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2024 MMIP Summit. (Photo courtesy Yurok Tribe)
The Yurok Tribe and the Pala Band of Mission Indians are hosting this year’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous People (MMIP) Summit in Pala, Calif., which will take place Tuesday and Wednesday.
This is the third year the summit will be held.
The event brings together tribal leaders, advocates, lawmakers, and law enforcement to address MMIP in the state.
Yurok Chairman Joseph James says the summit addresses the root causes of the MMIP crisis, which he says is an unfortunate issue that negatively impacts every Indigenous person in the state.
This year’s summit will feature a youth panel, cultural sharing, and testimony from families.
Topics include sex trafficking, the implementation of a statewide missing Indigenous person alert, and culture as healing.
According to the tribe, California has the fifth highest rate of MMIP cases in the U.S.
The summit is intended to help identify actionable tribally driven solutions to combat MMIP.
Members of the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California burn piles in an overgrown area near Dresslerville, Nev., to promote new willow growth, a key resource for traditional basket making. (Courtesy Washoe Tribe)
The devastation from January’s Los Angeles wildfires is a reminder that extreme wildfires burn year-round.
The Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California is working to reintroduce intentional, cultural fire meant to restore forest health – and reduce explosive fires.
The Mountain West News Bureau’s Kaleb Roedel has more.
It’s a sun-splashed afternoon in a forest near South Lake Tahoe, where large fir and pine trees stretch into the clear blue sky, and dozens of tribal members are eager to learn about cultural burning.
But first, they have to learn how to control and put out fires.
That’s why a group is huddled around a heavy-duty water pump with two thick fire hoses connected to it.
One hose is in a tub of water the size of an above-ground pool, and the other is unraveled a few dozen yards away.
Jeremy Miles Placencia, a U.S. Forest Service forestry technician, leads the demonstration.
“We have everything connected. We have our discharge hose. Now we can set up the fuel line.”
And then Placencia revs up the water pump, which roars like an angry lawn mower, echoing through the forest.
Water pushes through the extended hose, like a snake coming to life.
Now, participants can practice spraying pressurized water as if they were putting out a fire.
The U.S. Forest Service’s Jeremy Miles Placencia, left, demonstrates how to use a water pump at a fire training hosted by the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California. (Photo: Kaleb Roedel / Mountain West News Bureau)
One person soaking up that knowledge is 30-year-old Kyle Tabor-Cooper (Nooksack) originally from Washington state.
He now lives in Northern Nevada and is engaged to a member of the Washoe Tribe.
“I’ve met a lot of people that have inspired me to get into this training and just show me a different kind of way with cultural, intentional fire.”
Cultural fires are restorative, not destructive.
They’re typically done on a smaller scale to take care of traditional medicine plants or other cultural resources that rely on fire, as Rhiana Jones, director of the Washoe Tribe’s environmental protection department, explains.
“For example, the Washoe Tribe, our first two burns were burning a willow patch. Washoes are famous for their baskets, making beautiful baskets. So when you burn the willows, they grow back better, straighter, with less secondary nodes.”
But the Washoe Tribe wasn’t allowed to intentionally burn for more than a century. That’s because of longtime colonial federal policies that prioritized suppression – or putting out fires as soon as they start.
Jones said that has hurt tribes, and the health of many forests.
A mountain range covered in a smoky haze. In the foreground, there is a stand of burnt-out pinyon pines. In the middle ground, there are rolling hills of cheatgrass, which borders patches of surviving pinyon forest.
The Pine Nut Mountains on Washoe tribal lands, bathed in smoke from the Mosquito Fire in 2022, used to host many acres of pinyon pine forest.
Pinyon pines are threatened by climate change-driven drought, wildfire, heat, and invasion by insects.
“Fire suppression is like Indigenous culture and Indigenous people suppression as well. They were not interested in, I think, learning from Indigenous people.”
But that has started to change over the last decade.
Now, many federal fire officials say decades of keeping fire off the land caused a buildup of highly flammable dead trees and brush, turning many forests into a tinderbox.
And rising temperatures and drier conditions are adding even more fuel.
A 2021 study led by UCLA found that climate change has been the main driver of the increase in fire weather in the West.
“Climate change has had a huge effect, with respect to drought, increase of pests and pathogens, and then increase of wildfire. So, we’re having these catastrophic, huge wildfires coming through that we can’t keep up with.”
Global nonprofit The Nature Conservancy has worked with tribes to help restore that balance.
The group, which was at the Washoe Tribe’s training, brings together trained burn bosses and Indigenous fire practitioners to work and learn side-by-side, according to Brandon Cobb (Cherokee), a program manager with The Nature Conservancy.
“A lot of what we’re doing here is trying to return to that different style of fire that allows us to actually promote our ecosystems, promote our cultures.”
Cobb noted it’s important younger generations become educated and trained on stewarding their homelands.
“As Indigenous people, it took almost 500 years to nearly eradicate us. And in order to rebuild to what we once were, it will take at least 500 years.”
Back near the water pump, Tabor-Cooper is motivated to be a part of that change.
“I feel like there’s a lot of purpose in this kind of line of work (smiles).”
Through the hands-on training, Tabor-Cooper gained qualifications to fight fires with federal and state agencies and the Washoe Tribe, and work on cultural burns with tribal members.
The Nooksack tribal member already got a taste of what it’s like.
He recently observed a cultural burn in a meadow meant to restore medicinal plants like elderberries, an experience that inspired him even more.
“The possibilities and the opportunity and what the future holds seems so much brighter. Introducing a relationship with fire that isn’t just bad.”
Tabor-Cooper said he’s excited to carve out a career in fire, and pass that torch of knowledge down to his future children.
This story was originally produced for our new climate show, “Our Living Lands,” a collaboration of the Mountain West News Bureau, Koahnic Broadcast Corporation, and Native Public Media.
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