Indigenous Fire Practices Explored Through Art in Exhibition on View in Los Angeles
By Chadd Scott on
The deadly Eaton wildfire began on January 7, 2025, raging uncontrollably to consume chunks of Pasadena and Altadena.
As it was dying out, “Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art” was opening – January 22 – at the Fowler Museum at UCLA 25 miles west.
The exhibition offering insights into Indigenous fire stewardship, ecological resilience, and climate change had been in the works for years. The Eaton wildfire, likewise, was no spontaneous occurrence. Its roots go back even further, to decades and centuries old colonial fire suppression beliefs and behaviors imported to Southern California. Those practices weren’t the reason for the Eaton wildfire – and the rash of historic conflagrations experienced across the West over the past handful of years – but they are a reason. Six of the 10 largest wildfires in U.S. history have occurred since 2000.
That’s not a coincidence.
Prior to Southern California’s colonization in the 18th century, Native communities used controlled fire practices to ensure the vitality of their ecosystems. Contemporaries living in other fire-dependent ecosystems across the continent, like the Great Plains and southern pine forests, did the same. Regular, smaller, controlled burns mimicking the lightning-ignited wildfires that had shaped these landscapes for tens of thousands of years prevent the end of days infernos now regularly experienced across North America.
They do so by reducing the fuel load. Wildfires taking place every three or four years – a natural cycle – burn the grasses, fallen branches, and debris that accumulates on the forest floor. Fire fuel. When the fuel load is low, wildfires can’t grow large or hot enough to consume the mature trees. These fires clean the forest, reigniting cyclical, natural, fire-depending processes of regeneration.
Indigenous people understood this.
Marlene' Dusek, ‘Healing your heart and healing sóoval with kúut (Marlene’ managing sumac gathering area, an essential plant relative for weaving).’ Photo by Kim Avalos.
White people, in their all-consuming attempts to control nature, to dominate nature, to bend its will to their whims, developed wildfire policies and practices beginning in the late 19th century aimed at stamping out every flame. Fire was the enemy. Pursuing this course over 100-plus years created a great amount of fuel on the forest floor. Exacerbating the problem, rising temperatures and historic droughts resulting from climate change.
Under those conditions, when wildfire does start and isn’t immediately put out, catastrophes occur.
“Fire Kinship” counters the attitudes of fear and illegality around fire, a reconsideration with potentially profound implications for California. The presentation argues for a return to Native practices in which fire is regarded as a vital aspect of land stewardship, community wellbeing, and tribal sovereignty. These conversations at the museum have been shaped by community leaders throughout Southern California.
“I am a historian and study California Native history; however, I had not studied Indigenous fire practices before this exhibit,” Lina Tejeda (Pomo), co-curator of “Fire Kinship,” said. “One thing that stood out to me about fire overall is that suppression practices began in the late 18th century with Don Jose Joaquin de Arrillaga’s Spanish Proclamation outlawing fire practices in what is today known as Southern California. Many people refer to California statehood in the 1850s as the point fire suppression began, however, there were an additional 50-plus years of suppression with the Spanish proclamation.”
Of course, the cruel irony of staging a fire exhibition exactly coinciding with a tragic wildfire outside the doors of the museum was not lost on Tejeda.
“(The Eaton fire) confirmed for me that, without a doubt, this knowledge is needed and an exhibit as powerful as ‘Fire Kinship’ is critical to sharing Indigenous science. We cannot live without fire. As devastating as wildfires can be, we must rekindle our relationship, our kinship, with (fire) so we can understand the ways we can live with it to steward the land,” she said. “We began to post about the (show’s) postponement and the social media buzz about it also confirmed for me that it is wanted by the general public. There was an urgency to view the exhibit and learn from the Southern California Native communities’ lifeways and kinship with fire.”
There is much to learn.
Learning centers the exhibition, not disaster porn.
Native Fire
On view through July 13, 2025, “Fire Kinship” underscores the vital role of fire as a regenerative force while honoring the ancestral knowledge of Native communities. The presentation centers the expertise of Tongva, Cahuilla, Luiseño, and Kumeyaay people through objects, stories, videos, images, and newly commissioned works from contemporary artists. Collectively, they make a case for fire (kút in the Payómkawichum and Cahuilla language, ‘aaw in Kumeyaay, and cha’wot in Tongva) to be perceived as an elemental relative who creates a cycle that gives all living things a fresh beginning.
Included in “Fire Kinship” are loaned object-relatives that Native communities used and continue to use in partnership with the land, place, and fire: baskets, ollas, rabbit sticks, bark skirts, and canoes. Fire tempers and hardens clay vessels used for cooking and storing food. It helps cultivate plant materials employed in the making of baskets, blankets, capes, and skirts—pánul, se’ill, súul, and sélet (yucca, juncus, deergrass, and sumac in Wanakik Cahuilla language). Fire thins out juncus patches, allowing new shoots to grow. It also softens the tar that, when spread on cottonwood canoes, makes them seaworthy.
Installation view, ‘Fire Kinship Southern California Native Ecology and Art,’ 2025, Fowler Museum at UCLA. Photo Angel Xotlanihua.
“(Native people) view fire as a natural tool and, in some cases, (possibly all) a gift from the Creator to be used as a tool,” Tejeda explains. “A tool used to tend our land, to tend to plants used for basket weaving, repelling pests, curing trees for canoes, etc. Fire is viewed as a living being, a relative, something we must live with. There is duality with fire; it can be a tool, but as we have seen, it can be very destructive. Healing our collective relationship with fire is one way that can lead to fire adapted communities.”
Fire as partner, not enemy.
Sadly, tragically, not surprisingly, the deranged anti-environment, anti-Native Trump Administration appears to be doubling down on failed forest management practices, giving America’s national forests even more fully over to industry and logging at the expense of nature.
“Colonization, both past and present, disrupted a cycle that honored fire at the center and caused earth-wrenching ramifications,” exhibition co-curator Daisy Ocampo Diaz (Caxcan) said in a press release announcing “Fire Kinship.” “Native communities have been holding on to these gentle burns despite California’s ravaging by flames. We are all part of this story, and it is a time for listening and (un)learning.”
“Fire Kinship” encourages visitors to recognize that Native ecological techniques are not merely stories from the past, but viable practices that hold critical knowledge for the future.
Provocatively, the show also displays artifacts pointing to the ways we have been indoctrinated to fear fire. At the top of the list, the ultra-successful Smokey the Bear campfire campaign. It launched in 1944 and has created a lasting stigma for Native fire practices and controlled burns. Smokey the Bear taught us “fire = bad.” That’s not true.
Forest fires started by campfires are bad, yes, as Smokey warned, but that nuance was lost in the messaging and what the public came away with was “fire = bad.”
Fire for Our Future
In California, the frequency and ferocity of uncontrolled wildfires has an enormous impact on people and property – and represents brutal evidence of the erasure of Native ecological practices. Prior to the colonization, Native communities engaged in fire-controlled land management practices ranging from small burns to spur healthy growth, to larger ones that strategically eradicated invasive species and reduced fuel loads.
But Native communities in Southern California now face institutional barriers to bringing fire back to the land. Reintroducing and strengthening Native fire practices requires commitment and accountability from agencies with current jurisdiction over tribal territories. A section of the exhibition includes videos and images of fire practitioners, such as Marlene’ Dusek and other members of the Indigenous Women-In-Fire Training Exchange, sharing knowledge and participating in controlled burns.
They make a case for members of Native communities to become state-certified Burn Bosses, responsible for planning fires, obtaining permits, implementing burn plans, monitoring fire effects, and maintaining prescriptive requirements. This has been an option in California since 2018, but to date, only one Native person in Southern California is a certified Burn Boss, “Fire Kinship” collaborator Wesley Ruise Jr.
What other practices can municipalities and residents across Southern California – across the United States – take from indigenous people to help mitigate wildfire?
“On a very minimal level, let’s start removing invasive plant species from our individual land that we own and plant more resilient native species,” Tejeda advises. “Cities and counties can advocate for that. The Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy believes that the removal of invasive Eucalyptus trees on recently re-acquired land in Altadena helped mitigate destruction of their land in the recent fire.”
Non-native grasses were also a contributing factor to the devastating Maui wildfires of 2023.
Begin your education into native plants with the Homegrown National Park website, or your local native plant society chapter. In addition to wildfire suppression, native plants are crucial to fighting climate change and reversing biodiversity collapse.
Plants also play a leading role in “Fire Kinship,” as explained in exhibition wall text: “People need plants in order to live. But plants also need people. They rely on humans to gather their seeds, leaves, and roots; to remove dead and diseased material; and to talk, sing, and pray to them.”
People, plants, land, and fire in partnership. Imagine.
