'Fire is medicine': the tribes burning California forests to save them
The Guardian 10/21/19
The Spanish were the first California colonizers to prevent indigenous people from burning the land. In 1850, the US government passed the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, which outlawed intentional burning in California even before it was a state.
Early National Forest Service officials considered “the Indian way” of “light-burning” to be a primitive, “essentially destructive theory”. Championed by the Forest Service, ecologists and conservationists, new colonial notions of what is “natural” won the day. The valuable timber trees would be protected and burns would be extinguished at all costs. Fire was a killer, and America would make war on this new enemy for most of the next 100 years.
