Only Indigenous ways prevent wildfires

Only Indigenous ways prevent catastrophic wildfires. 

The reason why California and the larger West are facing an ecological catastrophe of this size, scale, and proportion around fire is NOT just 100+ years of fire suppression by a white culture imprinted with thousands of years of undigested trauma of war, which has made nearly everything they touch become destructive...

It's NOT just climate change. These are all symptoms of a much deeper ailment. It's the breakdown of cultural relational accountability that follows the destruction of land-based cultures. 

It is the outgrowth of the horrifying genocide of settler colonialism, which slaughtered the people of this land and severed the people's capacity to uphold time-honored agreements with the land, where fire, land, plant, humans, and a million other beings worked together in complex seasonal renewal and co-evolutionary dance.  

No matter what we do, how many acres people clear with chainsaws and equipment, how many FireWire communities emerge, how many panels of experts and roundtables are hosted, it's all for nothing if we don't focus on the deeper, enduring cultural solutions to this current problem, which is that most Western people have no idea how to be of Place, to be woven into a cosmology of healthy relationships where we are truly interdependent. 

And while we can't undo the horrors that brought us to today, they must be reckoned with, metabolized, and healed. 

Remember, Indigenous people and countless bodies of culture here on Turtle Island, we already experienced an apocalypse, a complete upending of everything we knew as normal, sane and familiar. We weren't supposed to have survived that genocide, the initial frontline, nor the continued hammer of the colonial project, the way its malignancy steeps into nearly every aspect of life as an Indigenous person still living, breathing, and praying in this modern world. 

But here we are. We are not a conquered people. But we are tired and exhausted in constantly looking over our shoulders, in silently burying our dead, in not having the time to adequately grieve before the next loss surfaces, to always be on guard because it has never felt truly safe here in so long. Yet we still pray, sing, laugh, cry, nourish our people and make beauty even amidst the chaos. And we quietly look at whats unfurling around us with a deep ache, knowing the bitter root of all the confusion of these times comes from people who have no idea who they are and where they come from. 

For many white folks, the changes that are occurring right now in the world are shocking, intense, and jarring and are making you react in social spaces with fear, anger, shock, and ungrounded action. A gentle remember that folks of color have been seeing, feeling, and witnessing this coming for a long time. The violence of collapse has been creating death and destruction for centuries for the comforts and conveniences of modernity. 

We will be in no better place until there is a possibility of a culture of people that can emerge towards the sanity of truly living on the Earth, and people understand that it's not just what we do but how we do it. 

We make our own ceremony on the land every season by engaging in seasonal ground burns. Moved by the ever-present inquiry: How do we move with the land so the land doesn't move us? If we aren't going to leave, what is the best way we can stay?

How do we live in a way where we renew and resprout the living agreements held in the soil and seeds beneath our feet. Here in these hills, perhaps those seeds must be cracked open by fire.

"Pyrophile" plants are plants which require fire in order to complete their cycle of reproduction. Many plants that are Indigenous here produce seeds with a tough coating that can lay dormant, awaiting a fire, for several years; these seeds depend on fire to break their dormancy.

This is about being home here, guided by the lands and agreements.

If you are not moving with the land the land will move you.

How do we go from prescribed burns and controlled burns to cultural burns again? What does it take for us to grow into a community of people who can hold the responsibility of knowing fire as friend on this land? Fires are the renewed, ancient and continued ceremony here on the land.

By nature, fire is both immensely destructive and also incredibly life giving and healing.

By nature, humans too can also be the most destructive and horrifying species who make unthinkable choices and actions, and we also can make beauty of great immensity with our hands and voices and have the capacity to tend relationships in a way that is beautiful and healing.

May us Indigenous peoples, who have endured and survived against all odds, now return again supported to uphold the agreements that we never forgot, that are imprinted in our bodies, held in the blood in our veins that are the wild rushing rivers, that are held in the little ponds of our grandmothers sweet womb waters inside of our spines. We remember the way forward by remembering fire as friend and not foe.

Change won't happen at the colonial table. That table will be broken and made into a council fire around which we will sit with the original inhabitants of this land, human and not. The furry fourleggeds and the winged ones, the mineral bodies and insects and all of our relations will be given a voice and consideration. 

We are in the epoch of responsibility, composting an era built by the myth of individual rights.

May we tend the possiblity of becoming a people again who can tend the old growth forest, cultures where old growth healthy forests and landscapes are even a possibility because the relationships needed for that to happen again are culturally encoded and held sacred. 

May us Indigenous peoples, who have endured and survived against all odds, now return again supported to uphold the agreements that we never forgot, that are imprinted in our bodies, held in the blood in our veins that are the wild rushing rivers, that are held in the little ponds of our grandmothers sweet womb waters inside of our spines.

 Rematriate the land. 

Listen to the people have grown intergenerational senses to listen and live in relationship with deep time.