Tribes suffer brunt of burn ban effects
The land near Yosemite National Park had been tended by Irene Vasquez's family for decades. They took care of their 7 acres by setting small fires to thin vegetation and help some plants to grow.
But the steep, chaparral-studded slopes surrounding the property hadn't seen fire since Vasquez and fellow members of the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation were barred from practicing cultural burning on a wider scale some 100 years before.
When a wildfire swept through in July, the dense vegetation stoked flames that destroyed Vasquez's home and transformed the land into a scarred moonscape. With that, she became one of many Indigenous residents to watch her ancestral territory burn in recent years, despite knowing the outcome could have been different.
“If we were able to impart that wisdom and knowledge to European settlers, to the agencies, to not stop our burning, we would be in a way different place,” Vasquez said.
Cultural burning — the practice of using controlled fires to tend the landscape — was once widespread among many Indigenous groups, but ended with the arrival of European settlers.
Now, many experts say the lack of regular, low-intensity fire in some California ecosystems has contributed to an overgrowth of vegetation that has made wildfires grow larger and more severe. And, in a cruel irony, Native Americans are among those most affected, they say.
Indigenous residents are over three times more concentrated in California census tracts that see fires most frequently and where the most acreage burns, according to a study by University of California, Irvine,
researchers published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
Members of the Karuk Tribe lost homes when the Slater fire burned hundreds of properties in Siskiyou County in 2020. The Mountain Maidu saw their Greenville Rancheria office and health facilities destroyed and the landscape severely damaged when the Dixie fire tore through the heart of their homelands the following year.
In July, multiple members of the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation were displaced by the Oak fire, which destroyed more than 100 homes in Mariposa County. The following month, the fastmoving McKinney fire — which killed four people — destroyed a building that housed Karuk tribal archives and resulted in a massive die-off of fish in the Klamath River, a hub of ceremonial activities.
For Vasquez and other Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation members, recovery has been complicated by a 40year legal battle for federal recognition. As an unrecognized tribe, the group is ineligible for many types of government aid. Its operations are supported by volunteer work, donations and grants received through its associated nonprofit, the American Indian Council of Mariposa County, which raised more than $100,000 through an Oak fire relief fund.
“We have a lot of people left with nothing,” said Clay River, who at the time of the fire was director of the Miwumati Healing Center, which serves as the hub for tribal health and social services. “Some people weren't even able to make it home to try to get stuff so they have the car they were driving and the clothes on their back — that's it.”
The fire damaged cultural sites, including prehistoric roundhouses and bedrock mortars where acorn grinding took place, said Waylon Coats, vice chair and cultural resource manager of the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation, who worked as an archaeologist on the fire. Flames severely scarred the land and destroyed resources that were once available for gathering.
The practice is central to tribal culture, said Coats, who recalled how when he was a child, basket makers would gather basket making materials, hunters would gather hunting tools and medicine people would gather medicine. Burning was performed to help all of those tradespeople collect the best supplies possible, he said.
“We didn't call it cultural burning,” he said. “We just called it taking care of the land.”
Community members would burn around deer grass to allow for new growth and help other native plants thrive. They would burn litter off the ground of oak groves so young trees could sprout up. They would set fires to keep areas around living quarters clear of debris and to improve hunting conditions.
These burns once occurred in and around hundreds of Southern Sierra Miwuk villages that dotted the Yosemite Valley and other areas of Mariposa County.
But in 1850, as the Gold Rush transformed the area into a mining free-for-all, the Legislature passed a law that essentially codified the slavery of Indigenous people, facilitated their removal from their lands and prohibited the use of cultural fire. At around the same time, state-sponsored militias undertook efforts to exterminate them.
Once Yosemite National Park was formed in 1890, those Southern Sierra Miwuk who had survived were no longer allowed to gather there or help manage the landscape.
“They were treated as if they had no historical knowledge by the people that were coming in to quote unquote preserve the land,” River said.
The last Southern Sierra Miwuk were not fully removed from Yosemite Valley until 1969, when park staff burned all but one of a small number of their cabins under the guise of fire training. Those who were displaced included Coats' father and grandmother, who is one of the tribe's oldest living elders and can still recall the trauma.
By then, the landscape surrounding the park had been transformed. What was once an interconnected mosaic of burns painstakingly conducted during different seasons for different purposes had been subdivided into neighborhoods, private ranches and industrial timber holdings whose owners had varying approaches to maintaining the land.
Now, many of the largest, most fire- and drought-resistant trees have been logged, and denser stands of younger trees have grown up in their place. No longer subjected to regular culling, invasive plants have helped form fuel ladders capable of carrying flames into the canopy. Pockets of forest haven't seen any fire, intentionally or naturally sparked, in nearly a century. Hotter, drier conditions resulting from climate change have helped ensure this dense vegetation is primed to burn.
Fire officials cited these conditions as factors in the growth of the 19,000-acre Oak fire, which they described as primarily driven by heavy fuels, including conifers killed by drought.
Without federal recognition, the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation has no land on which to practice burning. It is ineligible for funding that's available to other tribes for land stewardship, education, job placement and training, cultural preservation work and community and economic development. Unlike members of other tribes who worked as cultural monitors on the Oak fire, Coats was ineligible to be paid for his work.
The tribe petitioned for recognition in 1982, four years after the federal government created the process. During the protracted proceedings that followed, they have provided thousands of pages of evidence proving their descent from the Miwuk people who signed at least two treaties with the United States in 1851 and 1852, said attorney Stephen V. Quesenberry, who has been involved in the tribe's legal representation since 1984.
Most recently in 2018, the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs issued a proposed finding that recognition be denied, saying the Southern Sierra Miwuk had failed to prove they currently exist as a distinct Indigenous community. The tribe currently has until May 10 to respond.
“In my opinion, this is an absurd finding,” Quesenberry said. “It's deeply flawed.”