WEITCHPEC, Calif. — Elizabeth Azzuz stood in prayer on a Northern California mountainside, grasping a torch of wormwood branches, the fuel her Native American ancestors used to burn underbrush in thick forests.
“Guide our hands as we bring fire back to the land,” she intoned before igniting leaves and needles carpeting the slope above the Klamath River.
Over several days in October, about 80 acres on the Yurok reservation were set aflame in a program that teaches the ancient skills of treating land with fire.
It was among many “cultural burns” allowed in recent years by state and federal agencies that had long banned them — a sign of evolving attitudes toward wildfire prevention. Research increasingly confirms low-intensity burns can reduce the risk by consuming fire fuels.
Wildfires have blackened nearly 6,000 square miles in California the past two years. Dozens have died; thousands of homes have been lost.
But to the Yurok, Karuk and Hupa in the mid-Klamath region, cultural burning is about reclaiming a way of life suppressed with the arrival of white settlers.
The tribes’ hunter-gatherer lifestyle was devastated by prohibitions on fire that tribes had used for thousands of years to spur growth of acorn-bearing trees, clear space for deer and spur hazel wood stems used for baskets.
“Fire is a tool left by the Creator to restore our environment and the health of our people,” said Azzuz, board secretary for the Cultural Fire Management Council, which promotes burning on ancestral Yurok lands. “Fire is life for us.”
Merv George, a former Hoopa Valley Tribe chairman who now supervises the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, said officials who once considered native burners “arsonists” realize a new approach is needed.
Two national forests — Six Rivers and Klamath — crafted a 2014 landscape-restoration partnership with the Karuk tribe and nonprofits that endorsed intentional burns.
Yurok, Karuk and Hupa activists and The Nature Conservancy later created the Indigenous Peoples Burning Network, whose training burns have drawn participants from across the U.S. and other countries.
“It’s really exciting and gives me a lot of hope that the tide is changing,” said Margo Robbins, a basket weaver and director of the fire-management council. “We revived our language, our dances, and now, bringing back fire, we’ll restore the land.”
This month’s burn involved 30-plus crew members who prepared extensively — scouting the area, positioning fire hoses and water tanks. As Azzuz finished her ceremonial prayer, the wormwood that coaxed the first flames was replaced with modern “drip torches.”
