A People's History

It's nice to get out of the city and be in the great outdoors like my people used to.

Actually, no, not really.

Before contact, Indigenous communities used to manage and steward their lands every day.

One example is what I'm about to do.

Make a fire.

They use fire to manage their environment.

Today it's called controlled or prescribed burns.

But back then it was just called life.

Fire was used to promote the growth of useful plants and crops, which would increase the population of animals.

Those burns would also destroy the stuff that fuels wildfires, you know, the dead overgrowth, etc., etc...

But if we're all about prescribed burns now, why was it originally outlawed?

This is a people's history of Native America.

With me, Tai Leclaire.

It's Smokey Bear along with his slogan: Only you can prevent wildfires. The governments PSA to say, Hey, see this wildfire?

This is your fault. While the spark is usually caused by humans, a mismanaged forest is primed to be engulfed by flames.

So what if I told you that the heart of this partially clothed bears rhetoric is another continuation of the disrespect and disregard of Native American science and a contributor to climate change?

Well, back in 1911, Congress passed the Weeks Act, which granted the federal government the power to purchase.

Private land for the purpose of conserving forests and the water supply.

Part of conserving forests meant protecting the land from fire, a.k.a.

fire suppression.

Which effectively banned cultural burns.

And other fire based land management tactics, historically used by tribal communities.

The blanket policy of the early 20th century was fire suppression, which meant America's forest lands were allowed to.

Grow for over 20 years.

Untended in many ways, it had been.

But the U.S. government became more concerned about their forest management policies when they thought these vast spaces could be targets for enemy fire in World War Two.

In February 1942, a Japanese submarine shelled the Ellwood Oil field, a refinery near Los Padres National Forest near Santa Barbara, California.

But the 20 minute long shelling missed its mark.

There were no injuries and inflicted little damage.

What it did spark was fear and paranoia around the possibility of the enemy using wildfire as a weapon.

Enter Smokey the Bear, formerly Smokey Bear.

A cartoon of a bear pouring water on a campfire.

He was in Smokey after a legendary firefighter from New York and the start of the beefy bear propaganda.

Six years later, in southern New Mexico, Smokey Bear became a reality.

During the 1950 Capitan Gap blaze in the Lincoln National Forest before being seized by the feds in the early 1900s, the Mescalero Apache were the caretakers of this land and forest.

About 40 years after the Apache lost this land, it was likely human mistakes that started the devastating Lincoln National Forest fires.

All hands were called to extinguish the flames, including the newly formed tribal fire crew.

And brace yourselves for the best name ever.

The Taos Pueblo Snowballs.

Donning white helmets, giving them the name The Snowballs.

They aided the U.S. Forest Service in fighting the fire.

After four days, they finally suppress the inferno and a real life black bear cub emerged from the fire.

It was a Taos Pueblo Snowballs that rescued this badly burned bear and, along with a local fire crew, rushed it to a vet in Santa Fe.

He was later dubbed Smokey Bear in honor of his cartoon counterpart.

Since then, the dialogue around fires has been zero tolerance, resulting in.

Fires in California.

Due to climate change, the state's deadliest fire in history.

And now California needs to learn to adapt.

You see traditional stewardship of lands and resources is now discussed in Western science as Traditional Ecological Knowledge or TEK.

But now TEK is seen as an alternative to Western methods of forest management.

However, it's so much more than that.

TEK is a knowledge that can only come from being Indigenous to the land and its specific ecosystem.

Actually, I have a friend who loves fire.

Not a pyro, but.

Someone who knows more than me, both TEK and science.

Dr. Melinda Adams.

Hi, Tai!

So I'm out in the forest trying to light a fire, but got distracted by Smokey Bear signs.

Can you please break it down for me?

In order to build public perception of the dangers of wildfire.

Because when settlers first arrived, they saw Indigenous peoples placing fire to the lands.

But maybe didn't catch enough of the observation to see all the benefits.

So they developed this ingrained fear of fire that has since been passed along and inherited by different generations.

That's why you see large scale wildfires and people's reaction is fear.

Can you tell us a little bit about the work you do surrounding TEK?

What I do is very layered, and that's very different from how maybe a Western scientist approaches their work, how it's mainly siloed in one specific species.

But mine tries to encompass a lot of our cultural ways and learnings and teachings.

I like the contrast between Western science and Indigenous life ways.

Can you expand?

This idea of terra nullius, which was used as a tool of colonization, that before settlers came over land was blank, land was unowned, land was not taken care of by Indigenous peoples, and that nothingness that it presents, it directly erases Indigenous presence and stewardship techniques and Landcare from the areas that you're suggesting had no human contact.

What other forms of TEK are often overlooked?

I think often times waters is not necessarily focused on when we think of Traditional Ecological Knowledges, but we have people that have been guided by maritime calendars and in close relationships with water scapes.

Like so much of Indigenous history and culture, information like this was a race using assimilation and violence, TEK is no different?

I want to say that fire never really went away.

It was attempted to be suppressed, just like they attempted to genocide us as Indigenous peoples.

But those lessons never went away.

You know, they were passed on by specific tribes and still hold onto and adapt those knowledges.

Currently, government agencies are realizing the power in utilizing TEK practices.

In California, Governor Gavin Newsom publicly apologized to tribal nations about their historical mistreatment and promised to fund more prescribed burns.

It's one of the most biodiverse states and home to the most federally recognized tribes.

But before contact.

California was home to more than 300,000 Indigenous people.

But at the turn of the 20th century, it was down to 25,000.

So the natural diverse beauty that we enjoy now was only a fraction of what it was.

And even what we enjoy now is hanging by a thread.

Take the Klamath River, for example.

Mother To many nations of tribes from California up to Oregon, which has given them flourishing abundance of resources since time immemorial.

But what tribes saw as life, the settlers saw as money.

From the gold rush to steamboats, logging and agriculture, the Klamath River and parts of its lakes and tributaries have been either dammed, dredged, diverted, deforested or degenerative agriculture.

Sorry I didn't write any of this.

Once treaties started to be written, it took tribes away from their original homelands and for some of the small fractions of land reserved for them in order to keep traditional life ways and halt hostilities.

These tribes had to sign the treaties to maintain what little they had left, but the dams and farms had lasting environmental impacts that still harm the tribal nations to this day.

In September of 2002, tens of thousands of salmon washed up on the banks of the Lower Klamath.

This shocked, nearly everyone except the Yurok tribe, who predicted this scenario as their TEK foretold.

After decades of legal fights, protests and organizing the tribe's finally got their voices heard.

State governments, federal agencies, commercial interests and tribal nations signed an agreement to remove the dams by the end of 2024.

With one dam currently being removed, this feels like a major victory for TEK and tribal nations, right?

Even with these proclamations, funding for TEK practices is still hard to secure and power remains out of the hands of Indigenous people.

TEK is often categorized as part of humanities rather than a science.

Therefore, it's an undervalued and underpaid area considered solely for soft funding rather than hard funding.

What else am I missing, Dr. Adams?

When we talk about TEK, we also need to talk about access to land, acquiring federal recognition for tribes that do not have that status and building that agency and self-determination that we have as Indigenous peoples to steward lands.

Took us a while to start a fire, explain TEK and our good friend Smokey Bear, so we appreciate your time, Dr. Adams.

Ashoog, Thank you, Tai.

So in honor of this growing recognition of tribal land stewardship, we can do better than Smokey.

Canada already has one lined up a replacement for Smokey, and her name is Ember.

The FireSmart Fox.

She's more alert, adaptable, intelligent and respects traditional ecological knowledge unlike Smokey.

Maybe their next slogan should be Only you can give stewardship of lands back to Indigenous people. Thanks for watching.

For more, you can check out the incredible new season of Native America now on the PBS app.

Or on any local PBS station.