Sacred Fire

“It is an odd dichotomy we have set for ourselves, between loving people and loving land. We know that loving a person has agency and power – we know it can change everything. Yet we act as if loving the land is an internal affair that had no energy outside the confines of our head and heat.”

– Robin Wall Kimmerer

For thousands of years, Indigenous people manipulated the land of the West Coast through patch-scale fires. Frequent, low-intensity fires helped propagate fire-dependent plant species, maintain elk grazing, and shade rivers for returning salmon.

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One-hundred and seventy years ago, Chief Si’ahl and the People of the Inside signed over much of King County to the American government in return for hunting and fishing rights and a reservation for all tribal members. A reservation was never given to the Duwamish people.

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Repent – To feel regret or contrition

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One-hundred and twenty years ago, western expansion logged, mined, and claimed the western coast. The fear of diminishing resources and the fear of disappearing wilderness were treated as separate concerns. The United States government created a series of agencies to protect each, but ignored the complex ways that space and resources interact.

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Repentance – in sacred texts, the Hebrew idea of repentance is represented by two words: שוב shuv (to return) and נחם nacham (to feel sorrow).

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One-hundred years ago, the Great Depression forced 15 million Americans to look for work and FDR created the Civilian Conservation Corps to employ young, able-bodied men on public land. Suddenly, the National Forest Service was flooded with a workforce they were mandated to keep busy. In response, they created the 10 a.m. rule – all wildfires on National Forest land had to be extinguished by 10 a.m. the next morning.

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Repent – In the Christian book of Mathew, Jesus’s first public commandment is to repent.

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Fifty years ago, federal land managers began to let natural-cause fires burn in wilderness areas. But fires became larger and more ferocious as time went on. Battling them took almost 50 percent of the Forest Service’s budget, leaving little left for preventative tactics such as forest restoration and fuel thinning which would aid in fire management.

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Repentance – The Buddha saw shame of wrongdoing and fear of its consequences as essential safeguards on the Nobel Eightfold Path.

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Today, fires rage out of control up and down the west coast. Thousands of people have been displaced, millions of acers of land destroyed, and the sky is red with smoke.

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Repentance – In Arabic the word repentance (tawbah) means “to return”.

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Fire is meant to be here, as are humans. Neither is innately harmful. But when the American government took and forcibly removed the Indigenous people from this land, they destroyed a carefully maintained ecosystem.

As a nation, we must repent of our historic policies of fire suppression and Indian removal. Our repentance should include sorrow over the Native people who were murdered, the tribal culture which was destroyed, and the environmental abundance the western expansion exploited. It should include fear of the very clear and present consequences of climate change. It should include a return to native knowledge and science. And it should include a commandment to treat land as sacred and worth protecting and to spread that message far and wide.