11/27/2025
Honoring the first stewards of this land, we acknowledge the indigenous wisdom that has shaped our region’s fire history.
For millennia, fire has been an integral part of Chumash livelihood. Controlled burns had promoted growth within the land and stimulated the vitality of useful plants and hunting. Although the Chumash had practiced a hunter gatherer lifestyle, they were far from nomadic. Prior to colonization, the total Chumash population in Southern California was roughly around 20,000 people. They had built large cities, with up to 1000 natives, which was a direct result of effective land management and a diversity in resources.
Fire may be seen as a threat in California, but when used at the right time within the right parameters, fire is an amazing medium to manage grasslands. Indigenous burning fosters greater biodiversity in ecosystems and habitats, allowing them to evolve and thrive with fires. A low-intensity burn is able to open up landscapes to plants such as Chia sage, red maids, lupine, and scrub oak. It is known that the Chumash women had used hand drills to create embers in a bed of mugworth. The tradition of burning had been laid to rest on May 31, 1793, in which Spanish governor Jose Joaquin de Arrillaga outlawed the practice due to its interference with pasturage for the Spanish cattle. Although the tradition had been lost for up to 230 years, the current native Chumash community is pursuing the rediscovery and revitalization of these rituals with the Chumash Good Fire Project. This is a collaborative effort in which researchers and fire stewards observe the ways in which varying burning techniques modify the environment and how certain approaches are best for cultivating a certain species. What colonizers once saw as destructive wilderness in need of control was actually a carefully tended landscape, shaped by centuries of Indigenous knowledge that modern science is only now beginning to relearn.
Photo Credit: Matt Perko
