Ask the Honorable Ron W. Goode, Tribal Chairman of the North Fork Mono Tribe, what’s missing from the land and he will tell you it’s fire.
It may be a contentious subject, especially given California’s recent traumatic wildfires. “But I need to talk to you about fire,” Goode says.
“Many of the bushes that we’re now burning haven’t actually been burned for about one hundred and twenty years,” Goode said while conducting a burn on the Jack Kirk estate in Mariposa, California. “And they’re crying. They want fire, they want to be restored.”
“When you talk to different native people from the Yosemite area, they talk about how it used to look when fire was used as a management tool,” says UC Davis professor of Native American Studies Beth Rose Middleton Manning. Her classes have worked alongside Goode and members of other local tribes to help carry out traditional Indigenous burns. “The way valleys are now being encroached upon by conifers and other species in areas that were once open.”
The landscapes tribes in California cultivated were diverse, including foothills, woodlands and forest. Goode describes how, as a result of Indigenous land management, Spaniards were able to travel for over 60 miles under a canopy of mostly water oaks, a shade tree that produces abundant acorns, and how early Euro Americans found wide open pathways into Yosemite.
But early European settlers who set foot in California saw tribes setting fire to the land and regarded it as primitive. Strangers to the ecosystem and fire’s role within it, they suppressed the practice. In 1850, California passed the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, which outlawed intentional burning in the newly formed state. One early U.S. forest ranger suggested people who set fire to the land should be shot.
Federal and state governments radically transformed the land in other ways as well. In many instances, tribes were forced off the lands they had been carefully maintaining. Forests were extensively logged, then replanted in dense groves, further shifting delicate balances between trees and open areas, and creating the kind of closely packed forests that can fuel massive, uncontrolled wildfires.