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Our Living Lands is a collaboration of the Mountain West News Bureau, Koahnic Broadcast Corporation and Native Public Media.

Indigenous people learned to live with fire. What can we learn from their traditions?

A plume of dark smoke rises above a ridge of dense green, hilly forest. A road cuts thorugh the hills. It is cloudy but the white and gray smoke is still unmistakable against the sky.
Murphy Woodhouse
/
Boise State Public Radio
Smoke from the Bacon Flat prescribed burn drifts over the Klamath River near Orleans, Calif. The Karuk people have been conducting cultural burns on their ancestral land and supporting research on cultural fire.

Bill Tripp, the Karuk Tribal Natural Resources Director, is a leading proponent of cultural fire. Since he was 4 years old, Tripp has been conducting cultural burns on Karuk ancestral territory and working to bring fire back to the people and land. He has also been training the next generation of fire practitioners, while also supporting key research on cultural fire. In a recent study, Tripp and other researchers found that historically, the Karuk may have set around 7,000 fires each year, annually burning a large swath of their homeland.

In the final part of our series on Indigenous-led fire, the Mountain West News Bureau’s Murphy Woodhouse spoke to Tripp about the historic scale of Karuk burning and what a path back toward that may look like. Our Living Lands producer Daniel Spaulding chatted with Woodhouse about what he learned.

“You don't just live in a fire environment like this without developing an integral relationship with it,” Tripp said.

A board has pictures and a map tacked to it and a painted sign that reads "Good Fire Ahead." It is posted under a tent outside, on rocky terrain.
Murphy Woodhouse
/
Boise State Public Radio
A driver passes by an information station on the KTREX prescribed burn near the Klamath River in 2024.

As Boise State Public Radio's Mountain West News Bureau reporter, I try to leverage my past experience as a wildland firefighter to provide listeners with informed coverage of a number of key issues in wildland fire. I’m especially interested in efforts to improve the famously challenging and dangerous working conditions on the fireline.

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