I think that's for me almost where these messages of good fire have really sprung from where

people have gotten, you know, especially indigenous people, I think more and more are

coming forward and just saying kind of like enough. Like, you know, they, I've gotten so many

messages from people that are like, you know, okay, yeah, we need good fire back in the landscape,

like, what can we do? How can we help? So there's definitely like Matt was saying that component of,

you know, we need senior leadership people and I've seen systems like in the state of Victoria,

where, you know, it was a very high up senior guy who just suddenly said, you know, yeah, we're

going to do cultural burning now and support communities to be able to do it. And like, now that's

what they do. That was Dr. Amy Christensen. She's the host of Good Fire, a podcast that explores the

social, cultural and ecological importance of fires. For thousands of years, indigenous people

have used fire to improve their environment and their community. More recently, however, because

of colonialism and the centralization of power, many of those traditional practices have been made

illegal, forcing them to stop or suffer legal repercussions. Today, governmental agencies want to

integrate cultural burning into their systems, but indigenous people are only asking for the autonomy

to continue doing what they've done for thousands of years. Matthew Christoff also joins the conversation.

He works on Good Fire with Dr. Christensen. He's also the host of Your Forest, a podcast that explores

the natural world through conversations about environmental issues. So here they are, Dr. Amy

Christensen and Matthew Christoff. Welcome to Chattermarks. A podcast of the Anchorage Museum,

dedicated to exploring Alaska's identity through the creative and critical thinking of ideas.

My name is Cody Liska and I'll be your host.

So, Matt, right now there are a hundred episodes of The Your Forest Podcast. When you first

started it, did you think you'd put that many episodes out? I didn't even know it was going to

...