Chapter Eight | Relationships, respect, and reciprocity: approaches to learning and teaching about Indigenous cultural burning and landscape stewardship | Beth Rose Middleton Manning

Relationships, respect, and reciprocity: approaches to learning and teaching about Indigenous cultural burning and landscape stewardship

Beth Rose Middleton Manning

PROJECT SUMMARY

The Keepers of the Flame project seeks to engage students and other participants in Indigenous methodologies of experiential, reciprocal, respectful learning, with a focus on cultural fire as a land stewardship tool. Keepers of the Flame involves both an upper-division undergraduate course and a series of hands-on, public-facing workshops with cultural fire practitioners. The course strives to center Indigenous epistemologies of fire through presentations and writings by Indigenous and allied fire practitioners. The course introduces students to an understanding of contemporary environmental policy as an expression of settler colonialism, so that they can conceptualize Indigenous cultural burning as an expression of decolonization in action (see Tuck & Yang, 2012). The structure, content, and activities in the class strive to implement Native Science “based on the natural perceptive knowledge gained from using the whole body/mind of our senses in direct participation with the natural world” (Cajete, 2018).

Keepers of the Flame centers experiential learning, acknowledging that it is impossible to learn about cultural fire in a classroom (Tripp, 2021). To learn about Indigenous epistemologies of fire, one must be outside, with cultural practitioners, and with the plants and other elements that compose an ecosystem. We all become students of fire itself, guided by partners sharing Indigenous, place-based ways of knowing fire (Adlam et al., 2022; Adams et al., forthcoming). As an enactment of reciprocity, students contribute labor to Indigenous-led projects, Keepers of the Flame provides funding to Indigenous presenters and initiatives, and the final student assignment is a production that is returned to partners for their own use in sharing their work.

Keepers of the Flame attracts participants from across disciplines, including Ecology, Ethnic Studies, History, Environmental Policy, and Health; but it is firmly grounded in Native and Indigenous Studies (NAIS). NAIS at University of California (UC) Davis centers accountability, decolonization, Indigenous epistemologies, respect, and supporting Indigenous self-determination, sovereignty and community in ways that transcend imposed colonial borders (see Forbes et al., 2002). Keepers of the Flame asserts the importance of placing hands-on land stewardship and environmental policy courses in NAIS, following work by scholars that center Indigenous knowledge in ecology (see Kimmerer, 2013; Anderson, 2005; Kimmerer & Lake, 2001; Hankins, 2021; Long et al., 2021; Marks-Block et al., 2019).

Centering the course in Indigenous Studies also requires attention to positionality. Through weekly online discussion posts as well as in-class conversations, students are encouraged to link their identity with their education—what are their own family histories of relationality to place and landscape care? What is their relationship toward fire? If they are afraid of fire, what are the roots of that fear? Students are also guided explicitly to recognize the political within the personal and the ecological—what are the political conditions that led to fire suppression, and to the oppression of Indigenous people of California and the exclusion of their ways of care for and living with place? How do they fit into that context? How do the current (Western) systems of landscape governance frame fire and an appropriate human relationship with fire? How is this different from or similar to Indigenous approaches to fire?

The Keepers of the Flame educational project engages students in landscape restoration, as well as in critical examination of the multilayered colonial policies that have led to current degraded landscape conditions and exclusionary power dynamics in landscape governance. Students are also engaged in thinking critically about their relationships to Indigenous collaborators, and the ways in which they can reciprocate for the knowledge and experiences shared, particularly in the context of years of broader colonial oppression. This project offers rigorous attention to intersectionality and political ecology (see Middleton, 2015), in a broader context of developing respectful/reciprocal learning models with Indigenous partners and learning-by-doing in collaborating with Indigenous landscape restoration projects.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Understand the importance and scope of Indigenous stewardship.
Question inherited beliefs and behaviors about fire and forest stewardship.
Recognize assumptions in Western science that underlie questions, models, and approaches to public (United States Forest Service (USFS), National Park Service) and private (i.e., CalFire/state fire and forestry programs) forest management.
Recognize coloniality in who is considered an expert on forest management, and why.
Learn hands-on with Indigenous fire practitioners about the effects of cultural burning.
Identify the barriers and opportunities to Indigenous-led implementation of cultural burning and other landscape stewardship techniques.
Learn how to build cross-cultural, reciprocal relationships.

BACKGROUND READINGS

Adlam, C., Almendariz, D., Goode, R. W., Martinez, D. J., & Middleton, B. R. (2022). Keepers of the Flame: supporting the revitalization of Indigenous cultural burning. Society & Natural Resources, 35(5), 575–590.
Aldern, J. D., & Goode, R. W. (2014). The stories hold water: learning and burning in North Fork Mono homelands. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3), 26–51.
Anderson, M. K. (2005). Tending the Wild (pp. 34–357). University of California Press.
Anderson, M. K. (1999). The fire, pruning, and coppice management of temperate ecosystems for basketry material by California Indian tribes. Human Ecology, 27(1), 79–113.
Little, J. B. (2021, September 10). I lost my home to the climate crisis. You could too. The Nation. Retrieved August 2, 2022, from https://www .thenation.com/article/environment/climate-crisis-housing/.
Cajete, G. (2018). Native science and sustaining Indigenous communities. In M. K. Nelson & D. Shilling (eds.), Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability (pp. 15–26). Cambridge University Press.
David, A. T., Asarian, J. E., & Lake, F. K. (2018). Wildfire smoke cools summer river and stream water temperatures. Water Resources Research, 54(10), 7273–7290.
Gilio-Whitaker, D. (2019). As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock. Beacon Press.
Goode, R. W., Gaughen, S., Fierro, M., Hankins, D. L., Johnson-Reyes, K., Middleton, B. R., et al. (2018). Summary Report from Tribal and Indigenous Communities Within California. California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment.
Hankins, D. L. (2015). Restoring Indigenous prescribed fires to California oak woodlands. Gen. Tech. Rep. PSW-GTR-251. Berkeley, CA: US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station, 123–129.
Hankins, D. (2021). Reading the California landscape for fire. Bay Nature,January 3. Retrieved August 2, 2022, from https://baynature.org/article/reading-the-landscape-forfire/.
Kimmerer, R. W., & Lake, F. K. (2001). The role of Indigenous burning inland management. Journal of Forestry, 99(11), 36–41.
Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, ScientificKnowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions.
Kimmerer, R. W. (2018). Mishkos Kenomagwen, the lessons of grass: restoring reciprocity with the good green earth. In M. K. Nelson & D. Shilling (eds.), Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability (pp. 27–56).Cambridge University Press.
Kosek, J. (2006). Understories: The Political Life of Forests in NorthernNew Mexico. Duke University Press.
Lake, F. K., Wright, V., Morgan, P., McFadzen, M., McWethy, D., &Stevens-Rumann, C. (2017). Returning fire to the land: celebrating traditional knowledge and fire. Journal of Forestry, 115(5), 343–353.
Lake, F. K. (2021). Indigenous fire stewardship: Federal/Tribal partnerships for wildland fire research and management. Fire Management Today,79(1), 30–39
Long, J. W., Anderson, M. K., Quinn-Davidson, L., Goode, R. W., Lake,F. K., & Skinner, C. N. (2016). Restoring California black oak ecosystems to promote tribal values and wildlife. Gen. Tech. Rep. PSW GTR-252. Albany, CA: US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station.
Long, J. W., Lake, F. K., & Goode, R. W. (2021). The importance of Indigenous cultural burning in forested regions of the Pacific West, USA. Forest Ecology and Management, 500, 119597.
Marks-Block, T., Lake, F. K., & Curran, L. M. (2019). Effects of understory fire management treatments on California Hazelnut, an ecocultural resource of the Karuk and Yurok Indians in the Pacific Northwest. Forest Ecology and Management, 450, 117517.
Marks-Block, T., & Tripp, W. (2021). Facilitating prescribed fire in Northern California through Indigenous Governance and interagency partnerships. Fire, 4(3), 37.
Middleton, B. R. (2015). Jahát Jat’totòdom: toward an Indigenous political ecology. In R. L. Bryant (ed.), The International Handbook of Political Ecology (pp. 561–576). Edward Elgar Publishing.
Norgaard, K. M. (2019). Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People: Colonialism, Nature, and Social Action. Rutgers University Press.
Tripp, B. (2020). Our land was taken. But we still hold the knowledge of how to stop mega-fires. The Guardian, September 16.
Tripp, B. (2021, November 8). All things cultural burning with Karuk Tribal Member Bill Tripp. Northern Rockies Fire Science Network. Retrieved August 2, 2022, from https://www.nrfirescience.org/resource/ 24074.
Tuck, E., McKenzie, M., & McCoy, K. (2014). Land education: Indigenous, post-colonial, and decolonizing perspectives on place and environmental education research. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 1–23.
Vazquez, I. A. (2019). Restoring reciprocal relationships for social and ecological health. Ecology Law Quarterly, 46(4), 1049–1067. https:// www.ecologylawquarterly.org/print/restoring-reciprocal-relationships-for -social-and-ecological-health/.

ISSUE BACKGROUND

Fire in California in popular discourse evokes feelings of anxiety, fear, and dread. As “fire season” becomes longer and more destructive, responses to fire elicit polarizing political debates over proper forest management and the realities of climate change. In truth, the combination of forest mismanagement (fire suppression, lack of forest thinning and maintenance after thinning projects) and climate change has resulted in the current volatile forest conditions that are leading to numerous catastrophic fires. Lives have been upended or, at worst, lost, and homes, businesses, and entire towns destroyed by wildfires throughout the West (Little, 2021). How can we educate the next generation of land stewards and environmental policymakers to have a different perspective on fire?Until recently, fire suppression and forest mismanagement as an Indigenous environmental justice issue was not part of these conversations. Indigenous environmental justice roots environmental inequalities and discrimination in the history of settler colonialism and violent suppression of Indigeneity (Gilio-Whitaker, 2019; Norgaard, 2019). Fire suppression is intertwined with colonialism of Western forests (Tripp, 2020; Kosek, 2006; Norgaard, 2019). In September 2020, even as wildfires raged nearby, Karuk Tribe Natural Resources Director Bill Tripp published an oped in The Guardian entitled, “Our land was taken. But we still hold the knowledge of how to stop mega-fires.” The piece outlines the 18th-century California policies that prohibited burning and called for removal and extermination of Indigenous Californians. Tripp proposed a solution of returning Indigenous-led burning to the land:

“We hold the knowledge of fire, forests, water, plants and animals that is needed to revitalize our human connection and responsibility to this land … we can overcome our current situation and teach others how to get it done across the western United States.”

Tripp is not alone in this view. Other prominent advocates for viewing fire as a relational stewardship partner include North Fork Mono Chairman Ron Goode; USFS researcher and Karuk descendant Dr. Frank Lake; Plains Miwok traditional cultural practitioner and pyrogeographer Dr. Don Hankins, Maidu/ Wintun/Hupa/Yurok cultural educator Diana Almendariz; Executive Director of the Cultural Fire Management Council Margo Robbins (Yurok); and ethnoecologist Dr. M. Kat Anderson. Each of these leaders, and many more, know that fire was applied by Indigenous people for millennia prior to European colonization or American statehood. This view of fire is based in relationship to, knowledge of, and interdependence with home-place.

Students in environmental policy, environmental justice, and NAIS often enter the classroom ready to engage with these issues. NAIS specifically centers Indigenous epistemologies, histories, voices, and experiences, and thus dialogues on fire begin from a different starting point. In addition to calling out settler colonial violence as expressed in environmental policy, Indigenous perspectives on fire center on relationality and spirituality.

DEVELOPING KEEPERS OF THE FLAME

In winter 2018, I was teaching California Indian Environmental Policy, an upper-division survey course focused on Indigenous approaches to a range of environmental policy issues, including site protection, water contamination, illegal dumping, carbon offsets, and advancing traditional land stewardship approaches. With support from the Yocha Dehe Endowed Chair in California Indian Studies, I hosted multiple guest speakers, creating opportunities for students to learn directly from Indigenous practitioners. I invited Chairman Goode to speak about his work with cultural burning as a landscape stewardship tool, and he offered instead to host the class at a burn on his family land outside Mariposa, California.

I had never taken a class on an overnight field trip before, but we amassed gear, food, and transportation, and took as many students as possible three hours south to the foothills outside Yosemite. Chairman Goode offered songs and prayers for good learning and exchange, safety, and benefits for the land before we began the preparation for the burn. Under his direction, students used clippers and handsaws to cut back overgrown sourberry and redbud bushes and pile the limbs on top of the plants. Then, he and his nephew helped students ignite the bushes, using dried grass chunked in among the branches. I felt a little trepidation as the bushes ignited—would they burn as expected? Would the fire spread beyond our control? But they flamed consistently, consuming only the fuel provided and then burning out. The pattern of the burn reflected Ron’s expertise in the application of cultural fire. After the burn, students and volunteers raked the ash into the soil and cut any small protruding unburnt vegetation. When Ron sent me photos a few months later, the bushes were sprouting fresh, healthy shoots, and wildflowers were carpeting the burned area. When I returned two years later with a new group of students, we were able to work with a group of three elder Dunlap Mono weavers and their relatives to gather the strong, straight shoots of sourberry for traditional basketry.

That first burn in 2018 began a process of learning, teaching, collaboration, and engagement that led to the Keepers of the Flame course. The effort would not have been possible without the dedicated work of graduate student researchers in Ecology and Native American Studies Christopher Adlam, Deniss Martinez, and Melinda Adams, as well as Future of Fire postdoctoral fellow Nina Fontana. Keepers of the Flame is structured to guide students in learning about the human relationship to fire from Indigenous perspectives. This necessarily involves questioning Western environmental policy and practice regarding fire. In a broader context of colonial land management and a history of extractive research, the class centers on building respectful, reciprocal relationships with Indigenous partners and collaborators. Our partners include the Tending and Gathering Garden (TGG) Steering Committee, especially Diana Almendariz (Maidu/Wintun/Hupa/Yurok), and staff at the Cache Creek Nature Preserve outside Woodland, California; and the Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center, which sees significant value in highlighting Indigenous cultural burning as a climate adaptation strategy throughout the region. Keepers of the Flame is both a course and a broader initiative that includes a series of public-facing workshops involving multiple tribes, federal agencies, and nonprofit conservation organizations in learning about the multifaceted benefits of Indigenous cultural burning. This has taken on new urgency as homelands and communities are threatened by catastrophic fire.

PROJECT INSTRUCTIONS

The central aspect of developing a hands-on course that centers on Indigenous epistemologies is relationships. I have known two of the lead cultural educators and practitioners, Chairman Goode and Diana Almendariz, for over a decade and we have worked together on a variety of projects. Trust has been built through collaboration on issues of mutual interest. Both individuals are also committed educators with a passion for working with students and sharing their expertise. Their work with the students contributes to advancing their goals on specific land-based projects, expanding education about Indigenous land stewardship, and impacting policy. Other invited speakers in the class may represent newer relationships. All guests are treated with respect, their time is compensated, and I strive to identify ways that we can contribute to their work—for example, by writing letters to support their campaigns, or by contributing labor to a land-based project if invited to do so.

Keepers of the Flame also requires relationship building with funders and institutional collaborators. The multifaceted initiative involving the course, guest speakers, land-based projects, workshops, and research documenting student and participant learning requires funding to implement. I am grateful for campus-based sources of support, including the Yocha Dehe Endowed Chair, the Department of Plant Sciences, and the Environmental Justice Project of the Institute for the Environment (IE), as well as significant external support from the US Geological Service via the Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center. Each year a team of students and I, with support from IE graphic designers, have produced a colorful report on the Keepers of the Flame to keep partners, collaborators, and funders informed of project activities and outcomes.

All the aspects of Keepers of the Flame also require multiple partners to implement. Each year of the initiative (2019–2022 thus far), two to four graduate students or postdocs have assisted with implementing course learning, planning workdays, supporting outreach to and follow-up with speakers and practitioners, documenting course outcomes, and fundraising for course continuance. Collaborations founded between the instructor(s) and assistants/ collaborators are grounded in communication, trust, and the course ethics of respect and reciprocity. Students have created online resources with class protocols, processes, and materials, and trained incoming student assistants on how to support the Keepers of the Flame before they move on in their careers. Funding for student or postdoc time is also imperative to build into Keepers of the Flame planning.

It is important that the development of the Keepers of the Flame project remains rooted in a critical examination of the historical conditions that enabled the current fire crisis. This course and initiative are grounded in NAIS scholarship, which is attentive to homeland history and context. This is not an ecological course that looks only at present conditions and stewardship techniques. This is a Native Studies course that strives to understand the context of the landscapes in which we are invited to learn about and contribute to cultural burns, and recognizes the distinct and multifaceted epistemologies of practitioners. We are careful to include readings, speakers, lectures, and other media that inform participants about the histories of peoples, landscapes, and policies that have led to the present condition of ecologies and configuration of access and capital. The work in this course does not occur in a vacuum; we also aim to educate students on settler colonialism, Indigenous resilience, and Indigenous perspectives on language, land, relationship, and stewardship; and to contribute to Indigenous-led movements.

This project developed organically, emerging from the invitation of a collaborator (Chairman Goode), opportunities to implement fire on established eco-cultural restoration projects (with Diana Almendariz at the TGG), and in a political/cultural moment of reckoning with injustice (following Standing Rock, Mauna Kea, and George Floyd) and wildfire (in a context of the most catastrophic fire years on record in California). The relationships already established with practitioners as friends, mentors, and collaborators created fertile ground to establish the Keepers of the Flame as a hands-on educational and practical initiative to support expanded learning about, recognition of and respect for, and application of cultural fire (on relational learning see also Daniel and Ramirez-Ruiz, this volume).

ADDRESSING COMMON CHALLENGES IN THE PROJECT

The conditions for the success of Keepers of the Flame are dependent upon a variety of factors which are often independent of the instructors’ will. Success is defined broadly and includes facilitating hands-on learning opportunities; hosting multiple speakers; conducting pre- and post-learning assessments in the class and at workshops; and conducting follow-up and outreach with partners, contributors, and funders.

Being able to implement fire itself is a significant challenge from the perspective of permitting and liability. Some days when burns are planned may be declared no-burn days by air quality authorities, resulting in rapid scheduling changes until a burn window opens. In one instance, over 50 people came out to witness a burn only to have it canceled when environmental conditions changed, and it became a no-burn day. Keepers of the Flame participants learn flexibility in these contexts. All the burns associated with the class have been by invitation to existing Indigenous-led projects: Chairman Goode’s cultural fire workshops; burns at the TGG initiated by TGG steering committee members (Diana Almendariz) and staff (including Lynne Haralson, Jolene Jindrich, and Ameen Lotfi); and burns led by Plains Miwok pyrogeographer Dr. Don Hankins on lands he stewards. In each of these cases, the hosts have managed the permitting and liability. As observers of this process, Keepers of the Flame participants are also receiving an education on the bureaucratic limitations imposed on cultural fire practitioners.

Working with landscape preparation and fire requires explicit attention to safety. Students and participants must be informed about proper clothing, tools, shoes, and eye protection. Funding is required to purchase safety gear including fire-resistant clothing and glasses. Safety protocols with hosts may include specific waivers that reduce their liability. While many of the hands-on aspects of the course deal with preparing vegetation, and then observing and supporting localized application of fire led by knowledgeable and trained practitioners, we are still attentive to the potential dangers and inform students and participants of safety protocols. After four seasons of Keepers of the Flame activities, we have had no injuries.

OPTIONS FOR EXTENSION

The class and workshops currently take place within the winter quarter, which runs from the first week of January through the second week of March at UC Davis. This matches the seasonality of an early spring cultural burn. Other options might be fall class, to participate in a late fall burn, but the weather is increasingly warm and dry in the fall. These seasonal changes focus the burn window on the early spring season, after some moisture has generally been deposited in the winter (December, January). The class and workshops are particularly affected by weather; in 2019 rain reduced the ability to apply fire and shortened a multi-day workshop. Because of the impacts of the weather, and the uncertainty of permitted burn days and wind shifts, it could make sense to lengthen the class across more than one quarter, to increase the possibilities for being involved in cultural burns. Extending the class period beyond one quarter and offering workshops with partners at different times of year would require additional and flexible funding and assistants.

REFLECTIONS ON EQUITY IN THE CLASSROOM

Accessibility is an important consideration in a class and in workshops that emphasize hands-on, outdoor work. For this reason, we strive to make learning and assignments responsive to a variety of abilities and learning approaches. Frequent guest speakers provide oral and visual sharing on their personal understanding of and experiences with cultural burning. During the pandemic, many of these presentations took place remotely via Zoom and were recorded for students with bandwidth issues. Class assignments are both written (weekly reflections) and audio-visual—the penultimate assignment is a short podcast or video engaging with a particular topic related to cultural fire. The workshops are valuable even for those who may not be able to physically labor, as they can observe the work, listen to the practitioners share their experiences with fire, and see the results.

One element of accessibility that we continue to examine is that of flexibility and transportation, as the hands-on and workshop aspects of the initiative generally take place on the weekends, requiring participants to have free time on the weekends, and the ability to transport themselves to the project site. Pre-pandemic, we offered group transportation in university vans, but during the pandemic we have had to shift to individual and carpool transportation. In addition, we want the course to be accessible to student parents. Cultural fire is defined in part by its rootedness in multigenerational learning, so we have been able to welcome students and their children to attend workshops, workdays, and demonstrations, with attention to safety.

CONCLUSION

Keepers of the Flame is an initiative rooted in relationships and in response to a need for greater understanding of place-based relationships to fire. We consider the application of cultural fire to be a decolonial practice in the face of institutional colonial suppression of Indigenous peoples and their land stewardship techniques. Keepers of the Flame honors the voices of cultural practitioners who maintain relationships with fire and are willing to share their expertise with students, faculty, and community members. Participants leave with a responsibility to cultivate respectful, reciprocal relationships with Indigenous peoples and homelands, and to advocate for Indigenous self-determination in landscape stewardship.

REFERENCES

Adams, M. M., Gonzales, P., Almendariz, D. & Middleton, B. R. (forthcoming, 2023). Rematriating fire: practices and protocols of native women reclaiming cultural fire in California. In J. Aldern & T. L. Gregor (eds.), LandKeeping: Restoring Indigenous Fire Stewardship and Ecological Partnerships in North America.

Adlam, C., Almendariz, D., Goode, R. W., Martinez, D. J., & Middleton, B. R. (2022). Keepers of the flame: supporting the revitalization of Indigenous cultural burning. Society & Natural Resources, 35(5), 575–590.

Anderson, M. K. (2005). Restoring landscapes with native knowledge. In M. K. Anderson, Tending the Wild (pp. 34–357). University of California Press.

Cajete, G. (2018). Native science and sustaining Indigenous communities. In M. K. Nelson & D. Shilling (eds.), Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability (pp. 15–26). Cambridge University Press.

Forbes, J. D. et al. (2002). A hemispheric approach: Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis. In D. Champagne and J. Stauss (eds.), Native American Studies in Higher Education: Models for Collaboration between Universities and Indigenous Nations (Chapter 6). AltaMira Press.

Gilio-Whitaker, D. (2019). As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock. Beacon Press.

Hankins, D. (2021). Reading the California landscape for fire. Bay Nature, January 3. Retrieved August 2, 2022, from https://baynature.org/article/reading-the-landscape -for-fire/.

Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions.

Kimmerer, R. W. (2018). Mishkos Kenomagwen, the lessons of grass: restoring reciprocity with the good green earth. In M. K. Nelson & D. Shilling (eds.), Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability (pp. 27–56). Cambridge University Press.

Kimmerer, R. W., & Lake, F. K. (2001). The role of Indigenous burning in land management. Journal of Forestry, 99(11), 36–41.

Kosek, J. (2006). Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico. Duke University Press.

Little, J. B. (2021, September 10). I lost my home to the climate crisis. You could too. The Nation. Retrieved August 2, 2022, from https://www.thenation.com/article/ environment/climate-crisis-housing/.

Long, J. W., Lake, F. K., & Goode, R. W. (2021). The importance of Indigenous cultural burning in forested regions of the Pacific West, USA. Forest Ecology and Management, 500, 119597.

Marks-Block, T., Lake, F. K., & Curran, L. M. (2019). Effects of understory fire management treatments on California Hazelnut, an ecocultural resource of the Karuk and Yurok Indians in the Pacific Northwest. Forest Ecology and Management, 450, 117517.

Middleton, B. R. (2015). Jahát Jat’totòdom: toward an Indigenous political ecology. In R. L. Bryant (ed.), The International Handbook of Political Ecology (pp. 561–576). Edward Elgar Publishing.

Norgaard, K. M. (2019). Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People: Colonialism, Nature, and Social Action. Rutgers University Press.

Tripp, B. (2020). Our land was taken. But we still hold the knowledge of how to stop mega-fires. The Guardian, September 16.

Tripp, B. (2021, November 8). All things cultural burning with Karuk Tribal Member Bill Tripp. Northern Rockies Fire Science Network. Retrieved August 2, 2022, from https://www.nrfirescience.org/resource/24074.

Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012) Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society, 1(1), 1–40.

Tuck, E., McKenzie, M., & McCoy, K. (2014). Land education: Indigenous, post-colonial, and decolonizing perspectives on place and environmental education research. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 1–23.