Among members of the Karuk Tribe, whose ancestral lands encompass present-day Happy Camp (Athithúfvuunupma), California, fire is recognized not as an enemy but as one of the oldest teachers. For thousands of years, the Karuk have used low-intensity cultural burning to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire. Before European colonization, researchers estimate that approximately 7,000 cultural ignitions occurred annually across Karuk territory, averaging about 6.5 burns per Indigenous fire steward each year. Fire management was both an ecological and a social practice, rooted in reciprocal relationships between the environment and people.
In her 2026 master’s thesis, Relational Approaches to Fire Resilience: Designing a Living Shaded Fuel Break with Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Natalee Lopes examines how these longstanding stewardship practices can inform contemporary wildfire management. Conducted in collaboration with Karuk knowledge holders, the research concludes that wildfire mitigation should move beyond simply reducing fuels and instead promote long-term ecological health, cultural continuity, and community resilience.
Lopes challenges the dominant Western model of wildfire management, which has historically emphasized suppression and emergency response. Instead, she describes Indigenous fire stewardship as an ongoing process of relational care. Cultural burning is only one component of a broader system that includes selective thinning, pruning, understory clearing, coppicing hardwoods, and cultivating specific species.
To explore how these principles could be applied today, Lopes worked with Karuk cultural practitioners to design and implement a “living shaded fuel break” within the burn scar of the 2020 Slater Fire. Unlike conventional fuel breaks, which are often designed solely to slow wildfire spread, a living shaded fuel break serves multiple purposes. The project prioritized California black oak, sugar pine, berry-producing shrubs, and medicinal plants while reducing hazardous fuels and preparing the site for future cultural burning. The result was a landscape designed to improve wildfire safety, support biodiversity, and host social gatherings.
Care itself functions as infrastructure. Rather than viewing resilience as the product of one-time engineering projects or reactive wildfire suppression, the Karuk framework understands resilience as something cultivated through continuous stewardship and reciprocal relationships with the land. Lopes argues that integrating Indigenous knowledge into contemporary wildfire planning can produce fuel treatments that simultaneously reduce wildfire risk, restore ecosystem health, and strengthen community resilience. As wildfire seasons become longer and more severe, her research suggests that effective wildfire management requires learning from the people who have stewarded these landscapes for thousands of years and reimagining fuel management as a living, place-based system of care rather than simply an exercise in vegetation removal.
Photo: The Klamath River near present-day Happy Camp (Athithúfvuunupma), California
