Not in the Same Year

For a while, I imagined these hazel thickets as working in shifts: one patch burned, another taking over. Once the next shift appeared, the previous one seemed already finished.

A study of cultural burning in Karuk and Yurok ancestral territory in northern California discusses a practice dispersed across different places. Not every place burns in the same year; they are staggered, so that people still have opportunities year by year to gather California hazel sticks for weaving. This arrangement does not promise an equal amount of material every year, nor does it mean that gathering in a given year necessarily happens in a place freshly burned that same year. What it preserves is the latitude to go elsewhere.

The study also records another outcome. Some sites, because the burn intensity was insufficient, were rated by gatherers as comparatively poorer. There, understory shrubs and branch-bearing downed wood had been consumed only to a limited extent. Weaving hazel sticks were present among them, but gatherers had difficulty reaching them. The fire had occurred, yet it did not automatically bring that piece of land into the condition gathering required.

My earlier misreading lay precisely in taking the staggering between places as a smooth handoff of work. In fact, the appearance of gathering opportunities elsewhere only changes where one can still go that year to look for material; it does not make an already burned site more passable, nor does it reduce, on that site’s behalf, the residual matter obstructing gathering there. Sustaining a practice over several years, and having every place complete the same task, are not the same thing.

That some sites were underburned does not mean every other place should be burned more intensely. Fire must still contend with the fuels and gathering goals actually present at each site. Opportunities preserved elsewhere do not change the condition of this site, where understory shrubs and branch-bearing downed wood have been consumed only to a limited extent.