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With reforms in place, California’s Karuk Tribe works to reestablish cultural burning as 'common practice'

Jacob Tripp pulls a hose along a burn near a pump house in Orleans, California.
Murphy Woodhouse
/
Boise State Public Radio
Jacob Tripp pulls a hose along a burn near a pump house in Orleans, California. 

For millennia, Indigenous peoples have intentionally set fires to care for the land. Colonization and policy largely put an end to those practices, though the tradition endured. As the Mountain West News Bureau's Murphy Woodhouse reports, a new law in California has opened the door to restore cultural burning — a potential model for the rest of the West. Woodhouse follows the Karuk Tribe on cultural burns designed to improve community and environmental health.

As Boise State Public Radio's Mountain West News Bureau reporter, I try to leverage my past experience as a wildland firefighter to provide listeners with informed coverage of a number of key issues in wildland fire. I’m especially interested in efforts to improve the famously challenging and dangerous working conditions on the fireline.