Photograph by Brady Holden
Prescribed Fire Training Exchange in the Deschutes National Forest near Bend, Oregon in 2019
I came to the Leech Lake division of resource management at the tail end of last year's dry, hot summer: Labor Day weekend after one of Minnesota’s worst droughts in decades. Finally, that day, it was raining: a warm, steady mist had restored the brittle grass along the highway to a late-summer emerald green. The moisture was helping to extinguish the Greenwood fire in northeastern Minnesota, and washing the ambient smoke from the air.
But here at the Leech Lake Reservation, I’d come to talk to foresters who were bringing fires back to the forest, using controlled burns to build climate resiliency and prevent wildfire catastrophe. For millennia, Indigenous people across North America have used fire as medicine for the land, a tool to replenish food, cultural and medicinal resources and reduce wildfire fuel by eating away overgrown vegetation. In the 20th century, fire management on federal lands, shaped by Western interests in natural resources, production, and property protection, suppressed Indigenous burning practices across the country. But today in Minnesota, the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe—in collaboration with the Forest Service and the Indigenous People’s Burning Network, a group supported by the Nature Conservancy—is working to restore Indigenous burning practices to the fire-dependent pine hardwood stands of the Chippewa National Forest.
BJ Gotchie, Leech Lake’s interagency fire coordinator, and Keith Karnes, Leech Lake’s forest manager, met with me at the Leech Lake Division of Resource Management. We piled in Gotchie’s Ford F350 and drove out east on Hwy 2, the road that splits through the reservation’s central town of Cass Lake. “A lot of berries didn't really come in this year. They were all pretty dry. It's been looking like fall up here for at least a good month,” said Gotchie. “Due to the lack of berries, you're getting a lot of wildlife coming into town. A lot more bear calls.” The wild rice had suffered too. Gotchie said the past year’s low water levels had led to a minimal harvest.
And while last year’s wildfires had skirted the reservation, Gotchie spent his summer fighting blazes on tribal lands at Red Lake and Bois Forte. Many of them, he told me, were unintentional arson starts: a trailer chain dragged fast across the road, or machinery hitting a rock and sparking. But some were started by lighting strikes, which, scientists warn, will become more frequent as the climate warms. “Compared to when I first started, there wasn't much for dry lightning strikes,” said Gotchie. “We’re looking at that now as more of a factor here in Minnesota.” He and Karnes expect that this summer was a preview of future dry spells where faster, hotter wildfires will catch and burn across Minnesota, indelibly affecting the health of Minnesota’s forests.
At Leech Lake, 85 percent of the reservation’s acreage is made up of the Chippewa National Forest. While national parks prohibit logging, national forests do not: after timber barons stripped the land at Leech Lake of its old growth at the turn of the 19th century, the Chippewa was created to both protect the forest from exploitation by private companies and sustain a federal timber harvest. The national forest contracts with local logging companies that supply mills across Minnesota, says Karnes—trees are kept on an economic rotation of about 80 to 90 years.
Gotchie and Karnes are managing part of the Chippewa—an area named the Sand Plain Pine Project—through the Tribal Forest Protection Act, which gives tribes the opportunity to steward forest resources on federal land. Karnes and Gotchie’s goal is to mesh both timber production and ecological care in the plantation areas, restoring native plant communities while still allowing some trees to be cut. They’re methodically thinning the pines, making room for species like oak, birch and aspen to regrow, building climate change resilience through species diversity. “If you put all your eggs in one basket, one species, and something—maybe it's sirex woodwasp for red pine—gets here, it annihilates everything,” said Karnes. A few years down the road, they may plant edible fruiting shrubs in the gaps.
They also plan to restore burns in these fire-dependent stands, running fire through every eight to 10 years on average. The pines were small, their rose-hued bark relatively thin and delicate. When they’re planted so closely together, Karnes said, the trees can only get so big—their bark never toughens to the scaly crust that would protect them from fire.
We headed further down the road, and stopped at another Sand Plain Pine area. Here the pines were taller and planted in neat rows, lending the forest a kind of eerie symmetry. The understory was a sea of hazelnut, a flowering shrub that grows chest-high. Many areas of the Chippewa—starved of fire for more than a hundred years—are overgrown with just a few domineering species, which crowd out other native shrubs and plants. Gotchie and Karnes’ team had started to thin the trees and “brush”—meaning that they cut away much of the hazel—to prepare it for a first burn next year. Already, they were seeing species diversity increase: raspberries, juneberries, strawberries, goldenrod and rosehips were sprouting up, as were willows. When the first fire passes through, it would help clear the hazel, leaving a black scorch and restoring nutrients to the soil. Not long after, new seedlings would push up through the ash.
“A lot of times when we do these burns underneath the pines, blueberries come back—plentiful. It’s always been a good thing,” Gotchie said. He and the crew end the day with ash in their teeth, a face full of soot. “A lot of manpower on the ground—womenpower as well, there’s a lot of women on fire crews nowadays,” he adds.
Minnesota’s forests and their plant and wildlife—berries, plant medicines, saps, barks and branches, deer and hares and grouse—have long been central to Ojibwe ways of life, as they have for the Dakota, who lived in the northwoods prior to the Ojibwe’s arrival and co-inhabited with them across centuries. In the 19th century, when the Ojibwe ceded much of their land, the treaties they signed guaranteed that they’d retain the right to hunt, fish and gather not only on reservations, but on the ceded treaty lands as well. (Put together, those treaty lands make up the majority of northern Minnesota. Treaty rights have historically been undermined by state agencies like the DNR, which has cited tribal members for fishing and ricing without state permits on off-reservation land.)
Gotchie, who is Ojibwe, told me that many people at Leech Lake gather berries and medicinal plants, collect willow branches for baskets, canes, and artwork, hunt deer, and tap trees for maple syrup in the Chippewa. But many areas of the forest—starved for fire for more than a century, overgrown with species like hazel—have been depleted of their plant diversity. Burns are remembered, distantly, at Leech Lake: before fire suppression was implemented, Gotchie said, the Ojibwe ran fires through the areas where they lived, traveled, and hunted, replenishing their natural resources with the flames. Some elders have memories of walking through the forest—now impenetrable with brush in some areas—as easily as they would a prairie.
On places like Cass Lake’s Star Island, where sections of the red pine stands have lasted the century, you can find trees marked with fire scars, a record of where half-remembered blazes ruptured the bark. The Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe is partnering with the University of Minnesota to study these fire scars, and better understand how the Ojibwe used cultural burning to shape the land.
“Fire is a big aspect of our life as Native American people,” Gotchie says. It’s used to boil down vats of sap for maple syrup, and cooking and husking wild rice. Fire is also used in many ceremonies, and to heat homes. Growing up, Gotchie learned from his dad and uncles how to burn on their own land, setting firelines with raked up piles of leaves. For him, the burns have a spiritual aspect, something that sets his mind right as the fire sends smoke up into the canopy, eating away what’s dead and overgrown. It’s a reverent process, he said, managing something so wild and sacred with a careful hand. “Prescribed burning, I feel like I'm in touch with something within our cultural realm—I feel safe.”
Photograph by Brady Holden
Prescribed Fire Training Exchange in the Deschutes National Forest near Bend, Oregon in 2019
The U.S. Forest Service, historically, has had a different attitude. According to the Forest History Society, in the early 1900s a series of catastrophic wildfires in Montana, Idaho and Washington led the Forest Service to adopt a policy of aggressive fire suppression. They opposed controlled burning on the grounds that any fire was a threat to standing timber, suppressing Indigenous burning traditions across North America. The Forest Service also went to great lengths to prevent and put out wildfires: their infamous “10 a.m. policy” held that all fires should be controlled by the next morning. In the Chippewa National Forest, a system of 23 lookout towers, truck trails, airplanes, and well-trained fire crews was implemented.
But in the 1960s and '70s, advancements in ecological research began to show what Indigenous people had known for millennia: that fire has significant benefits for forest ecology. The Forest Service radically changed their policy, and began to let fires “burn when and where appropriate.” Today in Minnesota, they’re working hand-in-hand with Leech Lake’s foresters on fire restoration in the Sand Plain Pine Project, and running their own burning projects in parallel. They collaborate with the LLBO on blueberry burns on forest lands, and will be joining fire trainings coordinated by Leech Lake and the Nature Conservancy this year. Karnes says there’s still a sense of caution around burning—but the U.S. Forest Service as a whole is warming up to Indigenous fire stewardship as a tenet of ecological care. (Restoring fire is a point of contention with the timber industry, however, says Karnes. Charring on the red pines’ bark can make it somewhat more difficult and expensive for mills to process the wood.)
But a sense of caution notwithstanding, not having fire can lead to truly catastrophic outcomes. The Indigenous People’s Burning Network, which has partnered with Leech Lake in their fire restoration work, started in 2015 with the Karak, Yurok, and Hoopa tribes in Northern California. Out there, a century of fire suppression has made the forests a tinderbox of overgrowth—tribes are bringing back traditional fire to protect the land from the west’s increasingly rapacious wildfires. State governments are increasingly looking to Indigenous burning practices as the best frontline defense against wildfire disaster. The same stands true in Minnesota, where smoky skies likely lie in our future. Karnes and Gotchie say that there’s no better way to protect land from wildfires than to clear away fuel—vegetation—with a controlled burn.
I reached Mary Huffman, who directs the IPBN through the Nature Conservancy, over a Zoom call. “The fire control idea really made sense to European people. Across Europe, fire has been used in agriculture for a long, long time—but as the Industrial Revolution held sway, the European relationship to land and nature really did not include a close relationship with fire. So Indigenous peoples whose cultures were really entwined with fire, those cultures began to suffer,” Huffman said. It’s essential, she says, that we make room for more than one fire culture—with an eye toward Western prevention strategies and the ecological care that Indigenous people have practiced for millennia.
But restoring Indigenous burning practices on a large scale presents challenges, namely in land ownership and management. The Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe owns only 4 percent of the reservation—the area is a checkerboard of mostly national forest land, privately owned land, and state-owned land. There’s a reason for that: until the end of the 19th century, the land at Leech Lake was held in trust, owned and used collectively by the Ojibwe who lived there. But in 1889, the U.S. government—hungry for timber, iron ore, and farmland—used the Nelson Act to break up many of the state’s reservations into 40 to 160-acre allotments for individual families. Much of the remaining land was sold off to white settlers and logging and mining companies.
From this fractured landscape, 19 years later, the Chippewa National Forest was born—a vast, federally-owned recreation and timber production area on reservation lands. (In fact, the massive forest footprint actually pushed many Ojibwe people off of the reservation, forcing them to claim their allotments at White Earth Reservation as part of a larger statewide relocation effort.) The land overlap between Leech Lake and the Chippewa has intertwined the cultural and economic well-being of the band with the well-being of the forest. It has also resulted in a unique legal relationship: the Forest Service owes the band a “legal duty of care” in managing tribal resources, which they fulfill by consulting them and integrating treaty rights in management decisions.
Efforts to strengthen the Leech Lake’s land management power and increase collaboration with the forest service are in the works. In 2016, the band submitted a letter to the forest service expressing concern with increasing timber harvest levels in the Chippewa. The chief of the forest service responded with plans for a shared-decision making model, for incorporating traditional ecological knowledge offered by Leech Lake, and for outlining the band’s “desired vegetative conditions” for national forest lands. Things are changing, Gotchie and Karnes told me—they’re a far cry from where they were 10 or 15 years ago. Collaborations on burning and other management plans are happening regularly, and the forest service works closely with Leech Lake’s team. (There’s also a plan in place to restore 11,760 acres that were wrongly transferred out of Leech Lake’s trust lands to the Chippewa National Forest in the 1940s and '50s.)
But the national forest isn’t the only place where fire is returning. As Leech Lake’s fire coordinator, Gotchie has been brushing and running burns in villages around the reservation, places like Ball Club and Inger. In some spots, his team is trying to protect the land from arson and potential wildfires—and in others, they’re doing blueberry and raspberry burns, replenishing the villages’ adjacent forests with berries. Gotchie says that the fire suppression messaging has been hard to shake: after having fire prohibited for so long, some communities are hesitant about burns. But when they see the results, everything changes. “In the next few years, even after the first year, there were blueberries and raspberries—a ton. Now they're starting to see the decrease, and they're like—‘Hey, you guys ready to come burn this again?’”
The Nature Conservancy leads prescribed fire training exchange events to bring more firefighters into the fold of prescribed burning, creating incubators for traditional fire practice (one planned for 2022 will bring together Leech Lake, the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, the Minnesota DNR, and more.) The organization is also partnering with Leech Lake Tribal College to offer firefighting courses within the forestry program, as a stepping stone to the prescribed burning training. Putting the tool of fire in the hands of the wider community will build capacity for those who live at Leech Lake to care for the land directly, while facing new threats to the forest and its native plants.
As climate change drives the state’s prairies and deciduous forests up from the south, the boreal forest is retreating, altering the very character of the landscape. Black spruce, tamarack, aspen, and northern white cedars are leaving. Hackberry, silver maple, swamp white oak, and black walnut—trees that can thrive in warmer, fluctuating conditions—are coming. I told Karnes and Gotchie that it scared me to think of a Minnesota that felt like Kansas, and they agreed. But to them, whatever comes next is worth caring for.
