservation policies and interventions of the settler-colonial state. Suppose the state needed to use overt violence to enforce land acquisition and dispossession of Indigenous communities. In that case, certain conservation interventions like fire exclusion policies help the state to exert its hegemony and secure its sovereignty over the land and resources through processes of covert and slow ecological violence. In this view, conservation becomes a form of legitimate coercion and governmentality imposed by the state to control space and the population within the space.
Correspondingly, norms of conservation can be coercive and be internalized by people, which can lead to self-regulation. The state monopolizes the use of legitimate force and violence to employ coercive conservation by the criminalization of ecological practices based on the traditional knowledge and militarization of conservation interventions and practices. Fire exclusion policies and fire suppression in the United States, specifically California, illustrate coercive conservation. Fire suppression policies cause slow violence for the fire-dependent ecosystems and cultures, which rely on forests as a resource for their livelihood. The dominant narrative regards the perils of forest fire, while an alternative narrative considers fire as a vital part of the political ecology of fire-dependent cultures and ecosystems.
There are several factors that either deny or limit the access of Indigenous people to their traditional foods, which causes health hazards and diseases. Dramatic events such as genocide and forced assimilation over the past century have led to a loss of traditional knowledge of the land (including the preparation and acquisition of traditional foods) and a change in the people’s tastes and desires. But another critical factor is the lack of or denied access to traditional foods. For instance, Kari Marie Norgaard studies the dietary regimes of Karuk Tribe in Klamath Basin and lists at least 25 species of plants, animals, and fungi that formed part of the traditional Karuk diet and asserts that they are currently limited or denied outright to the Karuk people including Salmon and acorn that are most central to the Karuk diet, providing the bulk of energy and protein. Salmon scarcity is because of overexploitation and over-harvesting by the canneries during the early 20th century, followed by the formation of four dams on the Klamath River, but acorn and other elements of the Karuk diet are directly related to fire.
Fire suppression is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. Indigenous people utilized fire as a means of resource management for thousands of years and developed sophisticated ecological knowledge for using fire. Early European settlers learned the use of fire from Indigenous people and applied it not just as a tool to manage resources but also to alter the land use and to create agricultural land from the forest. By establishing permanent settlements, fire became a hazard to their resources, and settlers began to suppress the fire. As the Progressive Conservation movement gained prominence in the late 1800s as a response to intensifying public concerns over mishandling public domain lands and resource scarcity, an idea of suppressing any kind of fire was initiated. Fire suppression was considered as a method of resource management for the conservation of natural resources. Western science provided an objective understanding of nature, which disregarded the traditional ecological knowledge of Indigenous people. The Federal government used such discursive and objective knowledge to control vast areas of public domain lands and established the United States Forest Service (USFS) in 1905 to administer those lands.
A series of fires in Idaho, Montana, and California in 1910 urged the government to enact new legislation for fire suppression. The Weeks Act of 1911 was the first of these legislations, which expanded fire protection on public and private lands. The Clarke-McNary Act of 1924 extended the cooperative fire protection programs, which provided significant funding to the states for fire protection, overseen by the U.S. Forest Service. In 1935 the state and federal governments initiated a paramilitary-like program to eliminate wildfires through the rapid mobilization of firefighters, equipment, and technology. During World War II, the Forest Service launched cooperative agreements with the Office of Civil Defense and the Department of Defense, and wildfire entangled with the national defense rhetoric. The USFS military connections helped the institution gain access to military surplus and machinery after the war, which helped the USFS militarize fire suppression and extend its geographical reach. The post-war period was the pinnacle for developing equipment and scientific research, during which the USFS, its private contractors, and state foresters were also able to triple the appropriation for Clarke-McNary funds, that helped to initiate and infuse the cooperative programs. During this period, the USFS launched its most successful ad campaigns, which became the USFS icon: Smokey Bear.
Smokey Bear has first appeared on posters during the Second World War. The original posters were quite scary in nature. They had the face of a Japanese soldier with a lighted match and a menacing grin and a slogan that said careless matches aid the Axis. But after the war ended, the Forest Service needed a new way of conveying the danger of forest fires. The USFS wanted something strong to protect the forests, something animated to appeal to children and families. And that is why the first Smokey is a sweet-looking bear that wears a pair of jeans while holding a bucket of water that he is pouring over the campfire. Gradually, Smokey wore a forest ranger hat and then held a shovel, and over time his classic image was shaped. The campaign was successful as the number of forest fires since the Smokey campaign began has declined. But in recent years, they have gotten more extensive and more destructive, which scientists called the Smokey Bear effect, which emphasizes that all fires are destructive. Such narrative excluded fire from a landscape that is fire-dependent and adapted to fire. Accordingly, when the fire is removed from the landscape and is suppressed, more fuel (dead leaves and trees, shrubs, and dried grassland) has built up. Given that and combined with the impacts of climate change and the influx of population in areas that used to be wilderness areas, has led to more intense and devastating fires, such as the one that destroyed the town of Paradise, CA., in November 2018.
A few generations of Americans have grown up under Smokey’s accusing gaze. He tells us that our carelessness starts forest fires. His sole interest is to ensure our ecological rectitude by complying with his rules. He needs only his ranger hat to remind us of his police duties and his practical blue-collar association with security and productivity. Smokey is the ultimate administrative mouthpiece- not an actual servant of the public who owns the forest but the embodied threat of punishments and governmental disapproval of those who would endanger what will become logs to build more houses and paper and pencils to sketch development plans which all and all threaten the bear and his habitat more than any fire does. However, Smokey Bear might seem like an innocuous symbol of fire prevention that helps the environment; rather, it becomes a symbol of fire suppression and fire exclusion policies that has an opposite impact on the fire-dependent ecosystems and causes slow violence for the fire-dependent cultures of Indigenous people that rely on forests and controlled burnings as a resource for their livelihood. Smokey Bear is an excellent example of an institutionalized environmental management regime, which is also power-laden because it has the power of the USFS and the state, which helps it become a dominant discourse. Smokey Bear is an example of apolitical ecology that masks the relationships it describes and masquerades as a natural or neutral or normal course of events. Smokey Bear conceals the settler-colonial violence imposed by institutionalized, power-laden environmental management regimes and instead blames “You” because the carelessness of “You” can cause wildfire and “Only you can prevent forest fire!”
Farzad Forouhar works for the Wiyot Tribe in Eureka, California. Farzad moved from Iran to the United States in 2014 and since then has been residing in Eureka, CA. Farzad holds a B.A. degree in Political Science with an emphasis on Global Politics and Environmental Politics with a minor in Journalism from Humboldt State University.