This tribe was barred from cultural burning for decades — then a fire hit their community
The land near Yosemite National Park had been tended by Irene Vasquez's family for decades. They took care of their seven 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 UC 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 fast-moving 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 40-year 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.
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: