For more than one hundred years, the Karuk Tribe in northern California has had to deal with a lot of problems when it comes to culture burning, which is the setting of fires on purpose for both religious and practical reasons, like cutting down brush to lower the risk of wildfires.
That changed this week because the tribe pushed for and the state passed a law last year that lets nationally recognized tribes in California burn whatever they want as long as they agree with the California Natural Resources Agency and local air quality officials.
The tribe said Thursday that it was the first group to reach a deal with the government in this way.
The deputy secretary for tribal relations at Natural Resources said, “Karuk has been a national thought leader on cultural fire.” “Since they have a clear goal and are dedicated to getting this work done, it makes sense that they would be a good first partner in this space.”
Before they could do a cultural burn, people had to get a burn permit from the Natural Resources Agency’s California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and a smoke permit from the local air district.
Thompson said that SB 310, a law that was passed in September 2024, lets the state government “get out of the way” of tribes performing cultural burns.
Cal Fire will no longer be in charge of regulating or keeping an eye on the fires for the Karuk Tribe. Instead, they will be a partner and expert. Tribal leaders say that the old deal was basically one country telling another country what to do on its land, which is against autonomy. A good bond between governments now makes it possible for them to work together.
The Karuk Tribe thinks that, on the low end, its more than 120 towns would have burned down at least 7,000 times a year before they met European settlers. Some might have been as little as a single pine tree or a group of tanoak trees. There may have been other fires that covered dozens of acres.
“One: you don’t have major wildfire threats because everything around you is burned regularly,” said Bill Tripp, head of the Karuk Tribe Natural Resource Department. “That ability to get out there and do frequent burning to basically survive as an indigenous community has two parts.” Two: Most of the animals and plants we depend on in the environment are species that need fire to survive.
The Karuk Tribe’s traditional lands include a lot of land along the Klamath River in what is now the Klamath National Forest. For thousands of years, Karuk people have fished for salmon, killed deer, and gathered tanoak acorns for food. With more than 3,600 members, the tribe is the second biggest in the state. Their language is different from that of all other California tribes.
The government has a long and violent past of trying to stop people from burning cultural items. California passed a law in 1850 that let courts fine or punish cultural burn practitioners in any way they thought was “proper.”
A district ranger in the Klamath National Forest, which is home to the Karuk Tribe, wrote to a forest boss in 1918 and said, “The only sure way to stop cultural burns is to kill them off. Every time you catch one sneaking around in the brush like a coyote, take a shot at him.”
Thompson thinks that the new law will help make things right.
She said, “I think SB 310 is part of that larger effort to fix those older laws that have done harm and really think through: How do we respect and support tribal sovereignty, respect and support traditional ecological knowledge, but also meet the climate and wildfire resilience goals that we have as a state?”
Because of the terrible fires in 2020, many new rules were made to encourage people to set fires on purpose in the landscape, including, for the first time, cultural burns.
The laws exempted cultural burns from the state’s review process for environmental impacts. They also set up liability provisions and funds that can be used if an intentional fire gets out of hand.
She is a cultural burn practitioner with the yak titʠu titʠu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribe of San Luis Obispo County and Region and teaches ethnic studies at Cal Poly. “The generous interpretation of it is recognizing cultural burn practitioner knowledge,” she said. “It’s important that we have people who are actually able to practice” if we want to get more firefighters on the ground to help fight wildfires.
In order to build government-to-government ties with Native American tribes, the new law only lets nationally recognized tribes sign these new agreements. Thompson, however, said that this won’t stop the agency from building strong ties with tribes that aren’t recognized and protecting their rights.
Thompson said, “Cal Fire has given these non-federally recognized tribes a lot of technical help, resources, and support to carry out these burns, and we are all in and fully committed to continuing that work with the non-federally recognized tribes.”
Lucas Thomas says that Cal Fire helped her get through the state’s burn permit process to the point where she can now do it on her own. Cal Fire also handles the tribe’s smoke permits, she said. The tribe held its first four culture burns in more than 150 years last year.
Lucas Thomas said, “Cal Fire, their unit here, has really invested in the relationship and has really dedicated their resources to supporting us. They said, ‘We want you guys to be able to burn whenever you want. Just give us a call and let us know what’s going on.'”
