News From Native California - Spring 2015 Volume 28, Issue 3 | Page 25

Tribal-Traditional
Ecological Knowledge
Written by Ron W. Goode

at a recent symposium, an Australian aborigine woman
addressed the crowd of educators, historians, anthropologists, and other native folks. She asked, “Do you know who
you are? We know who we are—we are at one with the
land!”
Australian historian Bill Gammage spoke about fire, saying, “The colonists/settlers have always viewed fire as a
threat, while the Aborigine sees fire as an ally. Fire is part of
Dreaming.” He went on to say, “When working the land, use
a scalpel rather than a sword, burn early versus often.” He
spoke of fire rules: locate the resources, control the fuel, balance the species, maintain the fuel, and ensure abundance.
In his book The Biggest State on Earth: How Aborigines Made
Australia, he wrote, “The Continent was not natural, the
Aborigines made it that way!”

“People affect all other species,” according to Dr. Rebecca
Bliege Bird, anthropological researcher at Stanford University. “To manage is a religious philosophy of dominion. An
alternative is the Aborigine way of thinking—everything has
an inter-relationship, a web of positive and negative species.”
After thousands of years of living on the land, the Martu
of Western Australia were forcibly removed from the 1960s
to the 1980s. While they were absent, the largest fire ever
recorded burned through their land. After they returned and
started managing their land again, they re-established a more
mature habitat and fire regime and have kept the wild fire
small.
Dr. Frank Lake (Karuk), a Forest Service researcher in
Orleans, spoke of cultural resources from his own cultural
perspective, saying, “Each child’s umbilical cord is placed in

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