Stories, Water, Fire, and Sierra Meadows

Stream in Reds Meadow, Sierra Nevada

“All right,” said Measuring Worm. “Take your fires off the ground, for I am going up there with the water. I’ll go up in the water.”

So goes an old North Fork Mono story, told in 1918 by North Fork Mono storyteller Molly Kinsman Pimona to the Berkeley anthropologist Edward Winslow Gifford.

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Photos from Ron Goode’s cultural burns on 4.21.12

Not a lot of text in this post, only some quick photos. Last Saturday, April 21, a work crew from Santa Cruz-based American Conservation Experience (ACE) and AmeriCorps helped Ron Goode with a few cultural burns in the Sierra foothills. Also on hand to help were Ron’s nephew, Jesse, and yours truly.

Star-thistle pile burns by ACE and AmeriCorps

Ron Goode supervises the pile burning

[caption id=”attachment_140″ align=”alignleft” width=”584″ caption=”ACE and AmeriCorps at work

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Indigenous stories and common core standards: there’s exposition in those narratives

That tribes have been able to maintain their discrete identities as national groups can be attributed to their steadfast adherence to their mission as a distinct people, as revealed to them in creation or upon one of their migrations… Tribes are, therefore, ultimately guided by internal prophetic instructions rather than external political and economic events, and the success or failure of the tribe in dealing with unexpected problems can be traced to this concern with fulfilling their cosmic responsibilities

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Indigenous fire, land, water, art, and education

So, I’m easing into the whole blogging thing here.

After participating in the Southern Sierra Prescribed Fire and Smoke Symposium this week, I think I’ll go ahead and devote my first-ever blog entry to how Indigenous fire can bring order to the land.

My friend Ron W. Goode, Chairman of the North Fork Mono Tribe, uses fire to care for a stand of sourberry (Rhus trilobata) on land that his family owns in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

Here’s a “before” photo of a tangled, overgrown portion of the sourberry stand prior to burning:

Photo by Jared Dahl Aldern, 2012

After carefully preparing the site with pathways and firebreaks…

Photo by Ron W. Goode, 2012

…Ron conducted a contained burn in the sourberry stand:

Photo by Ron W. Goode, 2012

And here’s an “after” picture.

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