In California, women learn how to protect their ancestral lands with fire

Members of the A’i Kofán de Sinangoe Indigenous guard keep watch over the part of the Amazon rainforest their community resides in. With the help of technological tools like drones and camera traps, they are able to prevent invasions and illegal activity on their land — which often goes hand-in-hand with preventing deforestation and pollution.

Indigenous women in British Columbia are leading the revival of cultural burning practices and integrating Indigenous knowledge into wildfire management. Organizations like the Salish Fire Keepers Society have led to policy changes and an increase in Indigenous representation in firefighting roles.

In recent years, California has passed legislation making it easier for indigenous tribes to perform cultural burns, including one bill establishing a claims fund to protect landowners from the financial risk of any potential damage and another allowing tribes to enter state agreements that bypass typical permitting and regulatory requirements for cultural burns. The Karuk tribe is starting with backyard burns, using the practice as an educational opportunity to pass down traditional methods and knowledge.

A collaborative experiment between Indigenous community activists, tribal officials, loggers, nonprofits, and the U.S. Forest Service is delivering firewood to residents who need it for heating and cooking. The program, called Wood for Life, also doubles as a forest management initiative to thin out Arizona’s forests to prevent deadly wildfires. The shuttering of a local coal mine and the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this home heating crisis and group members in 2020 delivered a total of 650 cords of wood to several Indigenous nations.

To combat wildfires in California, Native American tribal leaders and government officials are coming together to facilitate “cultural burnings” or controlled burns. Regularly burning the landscape prevents thick, dried out vegetation from catching fire and causing massive wildfires. Tribal groups used to perform this ritual in the 1800s, but as settlers moved West, many of them prevented Native Americans from doing these cultural burnings. While controlled burns can be challenging in places where there’s too much underbrush, these partnerships can bring together indigenous knowledge and wildfire management.

In Central African Republic, the first community forest was created with the hope of reversing the area’s deforestation and empowering the Indigenous communities living in the forests. By placing the community forest inside a logging zone, local inhabitants can explore alternatives to timber production that are more eco-friendly. While the future of the country’s community forest depends on government negotiations, the model can provide a road map for other Indigenous communities throughout the region.

Indigenous communities in Michoacán, Mexico, have implemented traditional collective land management and community-driven governance strategies to sustainably cultivate avocados, successfully protecting local forests and biodiversity, empowering local economies, and resisting cartel violence.

Indigenous peoples in Thailand's Nan province, in collaboration with researchers from five institutions, launched a citizen-science program using soil, hair, and fish sampling alongside computer modelling to document transboundary pollution from Laos's Hongsa coal plant. This work produced evidence of acidic soils and mercury contamination that has empowered environmental advocacy actions.

Empowering Indigenous peoples in Indonesia with land rights allows them to protect and manage rainforests and biodiversity. One tribe that’s doing so, the Kajang, relies on substance agriculture and does not allow practices like cutting down trees, hunting, or using technology on most of the land.

The Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (TREX) brings people together to learn how to conduct controlled and prescribed burns to prevent explosive wildfires. The organization also works with local prescribed burning associations to enhance their capacity to conduct trainings in local communities and strengthen collaboration with local landowners. Part of the group’s curriculum includes lessons on ecology more broadly as well as the cultural importance of prescribed burning in indigenous communities.