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The Role of Indigenous Burning in Land Management
This article highlights the findings of the literature on aboriginal fire from the human- and the land-centered disciplines, and suggests that the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples be incorporated into plans for reintroducing fire to the nation's forests. Traditional knowledge represents the outcome of long experimentation with application of fire by indigenous people, which can inform contemporary policy discussions.
Keywords: biodiversity; fire; history; policy; traditional knowledge
Every landscape reflects the history and culture of the people who inhabit it. The worldview of a society is often written more truthfully on the land than in its documents. The current American landscape represents the historical legacy of one worldview superimposed on another, the colonial overlaying the indigenous. Nowhere is this history more apparent than in the attitudes toward fire, attitudes made manifest on the landscape.
Euro-Americans arrived in North America bearing their folk knowledge that held fire in forests to be destructive and hazardous to humans (Arno 1985; Lewis 1982). This view contrasted sharply with the traditional knowledge of the indigenous inhabitants, who embraced the benefits of burning and were skilled in application of fire technology.
Fire suppression began soon after colonization, and its effects followed the expansion of the frontier westward. Anthropogenic fire all but disappeared from eastern forests by the early 1700s and from the West by 1899 (Arno 1985). The consequences of suppression are written on the landscape today, creating what former Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt (1997) called "a crisis in forest health." Fire suppression was a 11 catastrophic disturbance for those ecosystems which had been influenced by anthropogenic fire throughout their development" (Packard 1993).
The results of fire suppression have been well documented for ecosystems throughout North America (e.g., Botkin 1990; Wilson 1992; Pyne 1995; Williams 2000a). Parklands were replaced by dense forests (Biswell 1989; Lewis 1993), prairies and savannas disappeared (Lewis 1993), and regeneration patterns were dramatically altered. Fire suppression has promoted stand homogeneity and the associated problems of insects and disease, disrupting the age-class mosaic that was historically maintained by burning (Barrett 2000).
The loss of fire in the American landscape is inextricably linked with the history of federal Indian policy that removed tribal people and, therefore, indigenous land...