Playback: This Indigenous Practice Fights Fire with Fire

Overheard at National Geographic

National Geographic

Science, Society & Culture

4.5 • 10.1K Ratings

🗓️ 27 June 2023

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For decades, the U.S. government evangelized fire suppression, most famously through Smokey Bear’s wildfire prevention campaign. But as climate change continues to exacerbate wildfire seasons and a growing body of scientific research supports using fire to fight fire, Indigenous groups in the Klamath Basin are reviving cultural burning practices that effectively controlled forest fires for centuries. In an episode originally published June 2022, National Geographic photographer Kiliii Yüyan introduces us to people bringing back this cultural practice and teaching the next generation how to use fire. For more information on this episode, visit natgeo.com/overheard. Want more? If you want to hear more from Kiliii, you can also listen to a previous Overheard episode where he shares stories from the many weeks he spent camping on sea ice with Native Alaskan whale hunters. And if you’re dying to see his photography, check out his website to see portraits of Indigenous people, Arctic wildlife, and more. Also explore: To learn more about Margo Robbins and her efforts to revive cultural burns, check out our article on the subject. The practice of cultural burning is just one of many subjects that Kiliii and writer Charles Mann covered about the ways Indigenous groups are trying to reclaim sovereignty. Read that cover story here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Eli Chen from the Overher team.
0:08.3	All of June we're playing some of our favorite episodes.
0:11.3	Here's this indigenous practice fights fire with fire.
0:18.1	What you're hearing is the sound of grass burning in a dense forest in northern California.
0:23.6	It's full of coniferous trees, brush and shrubs.
0:27.2	There are tons of branches and tons of dried out foliage because the area is so dried up.
0:32.0	Thanks to the warming climate, you walk around and you can hear the crunching of the branches,
0:38.8	crunching of leaves and everything.
0:40.4	So it's dry and hot.
0:43.2	And there are a bunch of people here, the ones who set this spot on fire in Kili Rian,
0:48.5	a National Geographic photographer observing the scene.
0:53.0	And as they're walking around, dripping fire out of their torches, which basically look like giant oil cans.
0:59.6	The fire drips out and forms a thin little line and they're able to create these lines of fire
1:05.2	and the fire spreads downhill.
1:08.0	Kili then watches the fire creep slowly, burning leaves and branches as it goes.
1:13.2	Maybe the flames get as high as six feet at the maximum as they kind of climb up these bushes
1:18.6	and these small trees and open up big areas in the forest underneath the main canopy.
1:26.5	Some of the people leading the burn are members of the Uroch tribe,
1:30.0	carrying out a tradition that's been practiced for thousands of years here in their ancestral homeland.
1:35.6	They're training fire lighters to carry on the tradition.
1:39.2	They're learning an important thing, which is how to heal the land.
1:42.5	They're learning how to have a relationship with fire and land again, and they're starting to understand
	...

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