Rethinking the Power of Fire With Mighty Partner Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance
If anyone has a right to feel strongly about fire, it might be the residents of California’s Clear Lake watershed in Lake County. Starting in 2015, catastrophic wildfires pummeled the area each season for eight years, leaving the majority of its surface area burned—and lives and homes lost. Now it’s the epicenter of a unique movement, where the community is activating to reframe fire, from a scary and destructive force to a sacred element. TERA—the Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance—is putting Indigenous-led stewardship front and center as they lead collaboration amongst organizations and Tribes to rejuvenate the ecology, economy and culture of their home. We chatted with TERA Executive Director Lindsay Dailey to find out more.
TERA Crew Member Nijoel McCloud lighting overgrowth and invasive Himalayan blackberry during a cultural burn at Hopland Band of Pomo Indians in Mendocino County. Photo Credit: Evan-Marie Petite
Lake County: Rich in Biodiversity, Including Humans
The Clear Lake watershed’s isolated geography has kept it a relic of biological and cultural diversity, Dailey says. While it’s a small rural community with lots of socioeconomic challenges, the area is a unique habitat for flora and fauna—as well as for humans. It’s home to seven tribal nations, each with its own government, and three distinct languages: Wappo, Lake Miwok and Pomo. And within Pomo: Eastern Pomo, Southeastern Pomo and Northern Pomo.
As fires hit the area year after year, the community began to look at things a bit differently, becoming activated in their search for solutions. Agencies like the Forest Service brought a new attitude toward conversations with Tribes, Dailey says, asking how they’d gotten where they were. And this time, actually listening to Tribes’ response: colonization, displacement of Native California and land management practices, cultural burning and Indigenous-led stewardship.
“And our [future] agency partners pretty much just took their hats off and said, yeah, we know,” Dailey says. “There was hearing each other and understanding and reckoning with the past and the history in a way that I think allowed folks to start exploring partnerships and building trust and hopefully coming at these problems from a new perspective that had more shared understanding and hopefully healing involved.”
TERA Crew Lead Stoney Timmons (Robinson Rancheria) taking a moment at a cultural burn with the Hopland Band of Pomo Indians. Photo credit: Evan-Marie Petit
Shifting Toward Indigenous-Led Restoration
From those humble conversations, TERA was born—with a mission “aiming to cultivate land stewardship, livelihood, and leadership skills that weave collaborative relationships between tribal members and the community at large, for the benefit of all lands and beings.”
What exactly does that look like? First, creating a training program that encompasses restoration ecology and traditional knowledge, preparing trainees for meaningful careers in land stewardship. The training offers students ecological literacy, cultural study, land stewardship skills, and vocational training in an experiential way. The second prong of the program is the TERA crew: a ready-for-hire eco-culturally oriented six-person hand-crew with USFS certified chainsaw operators. But this crew’s knowledge and experience go far beyond fuel reduction. From native seed collection for onsite restoration work and tree planting, to invasive species removal, to restoration of culturally important plants for basketry, food, medicine, and craft, and returning cultural burning to the landscape, the TERA crew takes a holistic view of interacting with the land, weaving together an integrated ecological and cultural worldview into all of their work.
TERA works with Hopland Band of Pomo Indians to move fire through a congested creek bed, clearing out Himalayan blackberry and creating a better environment for California bay laurels, valley oaks, elderberries and other native trees. Photo Credit: Evan-Marie Petite
Instead of simply teaching government agencies or other organizations bits of traditional ecological knowledge, the TERA crew goes deeper; taking a long-term approach to interacting with the land—less of a top-down, anthropocentric view and more of a kin-centric network of life perspective, Dailey says.
“It's based on generations of being in the same place and observing and being in a relationship [with the land],” she says. “The key is not to continue in an extractive path, mining the cool pieces of indigenous knowledge, but instead completely rethinking how we as a society can come back to our roots as land-based people.”
Collective healing alongside ecological restoration
The TERA crew is filling a modern need—but it’s doing so in a way that allows tribal members to have a lifeway and career path as caretakers of their ancestral lands. The work has ripple effects beyond ecological restoration, including repairing relationships between the tribal community and the non-native community, as well as amongst the different Tribes themselves. For example, a restoration project might connect a private landowner with tribal members who have a deep connection to historic sites on what is now private land. In addition to the actual physical work done by the crew, important new relationships can be forged, and conversations can begin about tribal access to important sites on their ancestral lands. Similarly, the crew is experiencing connection and healing between the Tribes themselves, as they work together to restore their shared ancestral homelands.
“Our crew is inter-tribal,” Dailey says. “So we have this young generation that's like, ‘We’re ready to work together. We're here to heal. Let's talk.’”
Martin Duncan (Robinson Rancheria), TERA crew member, and his two daughters enjoying a day of intergenerational learning and burning. Photo credit Lindsay Dailey
A New Model of Tribal-Agency Collaboration
For Dailey, one of the most exciting parts of TERA’s work is how it allows for long-term relationship with the land, like their master stewardship agreement with the US Forest Service on the Mendocino National Forest. Covering the north shore of Clear Lake and hundreds of thousands of acres of tribal ancestral territory for multiple Tribes, the agreement is a long-term contract with funding for restoration.
“We get to go out there and meet up with their team, their botanists, their wildlife person, their fuels' person, and kind of see things through their eyes,” Dailey says. “But also the Tribes get to say, ‘Well, this is what we see, and this is what we think the land needs.’ And to me, it's like the model of how I think agencies could be and should be working with Tribes. There's a real exchange of knowledge and a real humility to listening to and letting in and desire to learn from, but then not to extract that information, but rather to provide support through finances and training to allow Tribal members to carry out this vision of caretaking their ancestral land.’”
For both the Tribes and the non-natives, that kind of restoration work goes beyond ecology, Dailey says, beginning the deeper work of cultural reckoning and restitution. As TERA helps infuse that perspective into California’s fire education system, Dailey is excited to see it also shared out through other states’ curriculums, as well.
Even beyond the wildfire world, Dailey encourages others to take a similar stock of their own relationship to the land, its history, and the people who’ve been displaced from it—to take a reckoning, and look for ways to connect.
“Land is such a powerful unifier,” she says. “So many of us have deep, deep love for the places that we call home—how can we catalyze that love of home and all the critters that we share at home with to really envision new ways of working together?”
Lindsay Dailey and Stoney Timmons (Robinson Rancheria), founding members of the Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance celebrating the arrival of their new Type 6 fire engine. Photo credit Brels Solomon
We’re in a defining moment—a moment where we can choose to be overwhelmed, disconnected and discouraged, or where we can choose to be positive, embrace change and lift up the work of others seeking a better future together. We’re proud to support the work of the people and organizations out changing this world for the better—for all of us. Some may be small, some large. All are mighty. Each month, we’ll be highlighting one of our Mighty Partners and we encourage you to get to know them, support them, and share their work with your friends, families and colleagues. Let’s get to work.