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.
