As
fire season begins again in the Pacific Northwest, it is inevitable
that the news will fill with images of explosive, flaming fronts,
and headlines will tally the acreages consumed, the structures
engulfed, the lives given, the landscapes lost. But while wildfires
in North America and elsewhere are indeed becoming larger and more
severe, with very real and very terrible losses, these “newsworthy”
catastrophic fires reinforce a one-sided story of wildfire. Fed to a
public already schooled in the devastations of landscape fire by the
iconic Smokey Bear, the current rhetoric of the “wildfire crisis”
obscures the fact that wildfires are not always tragic and that fire
in the landscape—even when severe—is not always bad.

My
own thinking about fire began shifting in 2018 when I was training as
a Fire Effects Monitor in southwestern Oregon. It was my second year
working with prescribed fire—the intentional burning of
fire-adapted landscapes for fuels reduction and ecosystem health.
Yvette Leecy, a fire practitioner from the Confederated Tribes of the
Warm Springs, was training with me. “A lot of people just throw
fire on the ground,” she said. “Don’t do this. Lay it down,
gentle.” “Oh,” I said. “Like a gift?” “Yes,” she said.
“Like a gift.”

As
an artist and an herbalist, I had already begun noticing the gifts of
fire—many of the plants that were renewed by fire were also useful
for treating the injuries and illnesses that humans might sustain
from getting close to fire—whether a burns or a sprained ankle or
the ubiquitous firefighter “camp crud.” Through decreasing thatch
and insect populations, through increasing light and nutrient
cycling, recurring fires can create the optimal environmental
conditions for these plants that, in turn, create medicines to heal
fire wounds. Fire, quite literally, is medicine. While this was a new
connection for me—I too was schooled by Smokey Bear—Indigenous
cultures across North America have recognized fire as medicine for
millennia. They have purposefully engaged landscape fire to foster
medicinal plants and materially support their cultures, clearing
fuels from around trails and homes, inhibiting acorn weevils,
promoting the growth of camas, hazel, and tobacco, cooling streams
with smoke during fall salmon migrations. But as I have continued
hold Yvette’s instruction that day about how to lay fire down, I
have realized that the Indigenous recognition of fire’s medicine is
about more than just putting flames on the land and about more even
than just using fire to create certain environmental conditions.
Intentional Indigenous fire creates a practice that is
medicine, a way of an attending to and creating relationships with
land, where one’s “bedside manner” counts.

Since
European settlement, the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest have
been profoundly impacted by industrialized logging and grazing,
widespread changes in hydrology and vegetation, a growing
wildland-urban interface, and more than a century of fire
suppression. With increased drought and record-breaking temperatures,
the recurring patterns of landscape fire are
taking on new,
volatile, and indeed, destructive, rhythms of fire. Addressing the
losses of these new rhythms feels urgent. And yet, as Potawatami
philosopher Kyle Whyte has argued, the urgency of contemporary
environmental problems risks ignoring what might be the best
long-term remedy—the building of relationships based in consent,
trust, accountability, and reciprocity.

Indeed,
while Indigenous, fire-dependent cultures assert that fire is
medicine, the “problem” of wildfire crisis might be considered a
symptom of a greater illness indicative of how white
settler culture—of
which I am a part—has
chosen to live (or refuse to live) with these fire-prone
landscapes and with the people who stewarded them for millennia. If
fire is perceived as a problem, as a pathology rather than a
medicine, both landscapes and culture will be shaped accordingly. If
landscapes are only recognized as economic or recreational resources,
fire will only be recognized as that which must be suppressed.
Today’s fire is not just flaming fronts and tragedy, it is also
bulldozers, fire retardants, Nomex, and petroleum. It is the
long-term mythologies of economic progress based on industrial
development and military might, it is the ramifying impacts of roads
and logging, it is legal liability based solely on ignition, it is
the criminalization of Indigenous cultures, is the exoneration of
extractive corporations. All these constitute today’s wildfires.

For
fire, whether wild or prescribed, to be understood as medicine,
settler culture will need to attend to fire as more than an
emergency, as more than an existential threat, as more even than the
presence or absence of flames. Settler
culture will both need
to both support
Indigenous fire sovereignty and work to rebuild consent,
trust, accountability, and reciprocity with these landscapes and
their Indigenous human and other-than-human denizens. We will need to
ask what we learn from the landscapes we live in and how we treat
them: Are we curious about the land around us? Do we observe, do we
listen? Do we promote our landscapes’ health and well-being? Do we
respect the rights of other-than-humans to thrive in them? Or are
they neglected backdrops for what we consider more important? Paved
over, polluted, filled with trash? Do we gain sustenance from
them—food, clothing, shelter? Do we give as much as we take? Do we
make room for otherness, wildness, wildfire to exist?

Rather
than search for new solutions to the so-called “wildfire” crisis,
settler culture could instead look to understand what kinds of
relationships it has fostered and what kinds are possible. To learn
to live well with fire, settler culture could follow the example of
the Indigenous cultures that have stewarded fire-prone landscapes for
millennia. It could begin to wield fire neither as an incendiary
weapon nor even as a management tool, but as a gift that transforms
both giver and receiver, that builds communities and connections to
place, and that when offered with the proper bedside manner, becomes
medicine for both the people and the land.

Fire practitioners monitor a prescribed fire outside Ashland, Oregon in 2018.

Huckleberries are just one of many food plant who Indigenous North American  peoples maintain with fire.

Balsamroot is a medicinal plant who thrives in the open conditions created by fire.

Balsamroot blooms 3 years after the Bootleg Fire burned through this hillside.

Resources

Anderson,
M Kat. Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the
Management of California’s Natural Resources. University of
California Press, 2006 (2005).

Horton,
Jessica L. “Indigenous Artists against the Anthropocene.”
Art Journal, 76:2, 48-69. DOI:10.1080/00043249.2017.1367192

Lake
Frank L. & Amy Cardinal Christianson. “Indigenous Fire
Stewardship.” S. L. Manzello (ed.), Encyclopedia of Wildfires
and Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) Fires. Springer Nature
Switzerland AG, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978- 3- 319- 51727-
8_225- 1

Norgaard,
Kari Marie. Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People: Colonialism, Nature
& Social Action. Rutgers University Press, 2019.

Oshkigin
Spirit of Fire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uBuxbdr5Qs

Pyne,
Stephen J. Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and
Rural Fire. University of Washington Press, 1999 (1982).

Shifting
the Fire Paradigm in Karuk Aboriginal Territory—2023 SRF Lightning
Complex
https://sipnuuk.karuk.us/digital-heritage/shifting-fire-paradigm-karuk-aboriginal-territory-2023-srf-lightning-complex

Tuck,
Eve and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization is not a metaphor.”
Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol 1, No. 1,
2012, 1-40.

Whyte,
Kyle. “Too late for indigenous climate justice: Ecological and
relational tipping points.” WIREs Climate Change, 2019,
(e603), 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.603