Karuk Tribe right to cultural burning affirmed in agreement with California

The Karuk Tribe of northern California recently became the first to reach an agreement with the California Natural Resources Agency and local air quality officials to practise cultural burns.

Bill Tripp, Karuk Tribe's director of natural resources and environmental policy, said the agreement reflects the state's recognition of the community's sovereignty. 

"The whole fire exclusion paradigm has impacted our rights," Tripp said.

"Now we get a lot of very large wildfires today and there's a lot of reasons for that, but fundamentally at the root of it all is the fact that it's been so long since some of these places have burned."

He said they've been burning in and around their traditional lands since time immemorial and fire prevention campaigns such as Smokey the Bear instilled a fear of fire in society — one that has allowed for the accumulation of wildfire fuel.

He also pointed to other contributing factors like extreme and unprecedented weather patterns and the Weeks Act of 1911, a federal law that established the eastern national forests and the first co-operative wildland firefighting effort, and outlawed some Native American fire management practices in the U.S.

Tripp said historically, his people would have roughly 7,000 fires per year to burn off fuel such as dead branches and leaves and to help shape and regenerate the landscape.

Indigenous stewardship

In Canada, Natural Resources Transfer Acts in 1930 transferred control over Crown lands and natural resources from the Government of Canada to the provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

Wildfire consultant Brady Highway, a member of Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation in Sask., said these agreements removed First Nations' right to steward their territory and that extreme wildfires impact their inherent rights. 

"We are dependent on the land, on a healthy landscape in order for us to hunt and, and fish and gather the foods and medicines that we need," Highway said.

"Without a healthy environment, our inherent rights are being impacted."

He said he considers the process of applying for burn permits similar to having a duty to consult the province, "when the province regularly imposes regulations, legislation, land use policies on us without that same courtesy of consulting with us."

Firekeeper Joe Gilchrist, a member of Skeetchestn Indian Band near Kamloops B.C., recently attended a First Nations Emergency Services cultural burning workshop in Cranbrook, B.C., ahead of this year's wildfire season.

He said burn permits are not always practical because it's difficult to set a date to have a fire. 

"If we did a cultural burn then we would go out on the land every morning and then we would know when it's time to burn," he said. 

"There's lots of different signs which can't necessarily be projected."

He said he's seen wildfires become progressively worse since he was young.

"There used to be a pattern where about every four to seven years you'd have a bad fire year," he said.

"Just in the 2000s, you start to see that it's almost every year now that the fires are bad."

Gilchrist said he supports the direction the state of California's taking and believes a similar approach to cultural burns could work here in Canada. 

He said fire prevention through cultural burns would be much less expensive than the cost of fire suppression. 

"[The land] needs fire to be healthy," Gilchrist said.