In September 2020, the Slater fire roared through the tiny northern California town of Happy Camp, destroying almost 200 homes. Like many of the megafires that have increasingly engulfed the state, the fire burned hot and fierce for days, spitting embers miles ahead of itself and rapidly igniting the space in between. It ultimately consumed more than 200,000 acres. “For about a year in that area, you wouldn’t see any birds,” Kathy McCovey, a forester and anthropologist from the area, said in an interview for the NOVA documentary “Weathering the Future.” “You wouldn’t see any animals, any insects. It was just devoid of life.”

Happy Camp is tucked in the Klamath River Valley, in the traditional homeland of the Karuk people, and it is still home to a significant Native American population. But many residents were forced to move after the fire, afraid of what might happen if they rebuilt. “We’d had fires come close to Happy Camp before, but they didn’t burn as intensely or as quickly,” McCovey told NOVA.

Some 24% of California’s forest burned between 2012 and 2021, with blazes like the Slater fire sparking more frequently and putting communities at ever-greater risk. “Even though we have the largest, most well-trained firefighting force on earth, there’s simply several months out of the year when no amount of resources are going to stop these wildfires,” Will Harling, director of the local mid-Klamath watershed council, told NOVA.

It’s a painful reality for the Karuk and other Native American groups in this part of California. Their livelihoods and traditions were closely linked to fire for millennia. But after European contact, they were harassed, jailed, or worse for practicing traditions that involved careful maintenance of the land with fire. Now, California and other Western states are seeking a return to those traditional practices as they try alternative approaches to controlling wildfires, a bittersweet victory for the Native Americans who have long fought for the right to burn.

For thousands of years, the Karuk used fire to maintain forests as a source of food, following an annual burning cycle to create an environment that was optimal for the area’s native plants and animals. Some 80% of the species the Karuk have historically relied upon for food, traditions, and rituals cannot thrive without fire, according to Bill Tripp, the Karuk director of natural resources and environmental policy. Those species include willow used for basket weaving; tanoak trees, whose acorns are a major food staple; and elk, an important source of protein. The types of forest meadows created by regular fires are important for elk populations, Tripp told NOVA. “Maintaining these types of places with fire helps to make sure there’s more healthy calves, which means there’s more healthy adults.” Similarly, a well-timed fire will cause insect-infested acorns to drop to the ground, while leaving healthy acorns unscathed and ready for gathering. And flames prompt willow shoots to grow back straighter, more pliable, and better suited for weaving.

“Our place in the world is to manage our piece of the world,” Chook Chook Hillman, a Karuk community organizer and cultural practitioner, told NOVA. “That’s part of the reciprocity that has allowed us to live here for so long.” 

But starting in the 1800s, White settlers arriving in the area saw these forests as a source of income and worried that their new towns were vulnerable to the fires that occasionally swept through. One of the first laws after the establishment of the state of California banned intentional burning. “Native people in this place were shot and imprisoned and beaten for trying to maintain their cultural fire practices,” Harling said. Those practitioners who continued Karuk burning traditions risked legal trouble to do so until as recently as the 1990s. McCovey recalled hiding her fire practices even from friends, mindful that they might land her in jail. 

Without regular, low-intensity fires to thin them out, California forests are now twice as dense as they were 200 years ago. “Everything’s dead underneath there because every tree is wall to wall,” Hillman said. “All you have is this brown layer of branches and needles. It’s just this bed waiting to really explode.” Add to that the increased drought and heat wrought by climate change, and you get the conditions that produce the megafires that have plagued the West for the last decade, turning what was once a fire season into what Harling refers to as a “fire year.”

With infernos like the Slater fire becoming the norm, many areas in California are turning toward purposeful burns like those the Karuk practiced for millennia, recognizing that, as Harling said, “it’s how you want your fire. Do you want your fire in the middle of the fire season as an uncontrollable wildfire? Or do you want to put it in intentionally?”

In much of the West, that has meant mixing what’s known as “cultural fire,” with a ritual focus, and “prescribed burns” that incorporate more Western fire science and data. Tripp, like many cultural fire practitioners, was raised on stories and oral tradition, which taught him how to burn complex fires from a young age. “We didn’t have electricity, running water, refrigeration, all that kind of stuff when I was little,” he said of his childhood with his great-grandmother, “but I learned how to read the environment, how to know when this is going to burn, but this over here isn’t.” This new era allows Tripp and others like him to return to those practices with less anxiety about the consequences.

One goal in this approach to fire is to achieve a kind of burned mosaic, Hillman said, a patchwork in which some areas are more deeply burned while in others only grasses or undergrowth are singed, clearing fuels away but leaving the forest canopy untouched. Karuk tradition even includes guidance about the ideal timing to burn around specific plant species. 

Meanwhile, prescribed burns tend to apply this approach to more generalized fire management that’s not for explicit cultural or ritual purposes. At a recent prescribed burn near Happy Camp, community members helped lay down a “black line,” a border of burned greenery meant to stop the advance of a wildfire that might come through or a prescribed burn that might burn out of control. That created what practitioners often call a “catcher’s mitt” or “safety net,” a burned buffer zone useful for protecting communities and controlling future prescribed fire. 

With that safety zone in place, they lit fires across a field, keeping a close eye on the level of moisture in the air and the speed and direction of the wind. Water hoses waited nearby to help put down any flames that might leap across the black line. With any fire, escape is a concern, but careful planning allows for burning when the risk is minimal. “What we know is that the relative risk of being organized ahead of time, of choosing your burn window and choosing your resources, is night and day from the situation in a wildfire, when it’s coming at the hottest, driest day of the year,” Harling said.

In 2021, the U.S. Forest Service burned nearly 2 million acres of federal land in prescribed fires, more than ever before. And it has promised to continue expanding the practice, managing more than 50 million acres with fire over the next decade. That’s a meaningful shift for Native American fire practitioners like Tripp, who are able to reclaim their tradition and bring “good fire” back to the mountains. 

To start, Harling, Hillman, and others are focusing on more intensively managing existing wildfire footprints, like the ruins of the Slater fire. “It’s an opportunity without any major fuels built up to start to put fire back in as those pieces of that landscape become receptive, so that you immediately get that patchwork of frequent fire,” Harling said.

As California looks to a climate-altered future, Tripp echoes Harling in emphasizing the fire-dependent nature of the state’s ecosystems. “The fact is, it’s going to burn under the conditions that we choose for it to burn in, or it’s going to burn in the conditions that nature or a careless match or cigarette butt or power line transformer decides,” he said. That means that part of the task of managing California fire is changing the population’s relationship to it. 

In Happy Camp, both the Native and non-Native communities have engaged in intensive discussions about how to use cultural and prescribed burns better and more frequently. And in recent years, local students have begun visiting sites before and after prescribed burns to understand the process and observe the health of various species. Some have also started attending the prescribed burns themselves, to start getting used to what it’s like to be around flames again. “Fire can be your friend if you can learn to understand it,” Tripp said.

WATCH: WEATHERING THE FUTURE