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"Can they, can we all, understand the Skywoman story not as an artifact from the past but as instructions for the future?" (Kimmerer 9, 2013). Origin stories lay the foundation of our relationships and define our responsibility to the land.

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by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Kimmerer lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.

Tony Drehfal is a wood engraver, printmaker, and photographer. He lives and works in Wisconsin, where he has been making wood engravings since 2002, often inspired by the lakes and woodland landscapes north of his home. Tony is also the editor for Block & Burin, the newsletter of the Wood Engravers' Network.

In this excerpt from the new introduction to her acclaimed book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer draws upon the creation story Skywoman Falling and the wisdom of plants to guide us through our present moment of deep uncertainty. Her words of hope, transformation, and courage feel especially poignant at this moment as we look to find ways to heal and address the monumental challenges that lie before us.

I began writing Braiding Sweetgrass in what seems, from this moment in the midst of a global pandemic and the upheavals it has generated, a more innocent time, when climate catastrophe was a hot glow on the horizon. We could smell smoke but our home was not yet engulfed in flames. There was guarded optimism for leadership on climate change and justice for land and people, human and otherwise.

A lot has happened since in climate urgency, with the political pain of vile Windigos come to office and all the wounds they have inflicted. I don't need to say more. This evidence might suggest that the medicine of plant stories has not worked very well to heal our relationships with land and each other. The powerful purveyors of destruction are still in power, the skies darkening. But as always, I take my guidance from the forests, who teach us something about change. The forces of creation and destruction are so tightly linked that sometimes we can't tell where one begins and the other leaves off. A long-lived overstory can dominate the forest for generations, setting the ecological conditions for its own thriving while suppressing others by exploiting all the resources with a self-serving dominance. But, all the while it sets the stage for what happens next and something always happens that is more powerful than that overstory: a fire, a windstorm, a disease. Eventually, the old forest is disrupted and replaced by the understory, by the buried seedbank that has been readying itself for this moment of transformation and renewal. A whole new ecosystem rises to replace that which no longer works in a changed world. Braiding Sweetgrass, I hope, is part of that understory, seeded by many thinkers and doers, filling the seedbank with diverse species, so that when the canopy falls, as it surely will, a new world is already rising. "New" and ancient, with its origins in the Indigenous worldview of right relation between land and people. What the "overstory" of colonialism tried to suppress is surging. It is the prophesied time of the Seventh Fire, a sacred time when the collective remembering transforms the world. A dark time and a time filled with light. We remember the oft-used words of resistance, "They tried to bury us, but they didn't know we were seeds."

It's as if we can see the world we want to live in just over time's horizon; the question is how do we get there? It's a question familiar to Sweetgrass, unable to leave one place and travel to a better one by seed. Ki* relies on humans to carry rhizomes, the ones who can easily cross distance and boundaries, who know that whatever we wish to see on the other side of the narrows of this ecological and cultural crisis, we must pass lovingly from hand to hand.

The mythic story of Skywoman Falling is the heartbeat of Braiding Sweetgrass, both an opening and a closing, enfolding the stories between. The version shared in the first edition is the most widely told account of the epic, but it is not the only one. There is always the deep diving Muskrat and the earth on Turtle's back. The rescue by the Geese and the gifts of the animals are a constant, as are the seeds Skywoman brings, initiating the covenant of reciprocity between newcomer humans and our ancient relatives. The detail that varies from one telling to another is just how Skywoman finds herself falling from one world to the next. The common version is that she slips, the earth giving way at the edge of the hole in the sky where the great Tree of Life had fallen. It is an accident, with mythic consequences-and so it begins.

But in other tellings, this was no accident. In one version, she was pushed. In another she was thrown-not from malice but because she was needed for the sacred task and needed "help" in leaving her beloved home for the next. In every version I've ever heard, Skywoman was an accidental and possibly an unwilling traveler to the next world, like a seed on the wind.

As I look around at the strong women I know, Indigenous and newcomer, survivors and thrivers, teachers, artists, farmers, singers, healers, mothers, nokos, aunties, daughters, sisters holding together families and communities and leading the way to a new world, I have a hard time seeing our Skywoman as an unknowing and passive emissary. No. I see her standing at the edge of the hole in the sky, her belly planted with new life, looking down into the darkness. Guided by the shaft of dazzling light shining through, she catches a glimpse of the world that waits for the seeds she carries, plucked from the Tree of Life. With all humility and respect for the teachings of this sacred story, I cannot help my imagining forward to this moment on the circle of time. What if, with full agency, she spreads her arms, looks over her shoulder, feels her child stir within and then-what if she jumps?

She is a woman with a duty to safeguard life. Just as women have done throughout our painful history, carrying life through times of starvation and disease, on the long walks of removal, hiding children from the boarding schools and embracing the ones who came back, fighting pipelines, protecting water, saving the seeds, learning the language, holding the ceremonies, honoring the earth... Skywoman's descendants are not women who would step away from the edge, if it meant the protection of life.

What does it take to abandon what does not work and take the risks of uncertainty?

As a society we stand at the brink, we know we do. Through the hole that opens at our feet, we can look down and see a glittering blue and green planet, as if from the vantage point of space, vibrating with birdsong and toads and tigers. We could close our eyes, keep breathing poison air, witness the extinction of our relatives and continue to measure our worth by how much we take. We could cover our ears to our own knowing, back away from the edge and retreat to the gray decline.

In this time of transformation, when creation and destruction wrestle like Skywoman's mythic grandsons, gambling with the future of the earth, what would it take for us to follow Skywoman? To jump to the new world, to co-create it? Do we jump because we look over our shoulders at the implacable suffering marching toward us and jump from fear and portent? Or perhaps we look down, drawn toward the glittering green, hear the birdsong, smell the Sweetgrass and yearn to be part of a different story. The story we long for, the story that we are beginning to remember, the story that remembers us.

What does it take to abandon what does not work and take the risks of uncertainty? We'll need courage; we'll need each other's hands to hold and faith in the geese to catch us. It would help to sing. The landing might not be soft, but land holds many medicines. Propelled by love, ready to work, we can jump toward the world we want to co-create, with pockets full of seeds. And rhizomes.

This op-ed is excerpted from Robin's new introduction to the hardcover special edition of Braiding Sweetgrass, available from Milkweed Editions.

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by Robin Wall Kimmerer Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.

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Following the disappearing of Gabby Petito, a message went viral on social media to pull attention towards the hundreds of Indigenous people that have also gone missing over the last decade in Wyoming. The silencing of cries for help and reports of Native lives being lost is a continuation of the "vanishing Indian" narrative. If people fail to acknowledge the existence of Native peoples outside of a historical context, then their lives (and direct harms) will continue to be ignored.

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Taken of Alcatraz from Fort Mason, June 24, 2021, by me

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Alcatraz holds a special part of me as land that is from my home. It hosts the same trees and shrubs as are in my backyard and sits above the water that I swim in every day in the summer. But I have grown up knowing Alcatraz as a spooky reminder of its incarcerated past. It's a tourist attraction, a Hollywood icon, and a built landmark. What I only learned about recently was its history as an essential place of the Red Power movement where Native peoples occupied the island in 1969-1971. However, it still remains one of the primary sources of income for San Francisco's tourism industry. I am curious to explore the relationship between Native land rights and colonization and incarceration in the U.S., and the Golden Gate Parks Conservancy's response to it.

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Native American Occupation of Alcatraz Captured in Rare Footage | KQED Arts

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GGNPC's Attempt at Indigenous-Centered Knowledge

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GGNPC's Attempt at Indigenous-Centered Knowledge

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The Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy creates a page that attempts to recognize the Ohlone people, those who originally inhabited the land that includes Alcatraz Island. They do so by sharing an experience in which they encouraged participants to engage in traditional Ohlone games and stories, highlighting a non-Native park ranger's conservation efforts, accumulating "inspiring" environmental quotes by Native leaders, and hosting dialogues between the parks and indigenous voices. One article, unfortunately, is titled "Remembering the Ohlone, then and now". Additionally, the site overall places indigenous knowledge in the position of an environmental savior.

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Experience Ohlone natural/cultural history, through stories, games and art. Participants learn how to make and play a traditional Ohlone game, which introduce them to some indigenous plants found in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, your local National Park. Nature Boost Fridays are part of Summer Stride , a partnership...

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Kivalina, AK - Erasure by Climate Change

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Kivalina, AK - Erasure by Climate Change

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Case study of Kivalina, AK - along with others that we viewed in class - that follows my previous assessment of erasure from Daniel R. Wildcat.

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This Tiny Alaska Town Is Leading the Way on Climate Change

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Smokey Bear on Instagram Preaches "Parks for All"

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Smokey Bear on Instagram Preaches "Parks for All"

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One of the top comments says, "Keep them public and keep them natural forever" - @treeguy657

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A post shared by Smokey Bear (@smokeybear)

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Using Daniel R. Wildcat's analysis in Red Alert, we can see that removal has appeared in waves throughout history. It has arisen as "geographic, social, and psycho-cultural" and is now taking its most modern form via climate change. Climate change impact are causing forced removal on tribes from their threatened lands and if federal agencies continue to ignore these harms, Indigenous voices will continue to be erased. The lack of acknowledgment of these real harms perpetuate the false narrative of Native American tribes vanishing into history.

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Carolyn Finney on Accessibility of Nature

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Carolyn Finney on Accessibility of Nature

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Carolyn Finney speaks at Middlebury College about the history of conservationism in the United States leading to inaccessibility of parks and natural spaces to non-white folks. She tells a personal narrative regarding relationship to land and emphasizes how different minority groups struggle to practice their own relationships with the earth under the systems of colonialism that have stolen and assumed control over land.

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Whose Story Counts? | Carolyn Finney | TEDxMiddlebury

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Organizations that arose out of white conservationist theory should be, and are now finally being, forced to the forefront of facing this history along with its consequences.

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The organization calls out Muir's racist statements and pledges to diversify leadership and deepen environmental justice initiatives

smithsonianmag.com

In 1889, John Muir drew lines across a map of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California to propose a grand idea: enshrining what he saw as a treasure of natural beauty in the form of Yosemite National Park. Except, the " wilderness" Muir called Yosemite was already named- Ahwahnee, meaning gaping, mouth-like place-and beloved by the Ahwahneechee people who lived in the grand valley.

Muir, a lauded pioneer of the American environmental movement, spurred the conservation of the valley's pantheon of granite faces and groves of giant sequoias through his writing and advocacy. But Muir's desire to protect Yosemite, which led him to found the Sierra Club in 1892, was not for the benefit of the valley's original inhabitants, or even the full palette of American diversity.

Muir described the Native Americans he encountered on his famous walk from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico as "dirty," and referred to African Americans using an offensive racial slur, report Darryl Fears and Steven Mufson for the Washington Post.

This week, the Sierra Club's executive director Michael Brune called out the racism of "the most iconic figure in Sierra Club history" in a post to the organization's website. The post takes its inspiration from the nationwide reckoning with America's Confederate monuments and other public works that glorify figures associated with racism and oppression in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

"It's time to take down some of our own monuments," Brune writes.

Speaking with Brian Melley of the Associated Press, Stanford historian Richard White says Muir's very conception of wilderness bakes in racial bias. Muir's " unblighted, unredeemed wilderness" in which the "galling harness of civilization drops off" was only possible through the erasure of America's Indigenous peoples, whose villages and way of life had been destroyed. For Muir, Native Americans " seemed to have no right place in the landscape."

"There is a dark underside here that will not be erased by just saying Muir was a racist," White tells the AP. "I would leave Muir's name on things but explain that, as hard as it may be to accept, it is not just Muir who was racist. The way we created the wilderness areas we now rightly prize was racist."

Brune notes that Muir's views appeared to "evolve later in his life" but notes that his "derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples...continue to hurt and alienate Indigenous people and people of color who come into contact with the Sierra Club."

The Sierra Club's post also mentions Muir's close friendship with Henry Fairfield Osborn who was known, not just for leading the New York Zoological Society and the board of trustees of the American Museum of Natural History, but also for his role in founding the American Eugenics Society. Early members and leaders of the Sierra Club included other eugenicists such as Joseph LeConte and David Starr Jordan. Some of America's other early champions of environmental conservation, such as Madison Grant, were also proponents of eugenics, which peddled a set of pseudo-scientific justifications for white supremacy that eventually found their way into the founding ideals of Nazi Germany.

Brune writes that in its early years the Sierra Club was "basically a mountaineering club for middle and upper-class white people who worked to preserve the wilderness they hiked through-wilderness that had begun to need protection only a few decades earlier, when white settlers violently displaced the Indigenous peoples who had lived on and taken care of the land for thousands of years."

Brune tells Lucy Tompkins of the New York Times that his statements are the start of a series of conversations about the organization's framing of Muir's legacy.

"The Muir ideal of the lone white man at one with nature in the wilderness excludes all kinds of people from that relationship," Jon Christensen, an environmental historian at the University of California, Los Angeles, tells the Times. "That ideal has caused a lot of damage."

Brune pledged the Sierra Club to diversifying its leadership, and ensuring black, Indigenous and other people of color are in the majority on the teams making "top-level organizational decisions." The organization also committed to investing more heavily in racial and environmental justice work.

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Sierra Club Grapples With Founder John Muir's Racism

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smithsonianmag.com In 1889, John Muir drew lines across a map of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California to propose a grand idea: enshrining what he saw as a treasure of natural beauty in the form of Yosemite National Park.

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Muir Woods rangers doing the necessary work of uncovering the Parks' racist history. Especially the specific identification of the Parks founders' leading role in the American eugenics movement is extremely important.

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From far away, the caution tape and sheet of paper attached to an interpretative placard in Muir Woods National Monument could be mistaken for routine maintenance. In fact, the park's latest project is quite the opposite.

"Alert: History Under Construction," the paper reads. "Everything on this sign is true but incomplete."

The sign contains information about the park's founding, along with a timeline of the park's history and photographs. Credit for saving the park's treasured redwood and creek habitat is given to "influential, philanthropic white men," the paper explains.

"While they undoubtedly contributed to the forest becoming a national monument, part of our duty in the National Park Service is to tell the full story of how that happened," the paper says. "Look at the timeline below to see the park's history under construction."

The alterations to the sign also include yellow sticky notes posted on the timeline and offering information about the original, indigenous managers of the forest as well as the role of women in the creation of Muir Woods. Facts about the existence and impacts of racism are also sticky-noted.

In step with a larger racial reckoning, this innovative project is part of collaboration between Muir Woods staff members and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) interpretative team. In keeping with the mission of the National Park Service, the team aimed to share a more complete history of Muir Woods, explains GGNRA public information officer Julian Espinoza. They used a technique called audience-centered interpretation, Espinoza says, which goes beyond a regurgitation of facts and promotes critical thinking.

"The existing sign explaining the timeline of Muir Woods is accurate but lacks some context," Espinoza says. "The History Under Construction temporary exhibit was created after our staff thought up a creative and engaging way to expand upon that timeline and provide a learning opportunity to park visitors."

Before the staff marked up the timeline, which is entitled "Path to Preservation," its first item was the 1872 establishment of Yellowstone National Park, the world's first national park. And while that was certainly an important precedent, the staff of Muir Woods felt that other events that took place long before were also crucial to the establishment of the park. They added four sticky notes to a blank area to the left, starting with the stretch of time when 20,000 Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo people managed the land and conducted prescribed burns, taking care of the forest.

Other insertions include a note for 1769, when Spanish missionaries began using the labor of Bay Area's indigenous people, who then grappled with disease, slavery and genocide (which created a disruption in the stewardship of the land). An 1861 note tells how Congress extinguished the Indian title to the land that became Muir Woods, and an 1869 note mentions how John Muir - the famous naturalist for whom the park is named - included racist language in writings about indigenous people.

The Sierra Club publicly criticized Muir (the club's own founder) last year, stirring up controversy over his writings, while Save the Redwoods League renounced the racism of its own co-founder, white supremacist Madison Grant. But other white men involved in the conservation of Muir Woods also have problematic - though lesser-discussed - aspects of their legacies. And those are now part of the timeline.

For an 1898 item about the man referred to as "The Father of American Forestry," the Muir Woods staff also felt more information was needed. "Gifford Pinchot appointed Chief of what is now the US Forest Service; advocates 'scientific forestry,'" the item reads. The staff added, "... and eugenics, ... defined... as 'controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the population's genetic composition.'" Eugenicists often targeted nonwhite people, labeling their races as inferior and socially undesirable. Pinchot, who for 10 years served on the advisory council of the American Eugenics Society, has a Muir Woods tree named in his honor.

Another pair of timeline items added by the staff expound on the background of Congressman William Kent, who with his wife Elizabeth Thatcher Kent donated 295 acres that became Muir Woods. One note explains how Kent's anti-Asian policy and rhetoric laid the groundwork for Japanese incarceration during World War II, while a second note emphasizes how in 1920, Kent "advances the expansion of California's Alien Land Laws, preventing non-citizens from owning or leasing land. These laws complicate immigration from Asia and create a more hostile environment for Asian immigrants in California."

The notes also address overlooked contributions of women, for instance, when the California Club - an elite women's club - in 1904 launched the first-ever campaign to save the land that would become Muir Woods. Federal recognition of tribes (or lack thereof) appear in the notes, too.

The reaction to the exhibit, which will remain on display for the next six months, has thus far been "very positive," Espinoza says. Because it's a small park, there's a lot of engagement between visitors and staff, he added.

On Twitter, Mother Jones publisher Steve Katz offered feedback. "Paid a visit to Muir Woods today with the family, and @MuirWoodsNPS is doing some seriously creative narrative shifts in the official park history," he tweeted. "... Bringing in a deeper, more complex, and more troubled history of this jewel of the National Park System."

We love California's parks just as much as you do, so we have a newsletter that covers them from top to bottom. Sign up here.

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Muir Woods alters own signs to highlight racism, misogyny

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American Indians, The Doctrine of Discovery, and Manifest Destiny by Robert J. Miller

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American Indians, The Doctrine of Discovery, and Manifest Destiny by Robert J. Miller

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In the Wyoming Law Review, Volume 11 (2011), Robert J. Miller thoroughly lays out the history of land possession in the United States, which is very helpful in understanding why American settlers assume ownership over land and, therefore, control land management in the United States.

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Miller The Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny

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On the Karuk Tribe's official website, they describe the ancestral and ecological important of prescribed burning. It is very important to hear from indigenous voices who have been practicing prescribed burning for centuries and understand the productive use of fire and its preventative benefits - as opposed to the no-burn methods of many federal forest management agencies. The fact that they often can't practice their burning methods without breaking the law is also a clear example how differing worldviews and political altercations surrounding national sovereignty and Indian treaty rights result in harmful climate impacts on tribal communities.

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(Karuk Engine 641 Type 6 2020 Dodge Ram 5500)

Prescribed burning is an ancestral cultural practice that has taken place for thousands of years to manage the landscape, to stimulate the production of resources for humans and for animals, to prevent catastrophic wildfires, and to provide for species abundance and diversity. The euro-american invasion has since disrupted cultural fire practices with (among other injustices) fire suppression policies.

(Prescribe Fire 2020)

Currently The Karuk DNR works to restore these cultural practices, and has identified the Wildland Fire Program to operate under cultural objectives to return the seasonal low intensity fires, which the ecology has evolved with since time immemorial.

(Karuk Crew-1 Type 2 IA)
Fire Management Officer
I am a specialist on forest management and have over 32 years of experience. I have worked for numerous federal and state organizations in Fire suppression and Fuels treatment. I am on a type 2 Management team as a division and a type 3 ICT for the Klamath River Trex, I am currently funded through FY 2022 through the Calfire grant program and will provide oversight, guidance, and program coordination functions for project implementation of the somes bar project fire suppression resources.

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(Karuk Engine 641 Type 6 2020 Dodge Ram 5500) Prescribed burning is an ancestral cultural practice that has taken place for thousands of years to manage the landscape, to stimulate the production of resources for humans and for animals, to prevent catastrophic wildfires, and to provide for species abundance and diversity.

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Smokey Bear on Instagram Says the Future of the Forests is in You Hands!

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Smokey Bear on Instagram Says the Future of the Forests is in You Hands!

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Whose hands? Does the boy illustrated represent the targeted audience? This post is an example of individualizing the climate crisis and distributing the responsibility away from the large corporations that must be held responsible, as well as forest management agencies (like Smokey) that claim to be the knowledge keepers of forest care.

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This Youtube video, posted by Cheryl Tuttle (Yurok Tribe), explains the ways in which tending to land through fire management is a vital piece Karuk heritage. And additionally that the hostile relationship between tribe and U.S. government is threatening the tribe's futurity.

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Fire is Food by Ron Reed and Kari Marie Norgaard

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Fire is Food by Ron Reed and Kari Marie Norgaard

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Kari Marie Norgaard, who spoke at Swarthmore via Zoom in the course that we visited (Oct. 26), holds a discussion with Ron Reed (Karuk scholar, cultural biologist, and fisherman) in which they speak to, "the importance of fire for Karuk tribal culture, health, food, and sovereignty" and "the history of settler colonial fire suppression practices and its ongoing impacts on Indigenous communities. Reed argues for the need to center place-based, Indigenous ecology model."

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This collaborative was founded by Ron Reed (Karuk), and two University of California Berkeley professors, Jennifer Sowerwine and Tom Carlson. It is a hopeful and promising initiative to make connections between Karuk knowledge and western scientific knowledge in order to get students of higher education institutions engaged in "cultural resource management". Projects like these are what allow worldviews to intersect in order to (hopefully) challenge the dominance of suppressing federal legislation.

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What We Do – Karuk – UC Berkeley Collaborative

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The Karuk-UC Berkeley Collaborative builds connections between tribal members and the UC Berkeley community to enhance the eco-cultural revitalization of the people and landscapes within Karuk ancestral lands and territories.

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What We Do

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Klamath National Forest in Northern California

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Happy Camp Fire Moving Into Karuk Ancestral Territory

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Happy Camp Fire Moving Into Karuk Ancestral Territory

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Aerial photography of the Happy Camp Fire approaching, and soon to tear through, Karuk land and homes.

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Outline of the Evacuation Order Due to the Happy Camp Fire

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Outline of the Evacuation Order Due to the Happy Camp Fire

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Forced evacuation as well as failure to prevent and prepare tribes for wildfires is, like Kivalina, AK, a method of removal and erasure. Most often, tribal families are also unable to rebuild or receive little to no resources for rebuilding and safety, causing land and cultural devastation.

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This piece is widely known as the symbol of westward expansion and manifest destiny, which is the settler worldview that it is the divine right for white anglo colonizers to claim ownership of any land not already occupied by a another white settler (from the Doctrine of Discovery).

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John Gast American Progess 1872 (edited)

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On my run this morning, a recent (earlier this summer) podcast came up on my news feed regarding the discovery of old residential schools for Canadian Native children, along with the bodies of many of those children who disappeared. This devastating story brought forward the horror of what really occurred during that era of psycho-cultural removal.

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State-Sponsored Abuse in Canada•EJul 16•The Daily

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Origin Story Through Colonial Hstory of Alcatraz Island and Ohlone Lande

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Origin Story Through Colonial Hstory of Alcatraz Island and Ohlone Lande

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The following was a paper presented by Rosemary Cambra, invited panalist and chair of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe during last October's 30th anniversary of Alcatraz. by Alan Leventhal (Tribal Ethnohistorian), Hank Alvarez (Tribal Councilman), Monica Arellano (Tribal Councilwoman), Carolyn M. Sullivan (Tribal Councilwoman), Concha Rodriguez (Tribal Councilwoman), and Rosemary Cambra (TribalChair).

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History of Karuk Tribe's Battle with Wildfires

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History of Karuk Tribe's Battle with Wildfires

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More and more land in California is going up in flames. The area in the state burned by wildfires has increased by a factor of five since 1972, according to a recent study, which identified human-caused warming the likely culprit.

So what's to be done?

The Karuk Tribe wants to fight fire with fire.

This summer the tribe, one of the largest in the state, released a climate-adaptation plan that calls for a return to a more natural fire regime. According to the plan, using prescribed burns at appropriate times of the year in place of the current policy of fire suppression would reduce the possibility of high-severity fires, which have proven deadly and costly for California in recent years and are expected to worsen as the climate warms.

"Climate adaptation is about restoring human responsibilities and appropriate relationships to the natural world," says Bill Tripp, deputy director of Karuk Natural Resources Department and a co-author of the plan.

Wildfires have always been a part of the ecology of California, and "Karuk people have long been part of the ecosystem," says Tripp. Prescribed burning, in particular, has been a key part of cultural practices of Indigenous people for millennia. As the Karuk climate plan explains, "Due in part to these thousands of years of purposeful fire management, the forests of this region are ecologically dependent on fires that are low in heat production, or 'cooler' fires."

But much of that historic burning was snuffed out with the arrival of white settlers and a century-long U.S. government policy of fire suppression. In the Karuk territory and many other areas of the West, ecosystems are adapted to burn frequently, but suppression disrupts those natural processes. Instead, forests end up with dense, homogenous stands of trees, meadows are crowded out and dead materials accumulate on the forest floor - all of which can contribute to high-intensity fires that are now being supersized by warmer, drier forest conditions.

For the Karuk this has consequences for everything from food to culture. As the plan explains, "The exclusion of fire has led to radical ecological changes including high fuel loads, decreased habitat for large game such as elk and deer, reduction in the quantity and quality of acorns, and alteration of growth patterns of basketry materials such as hazel and willow."

Many scientists, as well as tribes, are calling for more controlled burns, but efforts for the Karuk to bring fire back to the land - and better increase their resilience in the face of climate change - are complicated by issues of sovereignty and lagging policy.

The Karuk people hail from the rugged and remote Klamath-Siskiyou Mountains in Northern California, along the Klamath and Salmon rivers. Most of their aboriginal territory of just over 1 million acres is currently managed by the federal government as national forest, although the tribe never ceded the land.

Instead the tribe's "heavily timbered, mineral-rich homeland" was "taken by the United States without ratification of its treaties negotiated in 1851," historian Stephen Dow Beckham wrote in an article two years ago. With the promise of a reservation never fulfilled, the tribe has virtually no land base.

Tribal members are still dependent on the resources from the nearby forests for food, fiber and cultural practices, but decisions about how that land is managed falls to outside agencies, like the U.S. Forest Service.

That leaves the tribe with little control over its own future. The tribe is concerned that poor land management, combined with climate change, increasingly puts them at risk and threatens their cultural resources.

The risks have already started to materialize: Temperatures in the region have increased 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1931, and the tribe has already seen more variable precipitation, decreased snowpack, earlier snowmelt, less spring runoff, drier fall weather, a longer fire season, and more insect pests and pathogens - including Phytophthora ramorum, which causes "sudden oak death." All those things are expected to worsen with warming temperatures, and the ecological changes could affect other species of cultural significance for the tribe, including chinook salmon, Pacific lamprey, beavers, Pacific giant salamander, tanoaks, evergreen huckleberry and elk. Some species already face compounding environmental pressures from fire suppression, dams, logging and water diversions.

But the biggest concern is in the increased risk of high-severity fire, which can damage homes and infrastructure, create public-health risks, destroy cultural resources and diminish water quality. Big wildfires have already hit close to home for the Karuk. In 2008 the massive Klamath Theater Complex Fire, a conflagration that united 11 separate blazes, burned for three months in the region and consumed more than 190,000 acres. Then in 2014 the Happy Camp Complex Fire burned 134,000 acres, ripping through the heart of Karuk territory and prompting the tribe to turn its community center into a refuge for residents forced to evacuate their homes.

The Karuk's climate-adaptation plan is an effort to shift the management dynamic and builds on some recent cooperative work among the Forest Service, the Karuk and other local groups.

"This plan is years in the making and we're hoping we'll be able to actually start to change the paradigm in the way fire is managed in Karuk country," says Tripp.

The Karuk's plan is also part of a growing effort from dozens of tribes across the United States to assess climate vulnerability and build adaptation plans, although each tribe faces unique challenges, especially tribes without federal recognition. (The Karuk have federal recognition, a relative rarity in California.)

It's a trend that's deeply needed.

"Indigenous people are disproportionately impacted by the changing climate as they lack the financial resources to build new infrastructure," says Kari Norgaard, associate professor of sociology and environmental studies at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the Karuk plan. "But for the Karuk, their vulnerability to climate change is also a function of state policy - the Karuk's ability to do what they want to do is reduced because of those structural conditions." Basic management decisions regarding land-use, logging and fire policy are out of their hands.

At the same time, says Norgaard, tribal members possess a wealth of information on the management of local ecosystems that should play a leading role as the region plans for how to cope with climate impacts.

"Native American tribes and native nations have been at the forefront of a lot of climate work, whether that's in the-street-protests or putting up solar panels or doing climate adaptation plans," she says.

But daunting challenges remain.

"One of the biggest obstacles is the sense that indigenous knowledge is sort of dead or not valid," says Norgaard, who has conducted collaborative research projects with the Karuk since 2003. "Many people just do not understand how much indigenous knowledge about fire use is really a modern science still today." Western scientists have increasingly called for the incorporation of traditional ecological knowledge into new plans for reintroducing natural fire regimes back to the landscape.

Indeed the Karuk's call for more prescribed burning is supported by a growing body of scientific studies.

"Prescribed fire is one of the most widely advocated management practices for reducing wildfire hazard and has a long and rich tradition rooted in indigenous and local ecological knowledge," Crystal A. Kolden, an associate professor in the Department of Forest, Rangeland and Fire Sciences at the University of Idaho, wrote in a report in the journal Fire. "The scientific literature has repeatedly reported that prescribed fire is often the most effective means of achieving such goals by reducing fuels and wildfire hazard and restoring ecological function to fire-adapted ecosystems in the United States following a century of fire exclusion."

Despite those scientific findings, the actual practice of prescribed burns lags greatly, as does funding. A recent report from Climate Central found that federal funding for prescribed burns is a fraction of what's allocated for suppression.

And that's become obvious on the ground. Kolden's research revealed that prescribed burning hasn't increased across the western United States in the past 20 years. In some places it has actually decreased. Most of the prescribed burning happening in the country, she found, was in the Southeast.

That worries Bill Tripp.

"When I hear the agencies talking about having a 97 percent success rate of suppressing fires, it makes me think that 97 percent of what should have been burning isn't," he says.

Kolden's report suggests that we need a larger cultural shift and better public education about prescribed fires and their role in reducing wildlife risk. "Without such a shift, more catastrophic wildfire disasters are inevitable," she wrote.

And that's at the crux of the Karuk's intention with their plan, a big part of which is working on increased engagement and public education, as well as more "interjurisdictional coordination" - allowing the Karuk to help drive management policy.

But even if all that goes well, there are still challenges to returning low-intensity fire to areas that haven't been burned in 100 years.

"Just the cost alone is going to be quite expensive, and then there are issues of workforce development and training," says Tripp. "It's not just about burning a certain number of acres. It's about how you put fire on the ground - it needs to be done right."

There's also the public perception or "social license," he says. Twenty years ago, the majority of people believed that all fire was bad, says Tripp. But he's seen that mentality shift in recent years. More and more people are learning that fire can be used beneficially - although it can be still be a tough sell in a state that has seen recent wildfires claim dozens of lives.

But the Karuk are hoping to convince people through example. The tribe has been working closely for years to develop a plan with the Six Rivers National Forest on a 5,500-acre demonstration project that will allow them to begin some restoration and prescribed burning in the national forest. They hope to carry the lessons learned from that work to further efforts, says Tripp.

"I'm hoping that we could end up getting to a place to where we can just all work together to make this all happen and try to mitigate these effects of climate change the best we can and protect as many of the species as we can that may be in peril," he adds.

Norgaard says she feels that efforts like this can help people see that the threats of climate change and wildfires don't have to leave people feeling disempowered.

"There is a lot we can do," she says, "and we need to be doing it now."

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California Tribe Hopes to Conquer Climate Woes - With Fire * The Revelator

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More and more land in California is going up in flames. The area in the state burned by wildfires has increased by a factor of five since 1972, according to a recent study, which identified human-caused warming the likely culprit. So what's to be done? The Karuk Tribe wants to fight fire with fire.

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Disaster came for the small mountain community of Happy Camp, California, on an unseasonably warm morning in September.

The Slater fire raged through the ancestral heart of the Karuk tribe in the Klamath Mountains near the Oregon border on 8 September. The tribe, known for its deep knowledge of cultural burning and forest management, saw almost 200 homes in the community of 1,000 go up in flames.

In a historic fire season with million-acre gigafires and more than two dozen deaths, the destruction in Happy Camp barely broke through the long list of dire news stories making the headlines. But it has brought deep hardship for many who have long warned of fire seasons like this one.

Many who live in the Klamath Mountains were either unable to afford home insurance or unable to get it because companies are increasingly wary of insuring homeowners in some parts of the state amid intensifying wildfires. "I lost my insurance two years ago, after the Paradise fire," said 60-year-old Happy Camp resident Flo Lopez. "I had a whole stack of denial letters from insurance companies, but I can't prove that. Because those burned."

More than a month after the fire and with residents still not allowed to return to their properties, the chance for this community with a native claim to California and a long history of tribal ecological fire management to rebuild to its full potential now seems more impossible than ever.

"We're here because we choose to be here," said Robert Perez, 34, who lost his ranch in the fire. "We have fresh water, our traditional knowledge, our culture, our ceremonies. It's all right here and it's where we want to be as people, right here raising our families. But a lot of these people are not going to have a choice but to relocate. It's about to be wintertime and we are going to have all these homeless families with nowhere to go."

Happy Camp, the headquarters for the Karuk tribe, sits squarely in Klamath national forest, a curving, mountainous hour-and-a-half drive from the county seat of Yreka. Colors overwhelm the senses on the drive into town, with the lush green of the trees rising over the red earth of the mountains, and the leaves turning golden orange in the autumn sun.

The colors continue well into the town itself, with its cheerfully painted houses and towering statue of Big Foot (properly masked for Covid times). But a right turn up along Indian Creek and the colors fade into a gray wasteland.

The September fire sucked the vivacity from the landscape, leaving behind blackened, broken timber and charred ground. For weeks, the land here still smoked amid the mangled remains of homes crumpled by the roadside.

Flo Lopez and her husband have lived together on their plot ofland for more than three decades, buther time here dates back much longer. Her grandparents owned it, and when she was orphaned at the age of five, they adopted her and her two siblings, and this land became her home. "We cleared that land, and helped Grandpa put in the well and septic and build the back porch," Lopez said. "On the mountainside, there was a big rock that we would climb up as kids and paint it blue and we would call it Blue Rock. Every year, there would be four eagles that would fly in and stay there."

Lopez and her husband are retired, don't have insurance and only have limited savings. "I don't know what we're going to do," she said. "At our age and not working, I don't know if we're going to get a loan."

In the days after the fire, Lopez said, she found herself wavering between jaunts of crying and determination. She keeps listing all that burned, trying to put a price tag on her losses, but then she thinks of the redwoods and walnut trees that her grandfather planted along the creek, and wonders if they survived. "My connection with the land, the land will get me personally through this," Lopez said.

"I'm going to go back to my land, regardless if they let me or not," she said. "That is my ancestral land. That is my grandparents' land. They're going to have to drag us off that land. Everybody is going to have to stand together, the ones who want to stay. My neighbors, we all want to rebuild. We grew up there together. Where else are we supposed to go?"

Both neighbors on either side of her, Lopez said, did not have insurance.

Firefighters from the Carson Hotshots regroup in Klamath national forest, after carrying out a day-long operation to help contain the Slater fire, 17 September 2020. Photograph: Bryan Denton/The New York Times/eyevine

he climate crisis, combined with more than a century of practicing fire suppression over traditional tribal land stewardship, has led to larger, more destructive wildfires. This year, California has seen more than 8,600 wildfires, including five that have burned enough acreage to earn a spot in the top 10 largest wildfires in state history. The million-acre August Complex fire is currently burning at a size nearing that of the state of Delaware. Experts predict this trend of more massive and more destructive wildfires will only continue over the next few years.

And with the more massive and destructive wildfires came issues with insurance. Home insurance rates in high wildfire risk areas have gone up significantly since 2016, when a drought allowed for a die-off of trees along the spine of the Sierra Nevada Mountains - so much so that some Californians saw their monthly house payments doubled, according to the advocacy group United Policyholders, and rural Californians.

My life, my whole life, my whole life's savings, everything I've ever worked for was right there on that ranch

Robert Perez

"Insurance companies are highly sophisticated gamblers," said Amy Bach, the executive director for United Policyholders."They take on risk for money, and you, as a regular person, have a certain amount of risk in your daily life. You're paying an insurance company to take that risk off of you. But if they get spooked, as they are now, it changes the dynamic."

For some residents in these small, rural communities, many of whom are low-income, the cost and hassle of finding an affordable provider just isn't worth it, especially when some insurance companies have refused to continue insuring Californians altogether in certain regions.

"A lot of insurance companies won't cover you because you live in a wildland fire zone," said Robert Perez, whose ranch was not insured. "You're not in any fire district. You don't have city water. There are all these issues with the state of California and the way that the insurance companies work that for a lot of people, it's next to impossible to get fire insurance and be able to afford it. I couldn't even find anything that would cover the place."

Robert Perez, 34, who lost his uninsured ranch to the Slater fire in Happy Camp. 'It's next to impossible to get fire insurance and be able to afford it,' said Perez. Photograph: Vivian Ho/The Guardian

Like so many others in his situation, Perez has no idea what he's going to do. "My life, my whole life, my whole life's savings, everything I've ever worked for was right there on that ranch," he said.

In Happy Camp, a town in the middle of the forest with one grocery store, one liquor store, and one pizza house, the impact of the fire has been devastating, given the community's size. Half the people in town are homeless. Half the staff for the Karuk tribe are homeless, making operations difficult to manage. Displaced residents are still not allowed to return to their burned properties.

The tribe has spent $4m on temporary travel trailers for residents who have lost their homes, and the Karuk Tribal Council was hoping a Fema major disaster declaration would bring in funds for residents to begin debris removal, said the council chair, Russell Attebery.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) last week denied the disaster declaration, keeping the residents of Happy Camp from those much-needed resources. On Friday, however, California's governor, Gavin Newsom, announced that Donald Trump appeared to have reversed that decision.

Many town residents see their current suffering as just the latest "kick in the teeth" from a government with a long history of disrespect for their cultural knowledge of prescribed fire and forest management.

The Karuk do not have a reservation like other tribes. Their tribal lands fall largely within two national forests, the Klamath and Six Rivers, and there is mistrust between some members of the tribe and the US Forest Service. "From the tribe's perspective, the forest service is an occupying force. The forest service is managing the Karuk land, and the forest service criminalized tribal culture in a lot of ways," said Craig Tucker, a natural resource policy consultant. The forest service made it illegal to light fires, a culturally sacred practice to the Karuk tribe, except under narrow circumstances.

People in this community have always had to figure out what to do with what they had and survive

Erin Hillman

"Their lack of respect for anything about this land goes back before just this one wind event," said Erin Hillman, a 56-year-old Happy Camp resident. "It goes back decades of not caring about whether they're managing this forest properly, not listening and caring about the community and tribe and the people who know and who have been here forever, who know how to make sure the whole place doesn't burn up."

On a recent October afternoon, Hillman called out for her cat Bobby at the edge of her burned property. It had been more than four weeks since she and her husband, Leon, had to flee without the cat, flames licking at the bumper of their car. Each time they had a chance to return to their home, she held out hope that he was still alive.

Erin remembered another wildfire a few years back that affected some of the Karuk community in nearby Orleans. Working for the tribe then, she had gone door to door to help evacuate people, seeing the look of "overwhelming helplessness" on their faces. Now, she understands it.

There's a resilience that exists in isolated, rural outposts like Happy Camp that Erin doesn't think exists elsewhere. "People in this community have always had to figure out what to do with what they had and survive," Erin said. "Since the early 90s, when the logging industry left, the mills shut down, the community got a lot smaller. You have to plan everything. You can't just run to the Walmart."

A lot of that meant turning to each other within the community. When the Hillmans first moved into their home in 1996, a storm swept through, bringing fears that Indian Creek, which ran behind their property, would flood. Their neighbors across the way invited the family over, said Leon, 53. "We sat there all night with them," he said. "These folks, they were a lot older. They were taking care of us."

Now, amid the ashes of their home, they wondered how they can in turn care for the neighbors of this age. The Hillmans know they're among the fortunate ones - they had insurance, albeit insurance that went up in price like most others in the region. "Some of these guys, they're really up in age," Leon said. "To know they're talking about not having any insurance, and that they worked at the mill their whole lives with no pension, and that they don't have anything - there's no way of recovering at all."

A burned out pickup truck among a scorched forest in Happy Camp. Photograph: Bryan Denton/The New York Times/eyevine

ore than anything, Hillman mourns the history that was lost in the fire. The community had grown so used to false alarms that nobody had prepared to evacuate for real. Her husband's regalia - otter hides, elk hides, wolf hides, deer hides, necklaces, bow and arrows - all gone. Baskets, which the Karuk are famed for, some more than a century old, some that had once held their children as babies - now ashes.

It's difficult to talk about rebuilding when many refugees can't even return to say goodbye to what they've lost. Attebery is adamant that a conversation around rebuilding Happy Camp cannot begin without a conversation around fire ecology. He hopes measures like tree removal would not only make Happy Camp more fire safe but provide opportunities and jobs for residents who direly need it. "You take care of the forest and it will take care of you," he said.

But whether community members will be able to remain is unclear amid the insurance woes. Residents say this financial reality is especially heartbreaking, given the community's connection to the land and forest. "My family has lived on this river since time began," Leon Hillman said. "I have this feeling that I can't go anywhere, and I don't want to. We're connected to this place. You're glued to it. Leaving all that behind, it just feels impossible."

Right before Flo Lopez left her family house for the very last time, she turned to her family pictures and promised that she'd be back. Those pictures - including the only photo she had of her deceased parents - are now gone. The house is gone. But she will be back.

"I can't let my ancestors down, the ones who fought for that land," Lopez said. "I have to stay strong for my ancestors."

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Fire tore through the Karuk tribe's homeland. Many won't be able to rebuild

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Disaster came for the small mountain community of Happy Camp, California, on an unseasonably warm morning in September. The Slater fire raged through the ancestral heart of the Karuk tribe in the Klamath Mountains near the Oregon border on 8 September.

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Maldonado et al. on Removal via Climate Change - Case Studies

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Maldonado et al. on Removal via Climate Change - Case Studies

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Another tribe facing removal via climate change. Their home website refers to history, culture, and Hurricane Ida recovery as well as emergency response info.

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OUR RESETTLEMENT

See our Tribal lead Resettlement plan including timeline, resources, and tool kits. A new community field guide and resource kit has been added click the learn more button for details.

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See our Tribal lead Resettlement plan including timeline, resources, and tool kits. A new community field guide and resource kit has been added click the learn more button for details.

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I created this podcast in the fall of 2020 for my final project in ENVS 203 with Dr. Sara Grossman. It is about this topic of the history of conservationism in America and the racist methodologies that went behind it. If you cannot access on Padlet and are interested in listening, I am happy to send it over via email.

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Standing Rock as a Fight for Sovereignty 

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Standing Rock as a Fight for Sovereignty 

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Although there are thousands of resources now circulating on the #NoDAPL fight at Standing Rock, this was one of the first videos I saw of Tara Houska explaining what had been going on there in 2018. Standing Rock is a perfect example of an environmental justice fight that, because those being oppressed are American Indians, is bigger than just environmental harm but also is a battle between governments and for sovereignty.

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The Standing Rock resistance and our fight for indigenous rights | Tara Houska

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True History of Our National Parks by Dina Gilio-Whitaker

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True History of Our National Parks by Dina Gilio-Whitaker

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Dina Gilio-Whitaker - The Usual Story of the National Park Service Is Incomplete | Time

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A photo of Penn Treaty Park in Philadelphia, along the Delaware River, where the Penn Treaty Elm still stands at the location the the first treaty between the newly independent United States and the Lenape people was signed. A symbol of what treaty significance should have meant, but was from then on neglected.