Maidu Tribes Reignite Ancestral Fire Stewardship in the Sierra Foothills

Magun Herrera stood in the middle of a sloping meadow this fall, wearing a hard hat, sturdy boots, and a yellow fire-resistant jacket framing her pregnant belly. The meadow, in the midst of the Sierra foothills, may once have been a Maidu basket weaver’s garden.

Deer grass juts from the ground in bunches — good habitat for grazing animals and material for the tribe’s baskets. The meadow also holds yerba santa, an evergreen shrub used to treat colds, and manzanita, with its brilliant green leaves identical on both sides.

For thousands of years, native people used fire to tend this land in the Sierra foothills, in what is now known as Butte County, spurring growth of the plants they wanted, knocking back the ones they didn’t and constraining the lightning-ignited wildfires that burned the area every few years.

Then came Western settlement, firefighters suppressing the flames, and conifers tangling thickly together. Eventually, the conditions grew ripe for the ferocious, wind-driven flames of the North Complex Fire and Bear Fire, which consumed nearly everything along nearby Berry Creek and killed 11 people in 2020.

As Herrera, who is part of the Maidu tribe, surveyed the meadow, she saw the promise of a place her people could, once again, rely on for generations to come.

“My hope is for our people to use this land so that everybody will have everything that they need,” she said.

To steward the land, she was helping to lead a planned burn. Maidu people from five local tribal groups participated: Berry Creek Rancheria, Mechoopa, Mooretown, Enterprise and Konkow Valley. It’s the first time in living memory that they’ve come together to burn, Herrera said.

The loss of indigenous fire stewardship and the corresponding Western settler obsession with suppressing all fire have fueled our current era of devastating megafires. Returning fire stewardship to indigenous communities helps restore the land and people’s souls. This is the spirit embodied in the November meadow burn. The land will be safer from future wildfires and tended according to the traditions of the Maidu ancestors who lived here for generations.

Fire, in this region of Northern California between Interstate 5 and the Sierra Nevada, is a defining problem of life. For native people like the Maidu, it is also a solution.

The burn was formally a training, with the goal of enabling the Berry Creek Maidu to reestablish their traditional relationship with fire. But it was more than that. Jedediah Brown, the tribe’s historic preservation officer, described it as “a homecoming, a return of fire to the land and the people. […] Through the continuation of this work, the relationship between fire, people, and place is renewed in the way our ancestors intended.”

Before burning the meadow, Herrera urged everyone to think about those who would gather materials in the coming months.

“It’s going to be a place where our people can gather food, fibers and medicines,” she said. “We want to make sure all of that stuff stays really clean.”

Basket weavers often hold materials in their mouths, and it’s long been a challenge to find plants free of fuel or herbicides. Here, the tribe can tend its garden as it chooses.

Burners didn’t use drip torches, which plop lit gasoline on the ground.

Instead, in the months prior to the burn, Herrera trained a crew of Maidu women in traditional ecological knowledge — “my girls,” she calls them.

“My girls harvested a lot of sticks,” she said, picking up one of the many bundles set aside for the burn. She held a lighter to the long twigs. “You light the stick, and the leaves start falling exactly like a drip torch.”

About 90 people came to the burn from all over Northern California. More than a dozen agencies and organizations — including resource conservation districts, prescribed burn associations and fire safe councils — partnered to make the training possible.

While some tribes, like the Karuk and Yurok along the Klamath River, have robust fire programs built over decades of working to reclaim intentional fire from agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service and Cal Fire, the reclamation in Berry Creek — formally the Berry Creek Rancheria of Tyme Maidu Indians of California — is in early stages.

The ability to practice their culture and revitalize traditions will provide the Berry Creek Maidu “a strong connection with their land in a way that helps to overcome the past traumas, including the traumas of the North Complex fire,” said Don Hankins, an indigenous fire expert and professor at California State University, Chico, who did not attend the Berrey Creek burn but knows others who did.

The restoration, he said, can help the tribe feel ownership and responsibility “to shape their future with fire so that they don’t have to go through that again.”

Hankins, who is a California Plains Miwok traditional cultural practitioner, writes about the stories that indigenous people tell of devastating “first fires.”

“And the fires we’re experiencing today are no different,” Hankins said. “Those stories tell us, after that happened, people learned to take care of the land. And so we’re at that time, this is the opportunity when there’s a fire footprint, even though there’s been devastation, the only good choice, I think, is to step back in and learn to steward [with fire] again.”

The intense 2020 fires burned through thick forests and uncovered Berry Creek Maidu ancestral village sites and gathering grounds, allowing the tribe to care for those places again.

“It looked to [our cultural monitors] like everything was laid where our ancestors had left it,” Herrera said. “Just like if you walked into an abandoned house and there’s a pair of glasses and a newspaper and half a cup of tea. Like somebody just got up and left.”

This 60-acre parcel, which used to host village sites, is part of that story. It was home to their ancestors for many thousands of years. But the land had been held privately for generations, and the tribes accessed it only recently, when it came up for sale and they collectively purchased it.

The morning after the meadow burn, Brown, the cultural preservation officer, walked a short distance away. Leaves, acorns and pebbles crunched under his feet. He stopped at a small rise.

“This is a village site. The old name for it is Piube. It means ‘rooted food,’” Brown said. “We now call it Hyhcetim kumbali, ‘the place to know’ or ‘the learning place.’ Because it’s like our school now, our classroom. We learn every day.”

Following the North Complex fire, Brown and other volunteers cleaned up the burned land, tending to it on the weekends over the course of three years. In that time, many acquired first aid and chainsaw certification, allowing them to safely remove burned trees at risk of falling on people — a big but necessary task to make events like this training day possible.

They uncovered a broad, flat rock with about 60 circular cups carved into the surface, each roughly the diameter of a coffee mug. Brown’s ancestors processed acorns for food in this bedrock mortar.

The tribe still uses acorns heavily. The day of the meadow burn, tribal members served acorn soup to all participants. Its pleasant, mild flavor was so popular that their entire batch disappeared, to their own surprise. Volunteers helped gather acorns underneath black oak trees — it was only fair to help replenish the stock.

After a full day of burning and a dinner of venison, corn and mashed potatoes hosted by tribal members in an indoor gym, Herrera reflected on the progress and her hopes for the future.

“I can’t even believe that today happened,” she said. Herrera organized the volunteers into groups with tribal names and became emotional listening to volunteers calling “out their squads in Maidu because the land here recognizes the language, it’s been spoken to it since time immemorial. I think that put a lot of intention down.”

“When we were lighting the fires, every bunch of deer grass got hit with just the right gust of wind [to light it], every single time,” she continued.

It was a good day’s work. She looked down at her abundant belly. Herrera expects her second child, a son, in February. She will develop her weaving skills as she waits, crafting both a new life and a basket to hold him, made of willow, oak and wild roses.

The basket’s backboard will grow from the land she burned.