By Robin Meadows
On a mild November day in California’s Sacramento Valley, Diana Almendariz ignites a clump of dry grass in a grove of cottonwoods. Landin Noland, wearing a thick, protective shirt with flames running down the sleeves, expertly wields a long-handled tool to spread the fire. Within minutes, a bright orange line dances and crackles all along one side of the grove.


As the line advances toward the other side, fireholders surround the grove, alert for any stray embers that need extinguishing. The crew knows the wind will pick up later but for now the air is still, and the fire stays right where they want it. Soon the air ripples with heat, and a dense plume of smoke shoots so high it temporarily obscures the sun.
Then, as swiftly as the flames sprang to life, they die back to a smoldering, charred mass under the trees. The cottonwoods are unscathed. While their leaves fluttered in the rising heat of the fire, they remain green and gold.

The burn tended by Almendariz, Noland and crew was in the Cache Creek Nature Preserve, which is near Woodland and lies in ancestral lands of the Wintun Tribe. Two of the preserve’s 130 acres are set aside for the Tending and Gathering Garden―a rare place in today’s world for Indigenous cultural practices such as burns and harvesting plants for traditional foods, medicines and baskets.
“Some people are still afraid of fire but it makes it better for everything to grow,” says Almendariz, a cultural practitioner of Wintun, Nisenan and Hupa heritage. She calls the burn “leok po” (pronounced “lay-oak poe”), which is Wintun for good fire.
“Every time you burn grasses, you’re creating water because you have less plants to draw it down,” Almendariz continues. “The more you burn, the more water you’ll have.”
Noland, who is Mississippi Choctaw and grew up in Santa Cruz amongst elders, explains the relationship between fire and water like this: watersheds are one big bucket that all the plants drink from, and more plants means more straws and so less water. By removing some of those straws, cultural burns help put watersheds back in balance.
“Fire and water go hand in hand,” says Noland, an ecology graduate student at the University of California, Davis. Along with Almendariz and other Indigenous knowledge bearers, he’s working to help bring cultural burns back into the mainstream.
More than a century of banning cultural burns and suppressing wildfires has heightened the risk of catastrophic blazes in California. Noland witnessed the aftermath of the 2021 Dixie Fire―the state’s second largest at nearly one million acres―firsthand. “It was an absolute moonscape,” he says. “Everything was torched, there was not a green thing in sight.”

When Europeans settled California in the 1800s, forests weren’t the tinderboxes they are today. There was less fuel for wildfires thanks, in part, to millennia of Indigenous stewardship. To give just one example, burns by Karuk and Yurok tribes helped keep forests in the Klamath Mountains half as dense as they are now, according to a 2022 study. These tribes also burn to keep streams flowing longer into the dry season.
Indeed, a handful of recent studies by Western scientists are in keeping with the longstanding Indigenous knowledge that fire benefits water. A 2022 study found that streamflows averaged nearly one-third higher than expected for six years after wildfires in the Western U.S. Likewise, streamflows were 24%–38% higher in lower Colorado Basin watersheds that had burned, according to another 2022 study. And in a 2020 modeling study, post-wildfire simulations boosted winter snowpack and summer runoff in California’s Cosumnes River watershed.

By thinning forests, both cultural and prescribed burns could reduce the risk of megafires and yield higher streamflows. But there the similarities end. Cultural burns, as evidenced by the untouched cottonwood leaves in the Tending and Gathering Garden, have lower, cooler flames and are less destructive.
Another difference between the two types of burns is the intention behind them. Forest managers prescribe burns to reduce fuels, while Indigenous people rely on burns for their cultural practices or lifeways.
Cultural practitioner Almendariz points to bunches of deer grass in the Tending and Gathering Garden that she had recently burned. The grasses have since resprouted and now bear a profusion of the long, straight stalks that Indigenous people prize for weaving the baskets central to their lifeways.
“To have Indigenous culture, we need baskets,” Noland says. “We carry our babies and food in baskets, and our artisans craft them.”
“Culture is what the burn is for,” says Danny Manning, who is Mountain Maidu and assistant fire chief of the Greenville Rancheria Fire Department. “You have to use the products of the burn, or it’s just a burn without the culture part.”
Noland grew up with a modern life rooted in traditional practices. His earliest memories include helping a firekeeper tend a fire all day to keep stones hot for a sweat lodge. “I’ve always been really connected to fire,” he says.
Now, Noland is documenting the vital role burns play in Indigenous lifeways, mentored by lifelong cultural practitioners including Almendariz, Manning, and Ron Goode, Tribal Chairman of the North Fork Mono Tribe in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
Noland’s focus is sourberry, a native shrub in the cashew family with tangy, red fruits. “It’s a really important resource for tribes,” he says. “It’s used for food and basketry, and is cultivated via cultural fire.” His project entails assessing how burns affect the suitability of sourberry stems for baskets.


“There are only a few good studies on the effects of fire on basketry materials―and Western scientists love studies,” he says. There’s no surer way to raise awareness of Indigenous knowledge on cultural burns.
Basketweavers favor sourberry stems that are long, straight and red, and Noland burned a patch of the shrub intending to assess the rejuvenated shrubs for these desired qualities. But the stems were already gone when he returned to his study site, which is on Northfork Rancheria of Mono Indians land in the Sierra Nevada foothills. “Weavers got to them before I did,” he says.
So Noland spent long days on multiple weekends using a clicker to count stems snipped off for basketry in burned versus unburned areas. He found that basketweavers had collected 20 times more sourberry stems in the burned areas. It’s hard to imagine a more compelling case for the importance of burns to Indigenous lifeways.
Noland and his fellow cultural burn practitioners hope more Californians will embrace the return of good fire, revitalizing both landscapes and Indigenous lifeways. “There’s a newly growing body of scientific evidence that we should be burning―and a wealth of Indigenous experience,” he says.