News From Native California - Spring 2015 Volume 28, Issue 3 | Page 27

Then suppression policy came! The Euro-American settlers brought their philosophical beliefs and their fear of fire.
In 1991, I did a second stint with the Forest Service as an
archaeologist. I was required to take a new recruit course,
a one-day session that included a spiel about fire. I was told
that fire is no good, that “there is not anything good about
fire!” Wow! I sat there with my mouth open—unbelievable!
So I went to the forest supervisor and said, “Now I know
what the problem is, and where we need to start correcting
it.”
Twenty years later, as we move into the age of collaboration, there is controversy over giving Native Americans too
much credit and accepting traditional ecological knowledge
from a practitioner rather than from a scientist who has been
to the best-known universities. How can some dumb savage (the wild Indian) know more about the land than a biologist or ecologist who has studied and published about what
it is going to take to restore, regenerate, and rejuvenate our
forest and watersheds? You can read statements that certain
(not all) scientists make, whether on Facebook or in scientific
reports, belittling the ecological knowledge of Native Americans (who still practice their traditions and cultural livelihood) and the historians who have befriended them. Some
of these comments are coming from the same universities
where historians and anthropologists and ethnobotanists are
trying to do their part, working diligently and collaboratively
with Native American traditionalists.
There are still many of our state and federal agencies—
forestry, parks, fish and wildlife—where people do not
understand how the land was when Euro-American settlers
got to what is now California. In 2010, at Devil’s Post Pile
Monument, park officials were talking about how the land
should be returned to the wild. Back to when everything
was wild! I asked them, “Do you mean when the Indian was
wild and living on the land?” To the non-Indian, terms such
as wild, natural, and wilderness become indicators that the
landscape was not touched and should not be touched—no

manicuring, no physical maintenance to enhance the landscape. In other words, live and let live, which boils down to
no cost to the governmental bodies in charge of our monuments, parks, forests, and wilderness lands. But to the Native
American, the immediate response to these concepts is, you
are talking about us, about our homeland, about our relationship not just to the land but to all the species that exists
on these lands, including those that will come to visit or pass
through.
Another controversial subject is cultural resources. Not
only the parks and forest folks, but also some of my own
native people will say, “We want our cultural resources protected!” I’ve heard it numerous times, at hydroelectric relicensing, at collaborations, and at water summit meetings.
Management plans are always stating how cultural resources
will be protected. Local, state, and federal laws have been
enacted to protect archaeological sites. While there may be
thousands of sites in a forest (five thousand recorded in the
Sierra National Forest alone), that does not cover all types of
cultural resources. The Mono, Miwok, Yokotoch, and Paiute
utilized over two hundred resources culturally and some one
hundred different food and medicine resources.
Ancestral sites, sacred sites, historical sites—of course
they are protected! But from whom? Oh yes, the Historic
Property Management Plans protect the cultural resources
too! Protects them from us, apparently—we as Native Americans cannot utilize them without a permit, an escort, or a
pass through locked gates. The word culture comes from the
same root as cultivate. To cultivate means to burn, harvest,
prod, prune, transplant, or engage in any other means of
sustaining the abundance of the resource for generations to
come.

Tribal Ecological Knowledge is still quite
misunderstood
Tribal-traditional ecological knowledge is based on four factors: philosophy, practice, spirituality, and knowledge. Are

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