Introduction Voiceover: You are listening to Season Six of
Future Ecologies.
Elizabeth Azzuz: I, as a four year old, got caught playing
with matches by my grandfather, my Karuk grandfather, and he
decided that I needed to learn my responsibilities to the
mother if I thought I could play with fire. And so here started
my journey. I have always burned with my family, pretty much
rogue or illegally, you would say, just because that was how
we were able to maintain our gathering grounds and our
hunting grounds and our food sources and materials that our
women needed. And so I learned that fire was a tool, not a toy,
and that fire gives us our foods and our medicines, and it
purifies our water. You know, it helps all living beings in the
forest and in the rivers. You know, out there, you're taught
to fear everything. Here we're taught to live with everything.
Adam Huggins: Hi Mendel.
Mendel Skulski: Hey, Adam. Who was that?
Adam Huggins: That was Elizabeth. I was interviewing
her in her fire engine. But we'll get to all that. Mendel, I
am so freaking excited to tell you about what I've been up to.
Mendel Skulski: What have you been up to?
Adam Huggins: Oh, ever since you and I first started this
podcast, we have been, I think it's fair to say, a little bit
obsessed with fire.
Mendel Skulski: A little bit?! We've done, like five episodes
Adam Huggins: That's right, the very first pilot episode that we
on fire... so far.
made together was all about fire. Since then, we have
interviewed Indigenous Fire Keepers, permaculturalists,
researchers, firefighters...
Mendel Skulski: Rogue landowners who refuse to evacuate.
Adam Huggins: And we've visited areas that have been burned
intentionally. We've visited areas that have been burned
unintentionally in catastrophic wildfires. I feel like we've
done just about everything except actually participate in
lighting some of those fires ourselves.
Mendel Skulski: Today's the day! Enough talk, more walk.
Adam Huggins: Exactly.
Mendel Skulski: So how are we going to make that happen?
Adam Huggins: So to be honest with you, even after having all
these conversations, I was thinking about fire in a pretty
theoretical way. And then this opportunity came up. I was
invited to apply for this brand new experimental artist in
residency program that was offered from a place called the
Confluence Lab at the University of Idaho, Mendel.
Mendel Skulski: Okay?
Adam Huggins: I applied, and surprisingly, was accepted.
Mendel Skulski: Hey, you're an artist!
Adam Huggins: Yeah, podcasters are artists, right?
Mendel Skulski: We are.
Adam Huggins: So I became one of the 10 inaugural Artists in
Fire.
Mendel Skulski: Congratulations.
Adam Huggins: Thank you. Appreciate that. That meant that
I had to get myself on the fire line, and quick. So I took a
handful of online courses with strange acronyms and bought
myself a very expensive new pair of leather boots, did a field
day and pack test. and that's how I found myself standing in
the middle of a narrow, one lane road at the top of a seemingly
vertical slope covered in dense brush, and wondering to myself
just how in the hell we were gonna pull this burn off.
Dylan Stevens: What's your burn experience like?
Adam Huggins: None.
Dylan Stevens: Cool.
Adam Huggins: I am amazed at how like steep this site is, and how
much like material there is still on the ground.
Dylan Stevens: You're like, Whoa, there's a lot of fuels on
the ground, and it's steep.
Adam Huggins: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's my impression.
Dylan Stevens: Yup. Welcome to the Klamath.
Mendel Skulski: The Klamath! We passed through there back in
season one. It is... steep.
Adam Huggins: It's very hilly, yes. When I lived there for a
year, way back when, I was up river in Karuk territory. But
this time, I went down river — for the very first time,
actually — to Yurok territory, which is near the mouth of the
Klamath River, where it lets out into the Pacific Ocean. It's
about as rural and rugged as it gets, twisting, unpaved roads,
scattered settlements and mountainous terrain. The
hillsides are steep but green. They're covered in Douglas fir
trees. The river is beautiful and wild because, very recently,
the last remaining dams were removed. That's a story for
another day, but an incredible one. And so what you're gonna
hear in this episode is sort of a medley of voices of all of the
different people I spoke to while I was there, the crew
members who are bringing good fire back to the land in this
part of the world.
That's pretty steep, man...
Rick O'Rourke: Yeah.
Adam Huggins: We're gonna burn this?
Rick O'Rourke: Yeah, this is the black.
Adam Huggins: Holy smoke.
And you know what? Mendel, we burned that slope.Aand then we
burned 30 acres over the next three days.
Mendel Skulski: Hell yeah.
Adam Huggins: From Future Ecologies, the sixth entry in
our seemingly never ending series On Fire. This is Out of
the Green, Into the Black
Introduction Voiceover: Broadcasting from the unceded, shared and
asserted territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and
Tsleil-Waututh, this is Future Ecologies – exploring the shape
of our world through ecology, design, and sound.
Adam Huggins: Okay, so a little bit of background. The Cultural
Fire Management Council, or the CFMC, is a Yurok-led,
community-based nonprofit organization with a stated
mission to facilitate the practice of cultural burning on
the Yurok reservation and ancestral lands, which will lead
to a healthier ecosystem for all plants and animals, long term
fire protection for residents, and provide a platform that will
in turn support the traditional hunting and gathering activities
of Yurok.
Robert McConnell: The objective is just to restore fire to this
place, right? This is the home of Rick's people and many others
of the Morek village here, just right up this way. Right, Rick?
Rick O'Rourke: Yeah.
Adam Huggins: this is Rick O'Rourke. He was around since
the very beginning of the CFMC. He's an old hand, and we were
burning on his family's land.
What'd you call it? Morek?
Rick O'Rourke: Morek, yeah.
Adam Huggins: And that was the village site?
Rick O'Rourke: Yes. Bones of my ancestors from the beginning of
time are there.
Annelia Norris: It means a lot to me to be able to burn the
place where I live.
Adam Huggins: You said we're gonna burn around your place?
Annelia Norris: Yeah, tomorrow, I guess.
Adam Huggins: Yeah. Is that right? Like, just your
neighborhood, or, like, literally, like, where your
house is?
Annelia Norris: Robert said in my backyard.
Isabel Guerra: There's no other crew like the one that we have
here and that we're building here with cultural Fire
Management Council.
Amanaka Yancey: I've grown up in fire here. Now that I've gone
out on wildfires and like burned with other prescribed burn
crews, I realize like, how freaking special this is, and
also how vastly different, like burning objectives can be.
Adam Huggins: Yurok territory is like everywhere else in North
America, in that Indigenous stewardship of landscapes was
criminalized for generations. California banned Indigenous
cultural burning in 1850
Elizabeth Azzuz: I was raised to learn that the red and green
trucks probably wouldn't shoot a child,
Adam Huggins: The red and green trucks being those of the
California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention and
of the National Forest Service, respectively.
Elizabeth Azzuz: But they would shoot or arrest adults for using
fire.
Adam Huggins: And it wasn't until well into the last century
that burning became a practice that would not potentially get
you killed, and I think that's just something that's really
important to recognize. People put their lives on the line to
keep this knowledge alive so that their descendants would be
able to steward their territory as intended.
Elizabeth Azzuz: We're just here to take care of the land, take
care of the people.
Jordan Spannaus: Restoring our land how it used to be before we
weren't allowed to burn.
Adam Huggins: One thing that they've been able to learn from
comparing historical aerial photographs with what things
look like now is that they have lost something like 96% of their
open prairie ecosystems.
Rick O'Rourke: Well, with no fire for 130 years, the
encroachment of the conifers onto our prairies, it just
happens fast. As well as the Forest Service and agencies like
that having them planted with trees and the subsequent removal
of the porcupines, which one of their main staples is the little
firs.
Adam Huggins: Oh, so the porcupines help keep the firs
down.
Rick O'Rourke: Yeah, that help with the encroachment.
Adam Huggins: Really?
Rick O'Rourke: Yeah.
Adam Huggins: They eat them?
Rick O'Rourke: Yes, that's one of their main parts of their
diet.
Adam Huggins: And what do you mean by the removal of the
porcupines?
Rick O'Rourke: I think they poisoned them or something like
that.
Adam Huggins: Yeah, this hit me way out of left field. I had no
idea that we are in the middle of a complete collapse of the
porcupine population. And that is from up here in Canada all
the way down the coast. It turns out porcupines helped regulate
the in growth of trees like Douglas fir, because they like
to munch on them like any good rodent does. The sad reality is
that they were treated like many rodents. They were singled out
as a threat to the forestry industry, and so for
generations, these creatures were poisoned. They were shot.
And killing porcupines was encouraged by both government
and industry.
Several decades ago, we stopped killing porcupines on purpose,
generally, as a society, but their populations have not
really recovered. So in many ways, the work of the CFMC is to
undo the damage from the policies put in place by the
Forest Service.
When I was talking with folks on the crew who were older, they
were telling me that when they were young, you could look
across the river and look down slope and see all the way
through because the forest was open. It was full of deciduous
trees. It wasn't packed densely with conifers. Is this starting
to sound familiar now? And so there's just no question that
the lower Klamath used to be a mosaic of ecosystems which
included some coniferous forest, but also included these large
areas of oak woodland and Prairie and grassland, and that
the Yurok people stewarded these areas with fire to have the full
range of foods and medicines and materials for their cultural
practices.
Margo Robbins: Well, a lot of people just burn for what they
call hazardous fuel reduction, but we're burning to restore the
land.
Claire Brown: It's step one of an intergenerational, iterative
restoration process. Yep, day one — coming!
Adam Huggins: Day one for me too.
And this is something that, many folks told me, sets the CFMC
apart from other burn crews. Their goals are as much about
cultural resources as they are about consuming the fuel.
Elizabeth Azzuz: You sometimes could get an agency person
that's just like, oh, let's just burn, burn, burn. We'll slow
down. You know, things need to be done a certain way.
Adam Huggins: That's Elizabeth again, Elizabeth Azzuz. She's a
founding board member of the CFMC, and she drives the fire
engine known as 111.
Elizabeth Azzuz: We're in someone else's home right now,
you know, and so we try to be respectful when we do that, we
ask permission from the land and the animals and the trees to
come into their home and do this. Government agencies don't
do that. You know, it's all about the acres. Get it done.
Get it done fast.
Adam Huggins: You know, the thing about prescribed fire,
about cultural fire, is that you can only do it under very
specific weather and environmental conditions. And so
when there is a good burn window, the CFMC is on it, and
they are taking advantage of every last minute that they have
during that burn window to get as much good fire on the ground
as possible.
Robert McConnell: We don't want to impact the values down here,
which is the water system.
Adam Huggins: And before a fire, there's always a briefing. When
the CFMC was first getting started, they had to rely on
non-Indigenous burn bosses, because they didn't have anyone
locally who had that designation, who had those
skills. But now they have Robert, Robert McConnell,
Robert McConnell: so we're not getting any of those petroleum
products near their drinking water, which is right there.
Adam Huggins: And at the end of every briefing, Robert would
say,
Robert McConnell: Go forth. Have fun. Be safe. Look out for each
other, learn something,
Adam Huggins: have fun, be safe, learn something. And that was
exactly what we did.
So to kick off the real work of day one, we had to prep the
site. I helped clear gutters and move brush away from a nearby
home that we were gonna burn — not the home, like, burn to the
home.
Mendel Skulski: I should hope!
Adam Huggins: Yeah, other squads were blowing leaves around with
a leaf blower, checking and charging the water lines,
getting all the gear lined up, you know, weed whacking the
grass on the side of the road, like all this activity. And then
everybody comes together. We're back at the top of the slope,
and folks are goofing around...
CFMC crew: By our powers combined... wind, water, fire,
Adam Huggins: Do you know what we're waiting for?
earth, heart!
Claire Brown: Test fire.
Adam Huggins: Test fire.
And when everyone is present and accounted for, it was Rick who
stepped forward to light the test fire on his family's land.
He took a lighter to this beautiful, long, silver bundle
of Wormwood that they used to start the fire, and he murmured
a prayer while lighting up a patch of ground.
Rick O'Rourke: Creator, look after all of our People who are
here do your service, helping heal our land, heal our people,
bring back our animals, create balance. It's an honor.
Adam Huggins: Can I ask you a question about the test fire?
Margo Robbins: Yeah.
Adam Huggins: Every time you guys do the test firing,
everybody gathers around. There's a prayer, there's song.
What's the like, what's the importance of that moment?
Margo Robbins: What's the importance of prayer? [Laughs]
Adam Huggins: Yeah, like, what, you know, it's not how, like, a
typical, you know, prescribed burn starts.
This is Margo Robbins. She runs the show at the CFMC. She's the
executive director.
Margo Robbins: Fire is medicine on the land, and when you smell
that Wormwood, it makes it even more real. It takes it from a
mind-knowing thing to a deep down heart-felt thing, and it
helps us connect to that spiritual part of who we are and
to connect to the things around us.
Amanaka Yancey: Yeah, it's really helpful. I've been on
other burns where that practice isn't held and it's just
immediately a cortisol level spike, then go... into this
really like dangerous experience with a bunch of different
people. Some you've known, have worked with for a long time,
some you're maybe just meeting, and that collective pause is
really potent.
Adam Huggins: I totally felt that. Just taking a moment for
everyone to align their intentions and spirits and also
just to get our heads on straight, it was so valuable,
especially to me as someone about to do something I'd never
done before with people I did not know.
Rick O'Rourke: To me, putting fire down on the ground is like
putting prayer on the ground. Really like seeing the land for
what it is and how important it is. I mean, this land needs us
as much as we need it, and we believe what we are doing is the
right thing to help heal this spot, as well as sending out
knowledge to help other spots start the same thing, you know,
so we can all do our part.
Adam Huggins: The purpose of a test fire is to make sure that
what we're seeing on our instruments, and what we're
seeing in the weather report, and what we're seeing on the
ground is actually conducive to the kind of fire that the burn
plan calls for.
Rick O'Rourke: It's receptive!
Adam Huggins: Meaning that it burned really readily. Still
within the parameters of the burn plan...
Rick O'Rourke: Think just dots will do it.
Adam Huggins: But all it took were the tiniest dots of fuel
from the drip torch to get the fire going.
And with that, the whole crew kicked into gear, and I had to
find my squad. Fire is running on the ground, and suddenly
everything starts moving really, really fast. And oh man, did we
get right into it. That fire started pretty hot, and so
within minutes, I had a hose in my hand and was standing in
thick smoke, putting water on some trees to prevent the fire
from getting off the ground.
And I was getting a total crash course in fireline lingo. Are
you ready for this?
Mendel Skulski: I think so?
Adam Huggins: All right, so on a fire line, you don't breathe
smoke in, you eat it. And boy, I was eating smoke on day one. I
was putting water on some logs on the ground to keep them from
burning, because they just burn forever. Those are called
heavies. and the whole crew took special care to inspect the
bases of trees that they wanted to protect, like Oaks and Arbutus.
Max Brotman: Take extra care to look for cat faces.
Claire Brown: Will do.
Adam Huggins: They look for these injuries called cat faces,
that if fire gets on them, it can burn the tree internally and
cause issues. By the way, firefighters don't go anywhere.
They bump.
CFMC crew: You want to go bump below the smoke and work with
Amanaka for a bit?
Adam Huggins: I'm happy to.
Will Bruce: Alright — yeah go for it.
Adam Huggins: And you don't just bump your body around. You can
bump things around too, like Jerries.
Will Bruce: Jerry!
Adam Huggins: Which are... cans of gas.
CFMC crew: Oh yeah, bumping Jerry.
Adam Huggins: Or... piss pumps, which are backpacks full of
water that you can use to make a nice stream. So you're walking
on the slope and something gets dislodged and goes tumbling
down, you're gonna yell really loud... ROCK!
Amanaka Yancey: Yeah, no matter what it is, if it's rolling down
the hill — rock.
Adam Huggins: So there are different roles on a fire crew.
Max Brotman: Rock! Little rock.
Claire Brown: Rock!
The first role that I was assigned to was Holding, and
holding has the responsibility of making sure that the fire
does not escape. And so when you're on holding, you got to be
looking out for spotting. Which is when little embers jump your
line and get started. And jackpots, which are unburned
patches of dense fuel that could explode. Fire can do so many
things. It can crown, it can creep, it can back, and it can
torch, which is when the fire starts climbing up into the tree
canopy. And when that happens, if you're on holding, you've got
in what shape. Too much, and the fire can burn too hot and harm
to get some water on the fire and knock it down. And folks who
are on holding are often on the sides and up along the top of
the burn right. They're coming down as the burn is moving down
the hill, keeping it contained.
the things you're trying to protect, like a valuable old oak
tree. But not enough, and the fire won't really move how you
want. It'll kind of stay static. The experienced hands on the
crew just sort of knew how to fire in each circumstance to get
the effects that they wanted. Finally, you've got the Green
and you've got the Black. The green is the unburned area
outside of your containment lines, and you want to prevent
that from catching fire. The black is the burned area inside
your lines.
Amanaka Yancey: I'm seeing a little bit of wind coming up
towards us with these embers. So while we're talking, maybe
Adam Huggins: You want to have an eye on the green over there.
Amanaka Yancey: We'll glance over our shoulder every now and
then
Adam Huggins: You know you can keep an eye on the black. I'll
keep an eye on the green.
Amanaka Yancey: Fantastic. Thank you.
Claire Brown: Temperature, 81, down 4. RH, 43 up 4.
Adam Huggins: That is the hourly weather report delivered by the
FEMO, another acronym. Let's take a quick break from the
smoke and check in with them, eh?
Mendel Skulski: Smoke break!
Adam Huggins: So FEMO stands for Fire Effects Monitoring, which
is like a task, and also usually a person on this burn that was
Claire Brown.
Claire Brown: Everybody gets to hear the trends through the day
and build that picture in their own minds of like how they can
expect things to be changing as the weather changes.
Adam Huggins: It's kind of like monitoring a patient during a
procedure.
Claire Brown: It's like taking vitals exactly,
PIG shaded 30, down 10.
Our probability of ignition in the shade is 30.
Adam Huggins: 30%?
Claire Brown: Yeah, 30% so if 10 embers landed on this fuel bed,
we could expect three of them to catch.
How do you copy?
Robert McConnell: Burn Boss copies, thank you.
Jordan Spannaus: Firing copies.
Max Brotman: Holding copies.
Claire Brown: One of the roles that FEMO has is the
documentation that supports the burn boss legally, because we
have a prescription in our burn plan and we have to have fire
behavior that's inside of that prescription parameter. Like the
burn boss needs to have a record of the weather for the day.
Adam Huggins: Every burn plan has these parameters, so the
burn plan can only be executed if the conditions are correct.
That's why there's constant monitoring. Is the temperature
still appropriate? Is the moisture content of the fuel
still appropriate? What is the wind doing? Is the wind going to
start to create problems?
And I want to say yes, we were wearing the traditional outfits
of firefighters. We had on our Nomex, we had fire engines, we
had our tools. We looked for all the world like firefighters, but
the context, to me, felt profoundly cultural. And this is
something that many folks told me sets the CFMC apart from
other burn crews. It's right there in the name, it's the
Cultural Fire Management Council, and so cultural goals,
cultural practices are front and center in this model of
prescribed fire. This is first and foremost about community
empowerment, and it's driven by cultural values related to the
responsibility to the landscape and the relationship with the
Creator. Cultural values related to what is a healthy landscape,
what is a healthy forest, what is a healthy watershed? It
encompasses everything from the movements of animals and how
they will interact with the landscape down to the flow of
water through the entire environment.
Rick O'Rourke: What we're doing is essentially creating a
landscape wide water filter.
Elizabeth Azzuz: This time of year, right now, when we're
burning, we know that the rain is coming, and so that's going
to put everything to sleep. It's going to take this charcoal and
ash filter clean water back into the water table, down into the
creeks, into the river and into the ocean.
Adam Huggins: And cultural values for significant foods,
medicines and materials... like beaked hazelnut.
Rick O'Rourke: With the canopy how it is now, those Hazels grow
good — because, you know, they got that canopy. They're
stretching long, straight sticks. That's what we're after.
That's what the ladies are after.
Margo Robbins: All of those small bushes. That's Hazel.
That's what we use for our baskets. So once the fire goes
through, they'll send up new shoots.
Annelia Norris: Our name for Hazel is Holihl.
Adam Huggins: This is Annalia Norris, and when she's not
lighting fires. She makes baskets.
Annelia Norris: Yeah, I'm a weaver. I've been making a lot
of baby baskets because there's a high demand for thosoe.
Mendel Skulski: Like a tiny little basket for your baby to
carry.
Adam Huggins: No, no! You put you put the baby in the basket!
Annelia Norris: Yeah, they're the safest way for our babies to
sleep. You know, it kind of mimics the womb and that feeling
so that babies feel secure, you know.
Adam Huggins: The Yurok are widely known for their baskets,
for their variety, and their artistry, and their quality.
Annelia Norris: I've done some burden baskets, and I really
enjoy that. That's like an open weave. We call them a kewoy —
gathering basket, packing basket. But I also do some
closed weave work, which is like your watertight baskets. And in
this region, we're known for our watertight baskets. That's what
we cook our acorns in. You know you have dipping baskets for
your water, cooking baskets. And then we also have our really
fine weaving, like our ceremonial caps and our, you
know, tobacco baskets, trinket baskets, those kinds of things.
Adam Huggins: How... the material, like, why does it need
to be burned to be good?
Annelia Norris: Well, it makes it stronger and more pliable.
You know, when you burn the tops of these larger Hazels, and then
new shoots can grow up. And then they grow nice and straight
without, like, little stems coming off. So the burning helps
to bring new shoots up, because that's what you're using, is the
new shoots, right?
Adam Huggins: So, like, there's a hazel right behind you, and
like, maybe you wouldn't use that so much because it's all
kinky.
Annelia Norris: Yeah, because you don't want a crooked basket,
you want a nice, straight stick.
Rick O'Rourke: You know, putting these sticks on the ground for
our basket weavers is my way of giving back, like, to the
dances, because these sticks are, like, so important. We keep
our food in them, our babies, our medicine, we send up prayer
with them. You know, without it, we wouldn't have been able to
live here and thrive like we had.
Adam Huggins: The Hazel is just one element of Yurok basketry,
but there's so much more to it.
Annelia Norris: We use the Blue Willow. We call that pergern. We
also use spruce root, Sitka spruce. Spruce root is called
'wohpeg — that's what we use for our watertight baskets, because
it expands when it gets wet. We use bear grasses, haamoh, we
call it. We use the re' go', which is the maidenhair fern.
The woodwardia fern, or pa'app'. We take out the insides of that
and we dye it with Alder bark, and that makes the red in our
baskets. We have yellow in some of our medicine baskets, and the
yellow is porcupine quill that's called tegee'n, and we dye that
with that yellow wolf moss.
Adam Huggins: Maybe you get the sense, Mendel, that it takes a
whole healthy cultural landscape to make a single basket. They're
burning for basketry materials, and they're burning for
medicines, and they're burning for game. They're also burning
to release oak trees so that oaks can be productive and
produce acorns again. And then they're burning under those oak
trees to prevent those acorns from getting infested with
weevils. And by taking part in this cultural burning, Annelia
is helping to restore that landscape.
Annelia Norris: It feels like the right thing to do, and I
feel like I'm fulfilling my purpose as far as like taking
care of the land where I'm living at and that's what we all
should be doing wherever we live. It's like... caring for
that landscape. We've normalized the cultural burning, like we've
really taken leadership in asserting ourselves and our
culture and our land management. You know, it just started
catching, catching fire. No pun intended.
Adam Huggins: Oh, pun always intended over here. I'm sorry.
Because cultural values are driving everything that happens,
because they're not just trying to burn off fuel, the burns look
really different from what can sometimes happen on other
prescribed fire crews, right? If your objective is just to burn
off as much fuel as you can without lighting a wildfire on a
piece of land, then you can burn through it really quickly,
right? But for the Cultural Fire Management Council, they have so
many values that they're trying to protect on the lands that
they burn — that they're trying to protect and enhance, right?
And so they need just the right fire intensity to where it's
going to move through the ecosystem slowly, to where it's
not going to kill the oak trees. It's going to provide
blistering, but not completely kill off the Hazels.
Rick O'Rourke: It looks really good. The cambium blisters down
at the bottom when you hit a certain heat point with this low
intensity fire. It's a longer duration and lower intensity,
and it blisters the cambium so that there's a top kill, and the
new shoots for our baskets come up in the spring.
Adam Huggins: So you can tell that you're going to get good
shoots absolutely just from the blisters.
Rick O'Rourke: Yes.
Adam Huggins: So I'm lying on my back in the tent first burn
today. I am so tired. Today was little over two acres took
something like seven hours. I'm told that tomorrow gonna take
the same number of people and we're gonna burn 11 acres. Who
knows how long that's gonna take? Anyway, Adam, day one of
burning on the Klamath with the Cultural Fire Management
Council... signing off.
Mendel Skulski: When we come back, day two, where we turn up
the heat. That's after the break.
Welcome back. I'm Mendel.
Adam Huggins: I'm Adam.
Mendel Skulski: This is Future Ecologies, and today, Adam is
bringing us all along on his trip to Yurok territory on the
Klamath River, so we can get a sense of what it's like to be on
a cultural fire crew,
Adam Huggins: That's right. And on this particular crew, it was
a really great mix of professional structure and then
also flexibility. People were shifting roles, and it seemed
like the leadership viewed every burn as an opportunity to give
different people at different stages in their fire journey new
experiences.
Isabel Guerra: Simply, I love it. I love how it pushes me. I
love how I learn something new every day.
Adam Huggins: That's Isabel Guerra, the firing crew lead.
Isabel Guerra: One of the things I see in creating a learning
environment is, yeah, you want to challenge people, but you
also need to let them know that it's okay to fail, and it's not
actually failure because you have your whole team holding on
to you, creating that safety net.
Rick O'Rourke: I tell the people I'm training, I'll put you out
of your comfort zone, but I won't put you in danger.
Isabel Guerra: Learning is such a sacred process.
Max Brotman: Fire is such a team effort. It's like a sports team.
You know? It's like football. We like make our plan. We modify
the plan as we go
Adam Huggins: Max Brotman — holding boss and drone operator.
Max Brotman: And I'm not a sports person, but I imagine
it's like playing football.
Claire Brown: We're gonna do it rose, bud, and thorns. So Rose
is something that you think went really well. Thorn is something
that you think could have gone better, and then the Bud is how
you would grow that into a better way of doing it.
Max Brotman: Every year, in the spring, we do fire effects
walks, where the whole crew goes out to the units that we had
burned in the last year. We look over our notes from the FEMO
report —
Claire Brown: because we can relate, like, oh yeah, our
weather that day was like this. And so we ended up trying this
strategy out, and we got this result. And like, now we're
seeing how it's regrowing, or what died, or what have you.
Max Brotman: We talk to all the people who worked the fire about
what they remember about that day — what happened here? Did
you light this? Who was lighting here? Oh, yeah. What did you do?
Where'd you get hung up? Was there a jackpot? How did we
impact the canopy? How did we impact the sub canopy? Is there
more light? Did we kill some trees? Why did we kill those
trees? Is that a good thing or not? You know, if we're trying
to thin out a thicket of young Doug firs. Like, could we have
modified what we did to do that better?
There's just so much learning that happens after the fire, and
so by doing that, all as a whole crew, and not just the
leadership, everybody gets to learn about the impacts of like,
looking at how their firing patterns worked, how did that
affect how we move through the unit, and then what effect did
that have on the forest?
Adam Huggins: The reality is that Yurok territory is big, and
there has been over a century of fire suppression. And so there
is just a lot of area that needs good fire. Even on the areas
that have been burned, they often need to be burned on two
or three or five or eight year intervals, right? And so when
you think about bringing all of those lands back into good fire
stewardship and then also going into the areas that haven't been
burned, it's a huge job. It's just enormous.
Claire Brown: This is, like, pretty representative of, like,
what the ground looks like in places that haven't had fire in
a long time, where you see the black oaks stretched out with
the crown super high, tied in with like a much younger age
class of fir trees — big firs that are probably still younger
than our eldest people here on site today, who will love to
tell you how they used to see clear across everywhere when
they were with kids.
Margo Robbins: You know, we should be able to just walk
across the land. And we should be able to see from, you know,
down near the bottom of the hill all the way up to the ridge.
Claire Brown: It's real thick in here. Got patches of Himalayan
Blackberry. We got patches with English ivy.
Dylan Stevens: It's a process, but there's areas upriver here
that have been worked repeatedly, that were just walls
of broom and blackberry, and they're not anymore.
Rick O'Rourke: You know, we prayed to have people come up
here to help us, and in that prayer, it's like we weren't
like gender specific or religious specific or race
specific, whoever would come to help us, we'll accept it
gratefully and try to feed you good and sit around and burn
together and eat together and we become family.
Elizabeth Azzuz: Yeah, you know, people often ask us, you know,
why we have non Indigenous staff? Well, everybody cares for
the planet. Everybody loves the Mother Earth, you know, whoever
wants to take care of whatever, and if we can provide that, we
will.
Will Bruce: I love all the people involved. I love the
land. I love watching the land respond to fire.
Adam Huggins: Will Bruce, GIS specialist and my crew lead.
Will Bruce: I love being in here, lending a direct hand to
Native people exercising their rights to manage this land.
Yeah, it just feels like a great place to be. And I feel very I
feel very appreciated. You know, everybody that's part of this
work is appreciated.
Elizabeth Azzuz: When we started out, it was just a handful of
us, you know, Margo and I worked in our cars or any office space
we could bum, basically. Or our kitchen tables, you know. And
then eventually it was like it was too much for her and I to
do. And we needed equipment. We needed vehicles and things, you
know. So the grant writing process has happened, and the
elders that sit on our board were like, you guys, got your
Hazel now? What about our acorns? What about our berries?
What about our medicine, you know, what about all these
things? I was like, Oh, shoot. And so it just kept growing, you
know, evolving.
Rick O'Rourke: A lot of these guys and gals, I trained them up
on their first day of lighting, and look at them now.
Elizabeth Azzuz: We try to hire community members, locals. We do
cooperative burns, where we train other government agencies
to do what we do. Aspiring fire lighter burns, that train people
who've never worked with fire. One of my favorite things about
these training exchanges is seeing their aha moment when
they realized that this is actually what they were meant to
do, that they were meant to care for the land, that they were
meant to evolve into the people I watched them become. We have
one kid. I use them as my example for everything. When
people are like, well, you know, why do you do what you do? Well,
this young man really, really wanted to work for us, bad but
he had some bad habits. You know, he wasn't living well.
Margo and I sat with him and said, Well, you have to do this,
this and this, and then we'll give you a job. Well, he did it.
He went and got himself cleaned up and brought us certificates,
and sat down and said, I did what you said. Now, where's my
job? He's been with us ever since. Loyal is the day is long.
He tells people he'll never leave us. We didn't do it for
that. We did it for him. So when you get about 15 or 20 of those
guys running around, it's worth it all. It's worth the two
o'clock mornings, you know, all the late shifts we do, but you
know, look what they're doing. They're caring for their land,
and they're making their elders happy and providing for their
families. And that's the whole goal, for me, is to make sure
the younger generation can move into the future safely and
happy. It's nice to evolve into what we are and why we do what
we do.
Jordan Spannaus: I started off wildland fire, and after seven
years of wildland just transitioning to prescribed
fire.
Adam Huggins: that's Jordan Spannaus. He's a firing boss.
Jordan Spannaus: Little bit better as far as things like
being able to go home at the end of every night, not not missing
birthdays and stuff like that.
Adam Huggins: Like, good for the family, too.
Jordan Spannaus: Good for the family, good for the land. But
yeah, fires, fire is just one of those things that I love.
Adam Huggins: One of the coolest things that I witnessed while I
was down there was seeing them do drone ignitions for the first
time.
Isabel Guerra: We're ready to launch the drone.
Max Brotman: Copy. Tell me precisely where you want it.
Isabel Guerra: So if your drops are slightly below the contour
that would be perfect.
Max Brotman: Okay, launching.
Adam Huggins: They've been using drones for years to map fire
intensity, because you can use heat sensors on the drone to see
where the fire is burning and how intensely. But this was the
very first time they had used this absolutely enormous drone
to drop these little incendiary dragon eggs into the middle of
the burn.
Unknown: Flying it is kind of like steering a boat, whereas
the other drone is like a hummingbird.
Adam Huggins: So that was pretty cool.
Isabel Guerra: Go for firing.
Adam Huggins: It was big deal.
Max Brotman: Oh my gosh, there's the freaking dots, guys.
Adam Huggins: The drone is going to help them access areas that
are hard for people to get into, in the middle of those burn
blocks, and hopefully make the process more efficient, right?
Speed it along a little bit.
When I spoke with many of the crew members, they told me this
moment that we're in right now where we're using Nomex clothing
and fire engines and all this technology, the drones, the
hierarchical structure of a fire crew, the certifications — all
of this is this moment that we're passing through because of
over a century of fire suppression. The Yurok need to
adopt these tools to achieve what they want to achieve in
this colonial system, but also because the condition of the
forest requires that level of technology, of safety equipment,
of planning and of organization. It is so extreme compared to
what it was historically. And so the vision that they expressed
to me was that this is a transition from a time of fire
suppression to a future where community members will just be
able to go out into their backyards, into the places where
they gather, and light fires themselves, with their family
members, and yeah, maybe they call in one of the local engine
operators for support. Or maybe that's not even necessary
anymore, because the ecosystem is safe to burn, and people have
become comfortable enough and knowledgeable enough again that
they can just do it when they're ready, when it's time.
Annelia Norris: Absolutely we have to get it back to where
it's safe for people to just light their little Hazel patch
or their acorn grove, or whatever it is, you know. What,
maybe three years from now, I'll I'll come light this up myself,
and then just say hey, I'm gonna light up my Hazel patch So FYI.
You guys could be on standby.
Jordan Spannaus: We do cultural burns and family burns, where we
do bring out families and even children sometimes to come and
watch or get involved in our burns. All the children and
stuff that burn with us get really into it. All talk about
wanting to do this when they get older. So I think everything
that we're doing out here is pretty good for our community,
for all the people around here, I think.
Adam Huggins: That's a really beautiful vision, not just for
fire, but for this time that we're moving through right now,
that there is so much to do. We have to work within sometimes,
and use the tools that the colonial system has to offer.
And then at the same time, we have to be moving towards a
place where maybe we don't need them anymore. Like, people have
been doing this for 1000s and 1000s of years. When you
experience it for yourself, you realize, not only can it be done
safely, it's a thing that we can do proactively in a world full
of forces beyond our control.
Rick O'Rourke: She's like, Oh, I wasn't expecting that. You were
expecting that monster coming at you, like you see in the news,
right? She's like, Yeah. No, it's not like that. There's ways
to mitigate all those dangers and then be able to put some
fire on the ground.
Adam Huggins: Doesn't have to be rocket science. Doesn't have to
be scary.
Rick O'Rourke: It doesn't have to be scary. They could be just
like peaceful and calming and just a good burn.
Adam Huggins: End of the second day of burning. It is 2am. We
burned until midnight, and I have nothing left. I'm conking
out.
By the third day, I had a drip torch in my hand, and I was
standing in the middle of a burn block that went as far in each
direction as I could see.
Thick patch of poison oak... and Himalayan Blackberry. and it's
on fire! But it's burning really good. Standing in the middle of
an inferno... wild. What a feeling!
We don't talk about it, but wildfires do not only consume
whole landscapes. They they consume living beings. They
consume animals. And in a cultural fire, in a prescribed
fire, the fire is so much less intense, and it's moving so much
more slowly, and it gives many creatures the opportunity to
escape and then to return to habitat that is still intact.
There are, however, some slow moving creatures that might have
gotten out of bed a little bit late that day and need a helping
hand.
Hey, Lloyd, I got a little salamander right here that I'm
gonna take across the road, alright?
Oh, my God, it's freaking adorable, by the way. All right,
little buddy, go free. Stay cool. Oh my God, look at you go!
Ah... I love salamanders.
Margo Robbins: All of the plants and animals, they all have a
spirit just like us. And people from this place, our spirit is
connected to all of these things. And so when, you know,
when they're healthy and feel good, that reflects on us, and
it's a link to our health too.
Elizabeth Azzuz: You know the deer are going to come rolling
here tonight. Get rid of their fleas and ticks. They love ash
for that. You know, we've seen all these things.
Adam Huggins: Like what you see, Robert?
Robert McConnell: This backing fire is beautiful. It's gonna
take time, though, because it's so steep in here.
Max Brotman: Good copy. Yeah, we're getting great backing on
this downriver area. Things are looking beautiful.
Amanaka Yancey: There's beauty you have never seen before that
exists in a burn.
Adam Huggins: So for the people who don't have eyes and are in
the future, what are we looking at here?
Will Bruce: Coming down to the last piece of this burn coming
into a nice steep section with fire gently backing through fir
trees, Hazel, Bay trees. Kind of like everybody's just in this
meditative state, just helping it walk down the hill. You know,
you can see, it's just like bringing itself down so nicely.
Adam Huggins: What do you think be here till midnight putting
things out?
Will Bruce: Yeah, that seems like a fair guess to me.
Adam Huggins: When a fire has burned its way through a given
burn block, it's time to put it out.
Robert McConnell: We're gonna just touch on our mop up plan,
Mech Ney-kem kue po-o.
Adam Huggins: Because fire suppression has in many ways,
been a very militaristic practice. The term that is often
used for that is mopping up. But mopping up is a term that was
basically used for when soldiers go across the battlefield, look
for anybody who's still alive, and kill them. So the CFMC calls
the penultimate stage in the burn...
Amanaka Yancey: Kem kue po-o. We were saying Mech Ney-kem kue
po-o, which is put the water on the hot stuff.
Adam Huggins: Amanaka Yancey, she was my squad lead.
Amanaka Yancey: Then they shortened it to Kem kue po-o,
which is... put water on it.
Adam Huggins: And it is the unglamorous job of trudging
through the ashy landscape with shovels and piss pumps, and
putting a little bit of water and a little bit of elbow grease
into making sure that every last part of that fire is out. It
definitely feels like something you don't want to do at 1am
after you've been burning for 10 hours straight, but it is a very
important part of the job.
Imagine you end up spending a lot of evenings this way.
Margo Robbins: Mmm... guess so.
Isabel Guerra: I love my job.
Adam Huggins: That night, I didn't record anything before
bed, I just hit the ground and was gone.
The day that I left, I woke up so tired and so sore, and all I
could think was... where are we going to burn next??
Mendel Skulski: This episode of Future Ecologies was recorded
and reported by my co-host, Adam Huggins. It was edited and
produced by me. Mendel Skulski.
It featured the voices of Elizabeth Azzuz
Elizabeth Azzuz: Just me and my big mouth. You know, I don't
know what possesses me to open the damn thing.
Mendel Skulski: Dylan Stevens
Dylan Stevens: When we were prepping, I was like, I think
these roots are gonna catch on fire. They did.
Mendel Skulski: Rick O'Rourke
Rick O'Rourke: But I'm compelled to share my knowledge with
people, because it was shared with me from people who forgot
more than I'll ever know.
CFMC crew: Margo Robbins
Margo Robbins: [Scream]
CFMC crew: [Screams respond in the distance]
Adam Huggins: Look what you started. I gotta work on my
scream a little bit so that it doesn't sound like I'm in
trouble, you know.
Margo Robbins: It's gotta come from deep in your belly.
Mendel Skulski: Robert McConnell
Robert McConnell: Let's have fun. Be safe, learn something.
Mendel Skulski: Annelia Norris
Annelia Norris: I can still scale these freaking hillsides,
so I'm not that old.
Mendel Skulski: Isabel Guerra
You put, you put, you put your time in!
Amanaka Yancey
Amanaka Yancey: Prescribed fire so hot right now.
Mendel Skulski: Jordan Spannaus
Jordan Spannaus: Gonna take a long time, but this is a good
start.
Mendel Skulski: Claire Brown
Claire Brown: Like a classic FEMO role is to make a report
that nobody reads.
Mendel Skulski: Max Brotman
Max Brotman: We don't say breathing smoke, we say eating
smoke.
Mendel Skulski: And Will Bruce
Will Bruce: I know you wanna burn it all, gotta wait 'til
fall!
Mendel Skulski: and music by C Diab, Thumbug, Adrian Avendaño
G̱a̱mksimoon, and Sunfish Moon Light, plus cover art by the
wonderful Ale Silva.
Adam Huggins: Huge gratitude to the CFMC for making this episode
possible. I talked to lots of other folks and just couldn't
include everything. So thank you to everyone who spoke with me,
and special thanks to Margo Robbins, Fern Purdy, Max
Brotman, Claire Brown, Will Bruce, and Amanaka Yancey for
corresponding with me, helping me put this piece together,
hosting me, helping me get my qualifications and keeping me
out of trouble on the line. Big thanks to the Confluence Lab at
the University of Idaho, and especially Sasha White, who
supported me through this process. Thanks also to Anita
and Micah Williams.
Mendel Skulski: You can find the CFMC at culturalfire.org. You
can find us and all of our episodes at futureecologies.net,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. We make this podcast
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'til next time. Stay lit.