Awesome Women Environmentalists
I'm a Burner
4/27/2023 | 3mVideo has Closed Captions
Trina Cunningham, a Mountain Maidu, continues the wisdom of her elders about fire.
Like many other tribes, the Mountain Maidu of California’s Sierra Nevada believe that there is too much fuel on the land and that the devastating fires in the American West are caused by not burning enough. Trina Cunningham continues her Mountain Maidu elders’ wisdom about fire by teaching a small group of non-native fire fighters how to do a cultural burn.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Awesome Women Environmentalists is a local public television program presented by NorCal Public Media
Awesome Women Environmentalists
I'm a Burner
4/27/2023 | 3mVideo has Closed Captions
Like many other tribes, the Mountain Maidu of California’s Sierra Nevada believe that there is too much fuel on the land and that the devastating fires in the American West are caused by not burning enough. Trina Cunningham continues her Mountain Maidu elders’ wisdom about fire by teaching a small group of non-native fire fighters how to do a cultural burn.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship(soft music) - Our ancestors, the Mountain Maidu, they were absolutely dependent on this landscape for everything.
There are written accounts of them burning their lands frequently like every year to get it back to that healthy state.
That knowledge has been interrupted through the processes of the gold rush, the genocide, enslavement.
There were so many laws and policies over those years that made it illegal for us to be on our lands or tend it, so we've left a lot of these landscapes neglected for 170 years.
In our homeland last year, over a million acres burned and that included many ancestral landscapes, timberlands, and it burned down several towns.
This is the closest I've looked at everything since the fire because it's just been so painful... almost unbearable.
because of the neglect of our landscapes, the importance of cultural burning and the urgency, there's a new awareness about that now.
- So you can start a fire up here in the corner.
My background comes from fire suppression 'cause I was a permanent wildland firefighter with the forest service.
Our prescribed fires, we use rip torches that makes it, the prescribed fire a little more intense and a little more quick, little more heat.
This is a slower process.
This is a really comfortable, relaxing experience compared to what we're used to.
This is like Trina set the intent.
- Everybody get your torch.
One thing to do that's really good is just to light a small fire to carry the fire to the other places with our torches.
This fire is our friend.
It's regenerative to the whole ecosystem.
We're in a new paradigm and we have other people that aren't native but care just as much.
After I spend part of a day or a day burning, I just feel rejuvenated and it's exhilarating.
And when you know that this landscape is safe for the next couple of years from large intensity wildfire, it's exciting but also getting to know fire in its behavior, it's kind of like meeting a new best friend.
I'm not a firefighter, either, I'm a burner.
- [Bill] That's like a burning man person.
- [Trina] A cultural, fire person.
- Yeah.
(laughing)
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Awesome Women Environmentalists is a local public television program presented by NorCal Public Media