What Fire Came Here to Do: Indigenous Burning, Multispecies Recognition, and Anticolonial Worldmaking in California

• In Event: Earth Relationalities: Indigenous Ecologies and Environmentalisms

Abstract

This paper uses ethnographic and interview-based research to examine the revitalization of Indigenous cultural burning – or “good fire" – in central and Northern California. It argues that this revitalization effort is best understood as a project of anticolonial worldmaking: one that links the transformation of institutions and hierarchies on a macro level with the (re)making of multispecies relations, responsibilities, and subjectivities on the land. Specifically, it puts the question of multispecies recognition at the heart of anticolonial worldmaking. It does so in three moves. First, it reframes the history of fire suppression as inseparable from the colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the systematic delegitimization of their relational knowledge of fire, land, and reciprocal obligation. Second, it advances a theoretical account of recognition as a human-nonhuman relation, drawing on insights from cultural sociologists' works on recognition as stigmatization and Indigenous political theorists' work on the liberatory dimensions of recognition. Third, it argues that Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination must be understood not as legal statuses granted by the state but as ongoing practices of worldmaking rooted in relational knowledge and reciprocal obligation to land and the nonhuman.

Author

• Ghaleb Attrache, University of California-Berkeley