Indigenous people have utilized healthy relationships with fire to steward ancestral lands for millennia, and Indigenous Fire Management (IFM) has fundamentally and indelibly shaped the ecological landscape of the modern-day US. However, colonization led to widespread fire suppression, resulting in ever-decreasing IFM over the past several centuries. Many stakeholders, including Tribal natural resource departments, state and federal land management agencies, and academic research institutions, are invested in revitalizing IFM and helping to mitigate the current fire crisis. 

Intentional burning practices create and sustain biodiverse, mosaic landscapes. However, not all landscapes require the same frequency of fire events to thrive. Indigenous people have millennia of knowledge of landscape specific fire management practices, and huge portions of North America have been influenced by IFM. These practices need to be understood wholistically across different spatial and temporal scales, thus creating larger, collaborative networks across multiple tribal partners is an important goal of the project.

Tribes

• Continuing to revitalize and implement fire management practices.

• Ongoing cultural revitalization.

• Ongoing scholarly research into fire management.

Non-Tribal Entities

• Interested in learning from Tribes and Indigenous land management practices.

• Increasing governmental mandates, programs, and funding.