Native Fire Restitution
Héctor Fox Figueroa
Kyle Whyte
Paige Fischer
Eric Clark
Danielle L. Fegan
Eric Rebitzke
Robin Clark
Paul Thompson
Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians
A collaborative project to examine Indigenous Fire Management practices
Purpose
Indigenous people have utilized healthy relationships with fire to steward ancestral lands for millennia, and Indigenous Fire Management (IFM) has fundamentally and indelibly shaped the ecological landscape of the modern-day US. However, colonization led to widespread fire suppression, resulting in ever-decreasing IFM over the past several centuries. Many stakeholders, including Tribal natural resource departments, state and federal land management agencies, and academic research institutions, are invested in revitalizing IFM and helping to mitigate the current fire crisis.
Intentional burning practices create and sustain biodiverse, mosaic landscapes. However, not all landscapes require the same frequency of fire events to thrive. Indigenous people have millennia of knowledge of landscape specific fire management practices, and huge portions of North America have been influenced by IFM. These practices need to be understood wholistically across different spatial and temporal scales, thus creating larger, collaborative networks across multiple tribal partners is an important goal of the project.
Optimal frequency of fire events in landscapes across Turtle Island
Approach
Research Objectives
Understand Tribes’ fire stewardship and fire restitution experiences, priorities, and lessons learned.
Identify strategies to expand Tribal priorities into federal land management.
Compare and contrast Upper Midwestern Tribal experiences, priorities, and lessons learned with those of Tribes in the US West and at the national level.
Identify barriers and opportunities for Native fire restitution and elevating Tribal priorities, practices, and strategies for overcoming barriers and taking advantage of opportunities
Sault St. Marie band of the Chippewa Indians IFM project area
Methodology
We employ a case-study approach, interviewing numerous key actors with multiple Tribes and associated non-tribal land management agencies to describe a roadmap to successful IFM outcomes, as well as highlighting key barriers and opportunities Tribes may face in their attempts to achieve similar outcomes.
Driving Questions
How do Tribes engage with partnerships to further their own socioecological research and land management objectives?
What strategies are employed to assure that Tribal sovereignty and long-standing treaty rights are respected?
How can Tribes interested in revitalizing IFM within their lands or territories leverage existing collaborative networks and funding sources to prioritize their land management objectives?
Preliminary Findings
Indigenous Fire Management has multiple demonstrated benefits
The stage is set for greater cooperation...
Tribes
Continuing to revitalize and implement fire management practices.
Ongoing cultural revitalization.
Ongoing scholarly research into fire management.
Non-Tribal Entities
Interested in learning from Tribes and Indigenous land management practices.
Increasing governmental mandates, programs, and funding.
Next Steps
Exploring potential avenues for tribal and governmental cooperation
Creating larger, collaborative networks across multiple tribal partners
Synthesizing and comparing strategies employed by Tribes in differing contexts