Bringing Fire Back to the Land: Honoring Tribal Pathways for Land Stewardship and Reciprocity Active

The Manzanita Band of the Kumeyaay Nation is one of many Tribal Nations in Southern California playing a leadership role in advancing climate adaptation strategies and actions. This project will bolster the Tribe’s climate adaptation and natural resource conservation strategies that identified fire as a missing element needed to advance these efforts.

Culturing burning has been practiced for thousands of years to rejuvenate ecosystems and reduce the intensity of potential wildfires. Yet regulations imposed on reservation federal trust-lands create significant barriers for modern cultural burning practices. This project will build upon an existing large-scale, regional, intertribal effort aimed at bringing cultural knowledge holders and Tribal fire managers to the forefront of Western fire management efforts. It will also identify barriers preventing Tribal Nations from asserting their sovereign rights to steward their lands.

Over the course of this project, partners will facilitate roundtables for both Tribal and non-Tribal members focused on identifying opportunities to collaborate and reinstate cultural burning. This project will produce a guide for Tribal partners outlining a process for implementing cultural burning and other Tribal fire management activities in the region. Through involvement in the Climate Science Alliance’s (CSA) Tribal Working Group, this project will also contribute to a larger effort supporting Tribal Nations across the region. Together, the team seeks to create a Tribal-led process based on collaborative cultural burn practices that honors Tribal history and knowledge, which is necessary to manage Tribal natural and cultural resources.