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About Smoke signals. (Grand Ronde, Or.) 19??-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 1, 2002)
ran' 10 AUGUST 1, 2002 Smoke Signals Conference Describes Benefits of "Cool Burning" Traditional use of fire moves Native culture to the front lines. By Ron Karten The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde recently hosted rep resentatives of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, govern ment agencies and labor unions for a two-day conference last month that focused on the traditional use of fire by American Indians and America's two-year-old National Fire Plan, which is now beginning to acknowledge the wisdom of that practice. Speaking from the front lines of the wildfires sweeping across Colo rado early in what promises to be another devastating fire season, Interior Secretary Gale Norton told the nation, "We cannot fight Mother Nature." What she didn't tell the nation is that Indians had this problem solved for thousands of years before the U.S. govern ment took over the operation. In introducing the conference, Tribal Council Chair Cheryle Kennedy said, "There's something to be said for practices given by the Creator for all of us, and burning is one of these." Or as Tony Farque, President of National Federation of Federal Employees Local 457 and emcee of the event, said to close the first day of the conference, "Think globally. Burn locally." The burning process, known as "cool burning," was employed both 2 1 f ' ' ' k ,V -5'. , ' " 1 nT:K Tribal member Connie Schultz, CTGR Cultural Protection Specialist, sitting at Camas Prairie. Pictured in foreground is a traditional camas oven that was built in 2001 by the Tribe and the Willamette National Forest staff. T. V.I .i, ' J? J1 -, Tribal Elder Merle Holmes enjoying the Traditional Salmon Bake with camas bulbs, and huckleberry cobbler. The camas and huckleberries for lunch are from the restoration projects at Camas Prairie and Cougar Rock. descent, a Ph.D. candidate in the Environmental Science program at Oregon State University and au thor of The Role of Indigenous Burning in Land Management, "but for all of the resources. Na tives used fire; he said, in crop, pest, and range management, for fire proofing, clearing areas for travel and collecting basket materials and to make hunting easier - both for tracking and for corralling animals. In fact, far from destroying or dam aging plant and animal life, said Robert Kentta, CTSI Cultural Di rector, "many plants and animals have adapted to fire and some are de pendent on it." The practice con tinued for some 80 centuries, Baker Pilgrim said, until the early part of the 20th Century when "your rangers showed up and told us we couldn't do it 1 - I, v f 'f -J. spring and fall when Indians knew that rain was coming to stop run away flames, said Aggie Baker-Pilgrim, a Tribal Elder of the Confed erate Tribes of Siletz Indians (CTSI). The fires could be as small as a few acres or much larger on the prairies, and would keep the forest or field floors clear of debris. "Afterwards," Baker-Pilgrim said, "deer would come in closer and ber ries would grow larger." And like so many Native endeav ors, everybody was involved. Women decided where to set the fire and started it, often with men surrounding the area to keep the fire from getting out of hand. "Children were involved, too," she said. Members of the conference de scribed the benefits of integrating fire into daily practices. "You're managing not just for trees," said Frank Kanawha Lake, of Native American and Mexican anymore. For 90 years up to today, "fire " f r 1 j.n """ '"I management has been the primary land management activity on much of our land base," acknowl edged Neil Sugihara, Ph.D., a fire ecologist with the US Forest Ser vice. And a follow-up interview with Pete Wakeland, CTGR's Natu ral Resources Director revealed that those 90 years of fire suppression, along with more recent restrictions on forest management have al lowed a deadly amount of wood fuel to pile up. Fire fuel is waist-high in many places, Sugihara said, setting the scene for forest fires that burn for months each summer and destroy millions of acres of timberland, threaten homes and lives and can cost $1 million a day to fight. Cli mate changes making drought more prevalent across the country also make forested areas more sus ceptible to devastating fires, Wakeland said. In 2000, the year the nation finally was forced to face up to how destructive its practices have become, the U.S. spent $2 bil lion on fire suppression and suffered multiple forest fire-related deaths. Maybe even more daunting than fighting these blazes, the solution in the form of the National Fire Plan is asking as many as two dozen federal, state, and Tribal participants to work together on the plan. Making so lutions still more diffi cult to come by, the plan will adhere to what Rich Fairbanks, forester for the Wil lamette National For est, called the "most restrictive" assessment of the prob lem. The Tribes of Grand Ronde and Siletz have already been involved in pilot projects in recent years, ac cording to June Olson, Cultural Resources Director for the Confed erated Tribes of Grand Ronde and one of the driving forces of this con ference. Camas burning, for ex ample, has been going on for three years. In addition, the Tribes of Grand Ronde and Siletz have iden tified areas in the Willamette Na tional Forest where "cool burning" might profitably be used. The conference raised challenges beyond the issue of fire. Work is sues exist for those who fight fires, said Cece Headley, a board mem ber of the Alliance of Forest Work ers and Harvesters and the Na tional Network of Forest Practitio ners. In the same way that the overall conference looked at ways to restore forests to sustainability, Headley and others were concerned about low pay, intermittent and dangerous work, and perhaps more important, the lack of any track to higher wage jobs in the industry. Traditionally, Natives who de cided how to manage the land also did the work. Again today, said Chris Van Daalen, of the Alliance for Social Justice and the Environ ment, "we need to connect labor with knowledge." Times have changed since tradi tional practices. For one thing, said Gary Bower, a U.S. Forest Service researcher who attended the con ference, "they didn't have to con sider people jumping up and down about air pollution issues every time they burned." The issue is politicized today. Sci ence has taken the place of tradi tion. And the earth is no longer more important than the sum of its parts. Each product from the earth has to pay its own way. But change is upon us again. "The values we're hearing today," said Jon Stewart, the U.S. Depart ment of Agriculture Forest Service's representative on the National Fire Plan, "are the values we need." According to Olson, the purpose of the conference was "to bring an awareness of the traditional use of fire to more people who are respon sible for public and private lands." Additionally, the Tribe is looking for ways to make profitable use of accessible National Fire Plan dol lars. Assessing the event, she added that it was more successful on the first count than on the sec ond. B A Traditional Salmon Bake hosted by the Siletz Tribe at Camas Prairie on day two of the Conference. Day two participants of the Traditional Fire Plan Workshop at Camas Prairie patiently wait ing for traditional salmon bake lunch. (Salmon cooking in foreground). M 5 'it ritt ;-, J 4X i
