Before Fire Suppression: The Erosion of Fire Stewardship and the Rise of Fire Aversion in Gold Rush Era California

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Abstract

A general wisdom has accrued that the fire suppression policies of the twentieth century are greatly to blame for California's present-day fire woes, because the absence of fire allowed dry fuel to accumulate for decades. There is growing interest in performing prescribed burns at a massive scale, and growing recognition that the Native peoples of California still retain the cultural knowledge about how to do this. This paper explores the environmental, cultural, and legal history of the century before fire suppression. It tackles the questions of what happened to Native burning practices, what happened to the landscape, and how did the dominant culture come to be one that was so fire averse that it would embrace a policy of absolute fire suppression at the dawn of the twentieth century? It also asks, when we train our eye on cultural and legal attitudes toward land fire, what do we learn about the settler colonial and capitalist conquest of California?

Author

• Marina Del Cassio, Stanford