Nature's Archive Podcast

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[00:00:00] Michael Hawk: Today’s episode is very timely. Our guest is Margot Robbins, co-founder and executive director of the Cultural Fire Management Council. Margo advocates for the return of cultural burning practices as a way to strengthen community support, biodiversity, and mitigate out of control fires that plagues so many areas.

[00:00:18] But before I delve further into the details of today’s episode. I want to note that it was recorded just a few days prior to the tragic and devastating wildfires that fact that the Los Angeles area in January. We’ve had numerous interviews on Nature’s Archive with wildfire and prescribed burning experts.

[00:00:36] So if you’ve heard any of those, you know, that fire frequency, intensity behavior and management practices vary dramatically, depending on what habitats and which climates we’re talking about. Now I mentioned that because today’s episode focuses largely on the forested lands of Northern California, specifically Yurok tribal lands. So while the topics discussed here might apply to other habitats and locations, the specifics likely vary. Despite all the past episodes relating to wildfire, though, we’ve had a notable gap that is no one has been able to speak directly to traditional indigenous use of fire. That is until today. So today, Margo Robbins will tell us about what cultural fire is and why it’s so important across so many dimensions of life. You’ll hear how cultural fire can be safely practiced. And how it has strengthened the Yurok community.

[00:01:28] There’s a lot of nuance to this discussion

[00:01:30] I think you’ll enjoy. And if the idea of purposeful fire being beneficial to the land is still new to you. I invite you to check out Nature’s Archive episode number 89 with Lenya Quinn Davidson. It’s one of our most popular episodes and it provides a great baseline of information that’s helpful for today’s episode. In fact, we have several other episodes that I mentioned before that discuss wildfire and we’ll link to all of those in our show notes. I was incredibly grateful for Margo to spend so much time with us today.

[00:01:59] And deal with some internet and even power issues. So without additional delay, Margo Robbins.

[00:02:07] Margo Robbins: Nicknow Margo Robbins, TCHNAC co founder and executive director of the Cultural Fire Management Council.

[00:02:16] Michael Hawk: So Margo, thank you so much for being here today.

[00:02:19] Margo Robbins: I’m really glad to be here, .

[00:02:21] Michael Hawk: there is so much to talk about, and this is, it’s the double edged sword, so to speak, of this podcast, because there’s always so much I want to cover, but there’s limited time. So, we’ll do our best to hit as much as we can. I know a lot about your work already. I’m not going to presume that our listeners know a lot about your work, but to help with that, I understand that you’re an enrolled member of the Yurok tribe, and maybe we can just start with a little bit about the Yurok tribe.

[00:02:49] Can you tell me where you’re located? Maybe touch on some of the basic history to give us a sense of place.

[00:02:57] Margo Robbins: The Yurok tribe is located in far northern California, near the Oregon border. The reservation extends from the mouth of the river about 42 miles upstream to Near the confluence of the Klamath and Trinity rivers, it is one mile on each side of the river.

[00:03:18] Our ancestral territory is much larger than that. So we have a village system with a head person of each village. We do not have chiefs. We have retained much of our culture and the language is being revitalized in the schools and in the homes. We still practice our traditional life ways of hunting, fishing, gathering, weave in, and ceremonies. And fire! Ha ha ha ha

[00:03:56] Michael Hawk: Yes. And fire. And that’s actually, where we’re going to focus a lot today, as much as I would like to get into some of the other aspects of of Yurok life that you just spoke about. So for you personally, what has led you to so passionately pursue returning fire to your lands?

[00:04:16] Margo Robbins: I am a basket weaver. And some of our basket materials are fire dependent. So the frames of our baskets are hazel, and in order to reproduce straight shoots, they need to have fire. And so In the interest of having my grandbabies carried in traditional baby baskets, I jumped head first, full force into this push to bring fire back to our homelands.

[00:04:52] The art of basket weaving was dying out because basket weavers did not have materials to weave with. Every time there would be a fire, CAL fire would hasten up here to put it out as quickly as possible, which is good in some ways, but not good. If you are, are dependent on those materials , for weaving.

[00:05:16] Michael Hawk: And, for, for me coming from obviously a totally different culture where baskets really weren’t a thing. Can you help me understand a little more broadly when you talk about basket weaving? I, as I understand it, there are many, many applications for baskets

[00:05:31] Margo Robbins: Yes. So Yurok people are very well known for their basket weaving. All of our baskets are pieces of art. Although they are also utility baskets. So we use baskets for cooking for as eating bowls to lift up prayer, to carry our babies, to carry heavy burdens, to trap fish, eels, birds. So baskets are like a cornerstone of our culture. Baskets are woven so finely that they will hold water and every basket has a pattern to it. There’s overlays of color that we put into the baskets and so they’re all a piece of art also.

[00:06:29] Michael Hawk: It’s just so amazing. All the different uses in waterproof baskets and so forth. It’s, uh, quite amazing for, for you personally, so you, you got into pursuit of returning fire to your lands for the basket weaving aspect maybe even going back further than that.

[00:06:47] What are your recollections of fire, whether it’s cultural or wildfire that you have from when you were growing up?

[00:06:54] Margo Robbins: I don’t have many recollections of fire growing up. the use of fire was outlawed. In the early 1900s, Native people would be shot if they were seen starting fires. In the later 1900s that you could go to prison for, like, get a lifetime sentence if you were caught making fires. And so, fire on the land was not something that people openly did.

[00:07:27] Some people did it in, in secret. But I was not privy to that. Sometimes those fires that were done in secret would be in places near the road where there were basket weaving materials, hazel, and so we would go and gather from those places but the the penalty of prison was pretty effective at, at almost obliterating fire on the land where I am from.

[00:07:58] Before I was in my teens, there was a wildfire. I remember mom packing up the trunk of her car with , family pictures and, other valuables. And the fire had actually been started by accident by my grandma. She was Barbecue and or cooking salmon on an open fire in her backyard.

[00:08:23] She lived, had a little house just down the hill from mom and her fire escaped and it turned into a wildfire. So that was like, one of my big memories of fire. Other than of course, everybody has wood stoves. We live out in the country and everybody builds, bonfires down at the river.

[00:08:44] And occasionally mom or dad would have the boys like cut the brush around the house and, burn that. But that was pretty much my recollections of fire when I was young.

[00:08:57] Michael Hawk: Alright, so what I would like to do is maybe jump ahead to current day, and if you could tell me a little bit about the current state of fire on Yurok lands, and then we’ll fill in the gaps in between.

[00:09:08] Margo Robbins: Currently, we have been very successful in bringing fire back to Yurok Territory. A little over 10 years ago, the community got together as a group after identifying fire as the most important issue facing our community, or lack of fire, I should say, and we did research. About who has control of fire in our homelands.

[00:09:41] And we found out that it is pretty much Cal Fire. A little bit Bureau of Indian Affairs. And we learned what we had to do to use fire in our homelands without getting in trouble. And so we trained up. Our local people, we had people from the outside come in and provide training for , our local people and have been successful with the help of our partners, including majorly the Nature Conservancy In burning on the upper reservation for the most part, we could burn in other areas, but we live on the upper part.

[00:10:22] And so we’re focusing on this area. And so we, this year, we burned. About 24 days out of the year, which is a lot for us. So we are restricted in the number of days we can burn by several factors. One is when we can get a permit from Cal Fire. So there are in the summertime, there are. Not comfortable giving us a permit, although we are moving those dates in a little, a little later into early summer and a little earlier in the fall, pushing the envelope to, to stretch those burn windows open.

[00:11:09] Michael Hawk: And is that reluctance for summer burning because of the climate? Because it’s generally the

[00:11:15] Margo Robbins: It’s very dry here in the summer and hot. It’s it’s not uncommon to be 100 degrees or a little over. And it’s very dry, but we’re also affected by the coastal weather because we’re relatively close to the ocean. And so sometimes when it’s really dry in other places, there’s areas in our homelands when that’s the only time those places will burn.

[00:11:42] And so we’re trying to educate CAL FIRE about that, and they’ve been pretty accommodating after, about three or four years of really eyeing us and, and, not knowing what to think, about a group of community people out there burning, but they came to understand that we know what we’re doing and, we’re willing to follow the rules and we have gained their trust.

[00:12:09] And so now we can burn and we burn anywhere from, if we’re, it’s, if it’s around somebody’s house, it might be just an acre or two, but that could be expanded up to 80 acres in a day.

[00:12:24] Michael Hawk: and in order to get to this point, you mentioned that you, got some training and engaged with some partners with Cal Fire, with Nature Conservancy. Did it require any changes to legislation or policy or anything like that with government entities or other groups

[00:12:39] Margo Robbins: There have been changes in legislation, but we started burning before those changes came into reality. As the realization that fire was needed more on the land, not less, because of the huge wildfires and the purposeful use of fire as a wildfire prevention tool, and government agencies. Realized their mistake in trying to exclude fire from the The forest and now we have all this fuel on the land that’s turning into these mega wildfires.

[00:13:24] They have done an about turn and have come to Native people to look for solutions to the wildfire slash climate crisis we’re facing. So we started pushing for more rights for Native people to burn, and that has made things a lot easier. So, for example, one of the laws that came into being is that cultural, Cultural burners are considered to be the same as a nationally qualified burn boss. And to be a NWCG qualified burn boss would take 10 years or more in the agency system. Of course, many Indigenous burners have much more than 10 years and they know Those, that experience is in their homelands and so it was a huge step though for, legislators and government agencies to accept that, yes, we know what we’re doing.

[00:14:27] Michael Hawk: You mentioned the term cultural burning. How do you define cultural burning and how, how might that be different, say, from prescribed burning or some of the other terms that people might hear?

[00:14:39] Margo Robbins: Cultural burning is similar to prescribed burning and there’s different maybe levels of cultural burning, I guess you could say. , in my opinion, true cultural burning is it doesn’t require any permits, it doesn’t require any special clothing, it doesn’t require Agency qualifications, it is the average person going out and burning around their home or gathering place for cultural reasons like Near my house, I have tan oak trees and hazel, and so I burn a little area over there and then I go back and harvest it. So cultural burning is indigenous people from that place using place based knowledge to burn for cultural purposes. And then they are going back and taking care of or utilizing those resources that they burned for. Now there is the other level of cultural burning, which the Cultural Fire Management Council typically uses, and we call that prescribed fire with cultural objectives. And so, all of our staff has the NWCG qualifications, and when we are burning bigger areas, we put in all the We have fire lines, we have the hose lays, we’re all wearing the Nomex, the hard hats, yellow shirts, green pants we have fire engines there, we have a burn plan describing the parameters of the conditions we can burn under.

[00:16:42] But, we are burning for cultural objectives, maybe those objectives are basket weaving material animal habitat, traditional foods, traditional medicine, and so that is also a cultural burn. Now A by product of both of these kinds of burning is what the wider world might call fuel reduction, because you can’t burn a mountainside to improve the cultural resources without a natural outcome of reducing the amount of vegetation on the land. And that vegetation contributes to the wildfires. It also contributes to an, overstocked forest, which decreases the water table and, decreases animal habitat and all of that. Prescribed fire is more what the agencies are doing. So their primary purpose is to reduce the wildfire risk, what they call fuel reduction or hazardous fuel reduction.

[00:17:57] And they have, all of the qualified, NWCG qualified people, the burn plan, the fire engines, all of that. A byproduct of what they are doing also provides cultural resources, and we will go in after they burn and gather stuff. They may not know what those are, or even that they’re there, but we know.

[00:18:25] Michael Hawk: you mentioned the cultural fire management council and we’re going to spend a little bit more time on that. I think here in a few moments, but the question that came to mind was, you mentioned, approximately 10 years ago. You and the community came together really recognizing that the lack of fire was so critically important was that the time where you founded the Cultural Fire Management Council?

[00:18:50] Margo Robbins: Yes, it was, we start, actually started out as the Klamath Local Organizing committee, and it was part of the Building Healthy Communities Initiative by supported by the California Endowment. And they hired a community organizer to come in and, help us, define what the most pressing needs are and then, helped us figure out, how to overcome those problems. , we did our very first burn as the, the Klamath Local Organizing Committee. And then, we got a new organizer, and then he wanted to, have something. Different to be recognized as yes, he accomplished something with this community and we said no we’re not going to do something different We need to keep burning and so we ended up splitting off from a bigger group who?

[00:19:52] Was working on a different community issue I think it was like a crosswalk at the store because there was elders that crossed there and worried that they might get hit by a car or something. And so we split off and we said, well, we have to come up for a name for ourselves.

[00:20:11] And so we came up with the Cultural Fire Management Council. And there was four of us who had split off, and two of them were Yurok tribal employees, and we didn’t want to be part of the official Yurok tribal structure, and so, And we decided that it wouldn’t be good for them to be, the head of our, our new, our new group.

[00:20:39] And so that left two of us and they looked at me and I said, yes, I’ll do it.

[00:20:44] Michael Hawk: It’s a really fascinating and, I would say successful story and I’m going to leave it a little bit as a teaser right now for the listeners, because we’re going to come back to this a little bit more time permitting later. But I wanted , to ask you , now that you have returned some fire back to the land can you tell me about like what changes you’ve seen in your land and maybe your community members have seen since the return of fire?

[00:21:08] That’s pretty open ended. So take that however, in whatever direction you’d

[00:21:12] Margo Robbins: I love this question. We have seen such amazing changes on. Our landscape since we started burning. And it’s just been a little bit more than 10 years, but all of the places that we burned, there are deer there before we started burning, our young men would have to go off the reservation and, and risk big penalties for hunting off reservation to bring deer home, to feed their family, and now they just go to the places where we burned and they’ll bring home a deer.

[00:21:47] And so that’s. Pretty amazing. We have noticed difference in the water table where before in towards the end of summer, things would be very dry. No water in the ditches. Now, in those places that we burn beside the road, it’s not uncommon to see water in the ditch. Now, the creeks are increasing , their flow.

[00:22:15] So those burns. That rely on, on wet, damp places throughout the year. They are becoming more plentiful. That’s huge. We can see from the roadside up to the ridge. We can actually see through the trees to the ridge and see the skyline, which is huge because before you couldn’t see past the bank on the edge of the road because it was so thick with brush.

[00:22:47] And that is a huge thing. We see. Not only the number of basket weavers increasing in our community, but we have so much hazel, we can invite our neighboring tribes to come and gather with us. And where once it was uncommon To see a baby being carried in a basket before we started burning. Now, every place you go, you’ll be seeing little babies being carried in baskets because the materials are there and available.

[00:23:25] There are more weaving classes. More and more people are are learning and expanding the art of basket weaving. There have just been so many changes. We see people who before they started working for us, was trying to find a ride to work. Now they have a car to take their family places in.

[00:23:48] And, and that’s pretty cool. We see people changing their lifestyles because they have an opportunity to do something so meaningful in the community that their old habits and lifestyles no longer suit who they are.

[00:24:09] Michael Hawk: Yeah. It really sounds like it’s helped with identity, well being, cultural connectiveness, like just permeating the whole society.

[00:24:17] Margo Robbins: amazing, yeah. I, I really had no clue when we first started this, how important and what a, critical element of being fire is not only to the landscape, but to the people it’s like. Just amazing how far reaching it is, it affects the plants, the animals, the soil, the water, the air, the people.

[00:24:46] It’s amazing.

[00:24:48] Michael Hawk: As you look ahead, it seems like the trajectory is really good, but I’m sure there’s more that you’re looking to do. What would you like to see? Like what outcomes would you like to see in the future on, on your lands or, or with the people?

[00:25:01] Margo Robbins: It’s interesting yesterday at our staff meeting, we just had a visioning exercise or activity with all of our staff about the future of CFMC and what we want it to be, but I see us with our partners taking care of our entire ancestral territory with fire. The people don’t own a lot of the land. A good portion of it is owned by forest service and parks.

[00:25:34] So it’s important to partner with, those other entities that have a jurisdiction over some of the land. So I see those partnerships becoming more solid also with the parks. We have a pretty good relationship with them. Now we go down there and burn with them. They come and burn with us. I look forward to the day when, we can drive from the end of the road all the way up to the store and look up the hill and see the skyline, not just patches here and there that, we’ve burned, but the whole entire way and that we can look down the hill and also see the river that we are returning it to that open walkable space that looks like it’s cared for and loved and not this overgrown tangled mess that we’re currently faced with. I see herds of elk on our homelands. I see our workforce expanding to have not just three work crews on the land, but maybe twice that many, right now we have two fire engines, at least doubling that so to continue to increase the workforce and the equipment to put more and more fire on the land.

[00:27:01] I look forward to the time when we don’t have to get permits from Cal Fire that the tribe establishes and, and claims their true sovereign authority over what we do in our homelands. So, yeah, big dreams.

[00:27:23] Michael Hawk: , sounds like a very pleasant dream and hopefully not a dream, but a reality before long. And I think, when pursuing that dream, you probably encounter a lot of myths about what cultural fire, cultural burning is. What types of myths do you still encounter and do you have to address?

[00:27:42] Margo Robbins: I think that people are just, I don’t know if they’re like creating myths about it so much as that they just really don’t have any clue what cultural burning is. Well, I guess, like, one myth about it is, like, with certain types of vegetation especially the more highly flammable ones. That people will say, Oh the native people never burned that. And that comes from the fear of, of burning it and afraid that it will escape and get out of control. But. If the Native people had been allowed to continue taking care of those places with fire, it would not be such heavy buildup and thick as it is now to where it’s such a huge fire danger. So the fact that it presents such a huge danger today tells me that In fact, they did burn that previously.

[00:28:53] And if they would go to the eldest people in that area, I believe they would find people who have memories of their grandma, who talked about, how those places were taken care of.

[00:29:07] Michael Hawk: Yeah, I that, that leads to two questions. I’ll see if I can remember both of them here. So with such a large gap in cultural burning because of the kind of colonial mentality of suppressing it all how much have you, as a people had to relearn and versus how much of that knowledge just continued to be passed down through history and story and so forth.

[00:29:32] Margo Robbins: We have been fortunate in in those renegade burners who continued to burn on the sly and who taught their little kids to do that also. And so a lot of the knowledge has remained intact. Different people hold different pieces of that knowledge. And when we come together, typically like in planning mode, and when you come together in planning mode with your neighboring tribes, and you start to get more of that picture and piecing it together. And then there’s also resources like the Kat Anderson Tending the Wild book that has important information that helps us to understand. So those pieces that may have slipped through the cracks through the generations, we can pick up in other places. And then also, just the act of, of being with fire, fire itself teaches us.

[00:30:53] And working with fire is a never ending learning experience. And even if the knowledge of how our ancestors burned came to us fully intact, we would still have to adjust the way that we use it because of climate change. And also because of the lack of fire being on the landscape for over a hundred years.

[00:31:25] It is so very different, the conditions of what we’re burning in compared to what our ancestors did when they burned every year.

[00:31:36] Michael Hawk: Yeah, and actually that ties into the second question that I alluded to. You mentioned that some of this fuel buildup is so great. do you find that sometimes you have to prepare the land in advance of a cultural burn, say by mechanical means or manual thinning or other methods to get it in a state where then you can proceed with a cultural burn?

[00:31:57] Margo Robbins: It is almost always necessary to do some kind of prep work before putting fire on the ground. That might be, cutting a fire line around it and then having water. There are times in springtime when you may not have to do that, you get a week of good weather, you can burn, and when the fire gets to those shady, damp places, it just goes out. But we almost always, not always, will put a fire line around it. I do not subscribe to the myth. That you have to go in and cut and pile and burn before you can do a broadcast burn. Sometimes that is advisable. But it is certainly not necessary all the time. I think it’s just people who are in, in fire on the land. We have fire suppressionists now responsible for doing prescribed burns. They’re used to rushing to a fire and putting it out, so it’s pretty challenging for them. Ha

[00:33:16] Michael Hawk: I can imagine. I have to ask, do you have a lot of frogs outside where, where you’re at? Because it sounds like there’s a lot of frogs in the background.

[00:33:24] Margo Robbins: Yes, they’re just singing away out there and all our culture at this time of year when you hear the frogs singing it means the eels are running and so people hustle down to the mouth this catch them and then. Within another month or so, the eels will be in the river.

[00:33:43] Michael Hawk: I had a note here of another term that I wanted to hear your thoughts on and that’s family burning. Can you tell me what family burning is?

[00:33:52] Margo Robbins: Family burning is cultural burning in its truest form. So, at one time, families were responsible for burning their own hunting and gathering areas. And that was one of the strategies that we identified to bring back traditional styles of burning. And so we support a family burn program where we’ll help families prep their land so that the fire won’t escape.

[00:34:23] If they need to put a fire line around it, we have tools they can use. We’ll send a few people to help them. If the brush is like right up against their house, then it would obviously need to be cut back and pulled away and piled. And so we’ll help with that. And then on the day that the family decides that they’re going to burn, we’ll send a fire engine and a couple of people so that they have a mobile source of water. Family burning is in our area done when CAL FIRE doesn’t have restrictions on burning. And so you don’t have to have any special qualifications or clothing. All age people will be out there from little kids to elders.

[00:35:10] .

[00:35:10] Michael Hawk: I know one of the concerns that people have with any type of fire is the smoke impact. So can you tell me a little bit about how you you manage for that? Maybe if there’s any misperceptions or perhaps they’re valid perceptions about smoke.

[00:35:24] Margo Robbins: Every burn plan has a smoke management component to it so that you are minimizing the smoke impacts to sensitive communities, such as schools and in hospitals. A lot of it has to do with, which way the wind is blowing and, and other factors. I think that it’s important for people to understand that prescribed fire and cultural burning is a wildfire prevention. That without the reduction of the vegetation. Live and dead vegetation on the ground. The wildfires will continue to get bigger and bigger. And the smoke from wildfires is carcinogenic. It is poison, a lot of it. Because it’s not just burning wood, it’s burning buildings and plastic and any number of things.

[00:36:31] And so when you think about it, so, in that way, if we have a way to minimize or reduce the spread and intensity of those wildfires, and it produces much less smoke, and the smoke from the purposeful use of fire is just wood. So people need to think about what kind of smoke are they going to choose.

[00:37:01] Because there is no such thing as a no smoke option, we can either do nothing, and the wildfires will continue to get bigger and bigger, we’ll be sucked into our homes with smoke so thick we can’t see across, across the way, or we can choose the minimal smoke which dissipates in a day or so with prescribed burns, which will impact the spread and intensity of the wildfire and the smoke produced by it.

[00:37:37] Michael Hawk: Yeah, I think that that can’t be stressed enough because part of the prescription of a prescribed burn is, as you said, taking into account the smoke and the wind and the weather. And the alternative, I think everyone in the United States and Canada in the last, half a dozen years has experienced days on end of, of smoke.

[00:37:57] So yeah, that’s the alternative is like, it’s going to come at an unexpected time and last for days or weeks , unless we get a handle on it. So I, I appreciate that insight. I think it’s , one of the more overlooked aspects of this. So more generally. There’s a shift of perspective that’s required when it comes to putting fire on the land.

[00:38:17] And, would you be able to maybe elaborate a little bit more on that? Like what, what types of shifts would you like to see in the public when it comes to applying fire to the land?

[00:38:29] Margo Robbins: I think it’s important for people to understand. That at one time, it was not some responsibility of, of a specialized group of people government agencies that had responsibility for taking care of the land with fire. It was the average person that took care of that responsibility. And in some states, that’s still the case. In some states, if you don’t burn your property, and a wildfire comes and burns your neighbor’s place, then you’re held responsible because you didn’t take care of your land with fire, and now it burns your neighbor’s place. I think we need to get back to that place where the average person has the knowledge and the right to take care of their home and their land with fire. Think about all the private landowners who own, a half an acre, an acre. 10 acres, 20 acres. What if all those people had opportunities to learn how to safely use fire to take care of their land?

[00:39:51] Maybe get your neighbors or other family members to help you. How big of an impact would that have on the number of acres burned annually? There is such a deficit of fire on the land that there is no way government agencies can ever catch up with that. So it, I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be doing it, I’m saying we need to expand the pool of people who know how to do it safely.

[00:40:26] Michael Hawk: Alright, so we teased a bit about the Cultural Fire Management Council or CFMC earlier. So maybe taking a step back, can you tell me what is the mission of the CFMC?

[00:40:37] Margo Robbins: The mission of CFMC is to restore our homelands with fire. And improve the health and well being of the land, the animals, the people, improve the water. It’s just a return fire to the land.

[00:40:58] Michael Hawk: And are you working on this with, say, neighboring tribes or other groups across the country? Or is it pretty much focused on traditional Yurok lands?

[00:41:11] Margo Robbins: We are focused. Almost exclusively on Yurok lands, we do go burn with our neighboring tribes, the Hupa and Karuk, and they come down and burn with us sometimes, and we do trainings to bring people from across the United States and sometimes other countries here on our homelands to increase their knowledge about the purposeful use of fire and the benefits.

[00:41:45] We are part of the indigenous people’s . Burn Network, whose mission it is to support other tribes in reclaiming their tribal fire practices.

[00:41:58] Michael Hawk: So how, can people help the CFMC? Is it a non profit? Can are you looking for donations or volunteers or what can people do?

[00:42:06] Margo Robbins: I think one of the biggest things that people can help with is to It really just helps spread the word that fire is a part of the natural ecosystem. And as human beings, we need to stand up and take our place in that cycle. That we’re meant to be part of the ecosystems. We can’t just leave land alone and expect it to be healthy and fully functional.

[00:42:43] Fire is a part of the natural ecosystem and we need to take our place in that.

[00:42:51] Michael Hawk: Absolutely. That’s and that’s our goal here as well with this episode. So, Griff, Griff and I were chatting on the side. So for people listening, Griff is here today as a producer in the background. So he’s kind of helped guiding the the discussion. And yes, this time is a little bit short. We would really like to hear a little bit more about your perspective on On fire tending to the land and sort of the way that we were thinking about it is that as the story goes when the first colonists arrived, they saw this land as a wilderness, but also at the same time, like an abundant garden, a promised land with what they saw.

[00:43:32] They didn’t recognize the fact that it was being stewarded by the story. Numerous different indigenous people so with that as a launch point can, can you maybe riff a little bit on that and the meaning that you know, returning some of these T. E. K. practices to the land, have to you,

[00:43:51] Margo Robbins: It’s really interesting. I went to this gathering in Colorado with several different kinds of agency people and some of them managed wilderness lands. And I had to inform them that what you guys called wilderness are places that indigenous people used to continuously steward and they are that way.

[00:44:23] Because of the stewardship practices, including fire, that we use to keep the land and everything associated with it healthy. As Native people, we once depended solely on the land to provide for all of our needs. And so we, we stewarded the land in ways that those species that were especially important to us were expanded and taken care of in specific ways.

[00:45:03] Not just with fire, but also utilizing the resources from those places in sustainable ways and the gathering practices of the people help to keep things in balance and plentiful and healthy. So, for example. At one time, our land was half prairie. It’s only, the prairies are only 1 percent of what they were.

[00:45:33] We used to burn prairies annually. And so it would keep encroachment from fir trees from taking over the prairies. On those prairies, not only did deer and elk thrive, but also other kinds of animals, coyotes, birds, things, things like that. On those prairies, there are What we call Indian potatoes, there’s like five different kinds of potatoes that we would go out and dig up.

[00:46:07] When you dig those up, you take the corms off, leave them in the land, and then more grow back. And your digging tool aerates the soil. And so it is a whole system, not just with fire, but also returning to those places, and digging the potatoes, gathering the acorns, picking the berries and nuts, Which provide more, they continue to provide, and so the traditional ecological knowledge has to do with not just taking care of those places, but actually utilizing the resources in the way that they were meant to be utilized, not over harvesting, but, but doing it in a sustainable way.

[00:47:04] Michael Hawk: And since we’re about at time I just want to ask Griff Griff, was there any follow up that you had to that?

[00:47:11] Griff Griffith: Margot, our mutual friend, Francisco he’s such an interesting young dude and him and I get into conversations about T. E. K. and he always blows my mind. And one of the things that he was telling me and a group of other land manager types was he was saying the role that indigenous play in the relationship that indigenous people had on their land could be understood by scientists as they were a keystone species. Have you heard that before? And do you like that?

[00:47:43] Margo Robbins: that

[00:47:43] humans are a keystone species?

[00:47:46] Griff Griffith: Yeah. Let the, the, the role that the Yurok played on their land was like a Keystone species, like they fit in and we’re like, you know, kind of like the beavers would be called or the Oaks would be called, like they were a species that many other species depended on

[00:48:00] Margo Robbins: I haven’t heard of that before, but it makes total sense that we as humans are a keystone species to, creating balance in, in the landscapes. That, everything has its place. And when those things get out of balance, then it starts to become unhealthy.

[00:48:27] Griff Griffith: and catches on fire and burns to the ground,

[00:48:30] Margo Robbins: Yeah, yeah. Or it becomes so thick with vegetation you can’t walk through it. None of the bigger animals can live there. Or the water source is contaminated or depleted. Until it is no longer healthy. So, so many pieces of the puzzle are affected by any one thing that’s out of balance.

[00:48:53] Michael Hawk: All right, I know we’re short on time but I, I can’t really express how happy I am that we’ve been able to make this connection and have this discussion and. How excited I am to share it with our listenership. So Margo, thank you for jumping through all the different hoops you had to jump through to make this discussion to happen.

[00:49:14] I know you internet going out and power going out and, everything else. But so thank you so much for doing this. I, I can’t express enough how much it means to me.

[00:49:24] Margo Robbins: Well, thank you so much for having me. I, I really appreciate the invitation to be on here. You guys are doing really good work and, and helping to spread some really important messages. So, I’m really glad that They’re gonna help spread the message of good fire.

[00:49:45] Michael Hawk: All right, Margo, thank you again. I appreciate you and all of the work that you’re doing.