More ‘good fire’ in Michigan restores Indigenous land practices

BLISS, MI – The word for fire in the Native language of Great Lakes Anishinaabe is “Ishkode.”

Fire was a historically frequent and recurring element of the Michigan landscape before the era of fire suppression that followed European colonization. Native people burned habitats for a variety of reasons from blueberry production and insect control to pine regeneration and improved hunting grounds.

Experts say the imperialistic notion of a North American wilderness untouched by people was simply wrong. In fact, Indigenous people stewarded the land for millennia and fire was among the ways they did it – until it was outlawed.

“Once Native management of the land was curtailed by non-Native thinking, we had Smokey the Bear stomping out every flame,” said Frank Ettawageshik, a tribal elder from the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa in Harbor Springs.

Settlers often considered Indigenous use of fire primitive and dangerous, even risking the economic value of timber from the forests.

However, today there’s a growing interest in controlled burning across the Michigan landscape to restore – at least in some places – widely acknowledged benefits of reducing wildfire risk and improving ecosystems. Tribal experts call this “good fire.”

Ettawageshik said growing interest in prescribed fires across Michigan could serve as a type of cultural land back effort that doesn’t literally involve property deeds changing hands. “Land back” is a modern movement that advocates for the return of ancestral lands to Indigenous people to confront historical injustices and restore sovereignty.

The tribal elder said that bringing back more controlled burning would return a key cultural element of the traditional ecological knowledge of Michigan’s Native peoples.

“It’s restoring natural land practices, taking care of the land in a way that our ancestors had this knowledge,” Ettawageshik said.

“And they didn’t just do it here. They did it all over the world. I mean, this was something that everybody did, until nobody did it. Then we started having these absolutely disastrous fires.”

Michigan’s history and ecology of fire

Deep in the woods at Wilderness State Park near the tip of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula are red pine trees that stand as sentinels to a time before the influence of European settlers. Contemporary scientists are now transcribing stories of old fires told by those trees, gathered from both the living and the dead.

Derek Hartline and Kurt Kipfmueller hiked into those woods in mid-March and stopped next to what would otherwise be considered a nondescript stump on state land. They noted the moss and lichen growing on the exterior. Took photos and measurements. Then out came a shiny hand saw.

Kipfmueller, a Michigander and associate professor of geography, environment and society at the University of Minnesota, knelt on a still somewhat snowy forest floor and sawed into the red pine stump, lopping off the top. Before he labeled the “tree cookie” sample with a permanent marker, he closely inspected the annual growth rings exposed by the cut.

“How many scars are visible?” asked Hartline, a conservation biologist for the Little Traverse Bay Bands.

“Four, I think. There might be five,” Kipfmueller replied.

The researchers are studying tree rings from both old stumps and living trees in the forests near the Straits of Mackinac to learn how frequently historical fires burnt across the landscape. Fire scars are long preserved in the red pine wood and sap, clearly visible with a giga-micro camera and sometimes with the naked eye.

“The trees actually played a role standing in and recording history when cultural history was being suppressed so heavily by Europeans,” Kipfmueller said.

“But the trees still preserve those stories,” he said. “They give us time stamps, but they don’t tell us why this fire burned. But there’s a record of fire here. That is, there’s too much fire here for it to be lightning caused alone.”

Figuring out how often Indigenous people set fires to the land is expected to help ecologists understand how to restore and conserve Michigan’s natural habitats, especially those evolved to require burning to regenerate.

“We call it reconstructing the fire history,” said Mary Parr, ecologist and fire expert with the Michigan Natural Features Inventory (MNFI).

Historical data collected in the tree ring research – called dendrochronology – will be contributed to an ongoing study by MNFI scientists designed to help fire and forestry experts figure out what places need controlled burns the most for ecological reasons.

“Within Michigan there’s a lot of different forests, different fire-dependent ecosystems,” said Parr, an Anishinaabe woman and enrolled citizen in the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa in the Upper Peninsula.

“All of those systems have their own fire regime, we call it. It’s kind of like their fire recipe, of how frequently they would burn based on the plants, which are basically fuel for the fire,” she said.

The scientific modeling will help state and federal officials in coming years prioritize where to write fire prescriptions for public lands across Michigan. However, it will take years to overcome the historical backlog of fire-starved lands, Parr said.

“We can’t just establish big fire programs overnight. We’re going to have to grow through time,” she said.

‘Frankenstein mentality’ of fire

There is a cultivated culture of fear around fire.

Dani Fegan, the Sault Tribe’s forestry manager and an enrolled citizen, said the negative impacts of colonization on Indigenous land stewardship was only part of the problem with fire. “There’s also just this general fear of fire that’s been bred in the last century,” she said.

Indigenous experts say that societal fear of fire creates a challenge to using prescribed fire more frequently both in Michigan and elsewhere. That fear of fire may be the greatest challenge, said one tribal environmental expert.

“I call it the Frankenstein mentality,” said Doug Craven, natural resources director and citizen with Little Traverse Bay Bands.

“In all circumstances you want to get rid of fire and you’re not utilizing it or valuing it. You see it as something to be afraid of, something to suppress, something to remove from the landscape,” he said.

Craven said that among tribal communities, fire is treated with healthy respect but not fear. There’s no urge to completely snuff it out, he said.

“Fire is viewed as a being,” Craven said. “It breathes, it moves, it has this different aspect. It’s this very unique thing that we have. There’s nothing like it anywhere else in our landscape or within our world, and so it’s treated that way.”

One cultural fire expert from a tribe in Oregon said a nationwide resurgence of interest in using prescribed fire, or controlled burns, for wildfire risk reduction and ecological benefit is an opportunity to infuse modern land management with the traditional ecological knowledge of Native peoples.

Jesse Jackson, education programs officer and citizen of the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe, said contemporary burn culture can bridge the gap between pre-contact fire culture and modern notions of using fire to restore balance to natural environments.

“One of the biggest travesties of Smokey the Bear is putting that negative connotation into people’s minds of fire, having them trying to work against it and stopping our children from developing the relationships with fire,” Jackson said.

And the return of fire is already working in some places. In 2021, a University of California, Berkeley, study showed that a half-century of allowing lightning-sparked fires to burn unchecked in a portion of Yosemite National Park recreated a forest ecosystem more resilient to drought, wildfire, and climate change than surrounding areas of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

It’s an environmental stability that can be restored far and wide, tribal experts say.

“We need to control the fire on the landscape, and we want to keep that balance,” Jackson said. “We had it since time immemorial. It’s time to come back.”

Reporting for this story was conducted during a fellowship with the nonprofit Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources.

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