In the previous few posts SOS Forests has presented some discussions about fires in the Northern Rocky Mountains. Last January we also wrote about the subject in these two posts:
Whoofoos Kill Old-Growth (here)
Homeland (here)
We present those again, because they pertain, and also because we are busy with other matters. This site is under reconstruction. Watch out for falling objects. Wear a hardhat around here.
In the previous post the issue of riparian zone protection was raised. The un-measureable metric of site potential tree height has been applied (awkwardly) to riparian zone buffers.
Riparian zones are the areas alongside creeks and streams. It is thought that such areas are particularly fragile, and that disturbances to riparian zones affect downstream habitats in a variety of ways. Riparian zone buffers are no-touch areas where disturbances must be minimized to avoid negative impacts to aquatic and streamside ecosystems.
The question then arises, how wide should the no-touch zones be to protect those fragile systems? Site potential tree heights are one way (a poor one) to determine riparian buffer widths.
All the above assumes that riparian zones are very fragile and sensitive. But are they?
M. Kat Anderson, author of Tending the Wild, discussed her research at a recent meeting in Pt. Reyes Station, CA. Her talk was taped by Kevin Feinstein, and is available for viewing (here).
The video is a long download, and only includes a portion of her talk, but it is well worth the FREE digital capture. Kat Anderson in person conveys tremendous warmth and understanding, as well as phenomenal knowledge of ethno-ecology of California.
We reviewed Tending the Wild (here and here). We also reviewed Kat Anderson’s Introduction to Forgotton Fires by Omer Stewart (here).
Her comments on the video include the observation that wilderness and the human-built environment represent two extremes. Most of our landscapes for most of the Holocene have been between those extremes, and have received human care and tending in a sustainable and non-destructive way for all that time.
She also emphasizes that stewardship is a relationship between humans and the plant and animal world. We do not lack engineering; we lack traditional ways and feelings of belonging and interacting. Our landscapes have suffered in the absence of human care. Nature misses us.
The videographer, Kevin Feinstein, has an interesting website named Feral Kevin (here). Some excepts from his post on the Henry Coe Lick Fire:
I do hike all around California and see the potential for dangerous fires because of the tremendous fuel load. This overgrowth of brush also leads to reduced biological diversity, leaving an abandoned “wilderness” that has been degraded and fragmented by the recent European invaders. No longer interacting with or being stewards of the land, instead we either develop and destroy what is not considered wilderness, and then leave areas alone to suffer this fate of abandonment. California ecosystems have been used to human interaction (including intentional fire) for thousands of years. The plant and animal communites have come to depend on it many ways. If the land was still inhabited by stewards, small strategic fires would be burned consciously each year, preventing this type of catastrophic fires we see now. Of course, what we have instead are constructs like “wilderness” that are more of a projection of our own unconscious. In this case, it’s this area that is separate from us, that isn’t tainted with our taint (but it is tainted with our neglect). Like an unresolved problem, the fuel load builds up toward explosive catastrophe, which we then bring military bombers and helicopters, and risk the lives of our brave firefighters to try to manage the catastrophe that we’ve somehow created. This is precisely what our culture does in the bigger scheme, which is to let our abused and neglected planet fester until catastrophe forces us to react.
Here at SOS Forests we have emphasized the fact that human beings have been impacting Western landscapes for millennia. We have 64 posts in the Anthropogenic Fire Theory category. In those posts we have presented references to articles, reports, and books by anthropologists, archeologists, historians, ethno-ecologists, other -ologists, and just plain folks with deep knowledge of the past. They all convey the same message: human stewardship not only altered but engendered many of the forests, prairies, and savannas that existed in the West, and indeed across the America’s, when Columbus landed.
Anthropogenic fire maintained and sustained landscapes beneficial to cultures that depended on the fruits of those landscapes for survival. The indigenous peoples learned, likely through trial and error, how to sustain game and edible plants. If they had not, they would not have survived.
If catastrophic fires denuded watersheds and incinerated wildlife over vast tracts (as they do today), the human beings that lived there would have starved or had to move. We from know anthropological research that Native American cultures were not wandering tribes, but rather nations with long established, permanent territories. The members of the Nations sustained the productivity of their territories through traditional environmental management techniques. In the West, the most advantageous and successful techniques involved frequent, regular, seasonal burning.
The public needs to grasp that human beings have always been integral, that our forests are heritage relics of human care. The understanding that our landscapes are CULTURAL and not wild is a key component of the restoration of sustainable forests. To abandon our forests to “natural” disasters is to throw away the real past.
Human beings have been tending our forests for millennia. That justifies, indeed demands, our tending of our forests today. If we took better care of our forests, we wouldn’t have so many of the other ancillary problems.
It is important for the lay public to understand that stewardship has roots, that stewardship is our inherited responsibility, and that abandonment to wildfire is shirking our responsibilities as human beings.
This year has proved to be a good year for Oregon white oak acorns. Acorn crops are irregular; the last good crop (around here) was in 2004.
For more about Oregon white oak, we consult the Silvics of North America (Vol.2 - Hardwoods) (here):
Burns, Russell M., and Barbara H. Honkala, tech. coords. 1990. Silvics of North America: 2. Hardwoods. Agriculture Handbook 654. USDA Forest Service, Washington, DC. vol.2, 877 p.
Quercus garryana Dougl. ex Hook.
Oregon White Oak
Fagaceae — Beech family
by William I. Stein
Oregon white oak (Quercus garryana), a broadleaved deciduous hardwood common inland along the Pacific Coast, has the longest north-south distribution among western oaks-from Vancouver Island, British Columbia, to southern California. It is the only native oak in British Columbia and Washington and the principal one in Oregon. Though commonly known as Garry oak in British Columbia, elsewhere it is usually called white oak, post oak, Oregon oak, Brewer oak, or shin oak. Its scientific name was chosen by David Douglas to honor Nicholas Garry, secretary and later deputy governor of the Hudson Bay Company.
The range of Oregon white oak spans more than 15° of latitude from just below the 50th parallel on Vancouver Island in Canada south nearly to latitude 34° N. in Los Angeles County, CA. South of Courtenay, BC, Oregon white oak is common in the eastern and southernmost parts of Vancouver Island and on adjacent smaller islands from near sea level up to 200 m (660 ft) or more (47). It is not found on the British Columbia mainland except for two disjunct stands in the Fraser River Valley (28). In Washington, it is abundant on islands in Puget Sound and distributed east and west of the Sound and then south and east to the Columbia River at elevations up to 1160 m (3,800 ft) (68). Oregon white oak is widespread at lower elevations in most of the Willamette, Umpqua, and Rogue River Valleys of western Oregon (67,68). It is also common in the Klamath Mountains and on inland slopes of the northern Coast Ranges in California to San Francisco Bay but infrequent from there southward to Santa Clara County (29).
Here is the distribution map:
The GW Fire is now 60 percent contained at 7,500 acres. Over 840 firefighters and command personnel are finishing the mop-up and will begin to demobilize soon. The trucks, helicopters, air tankers and bulldozers will be driven, flown, or hauled away.
What will remain is the GW Burn, a blackened, charred, mostly dead tract of former old-growth forest with ancient heritage.
The wasteland of the GW Burn connects the Lake George Burn with the Cache Mountain Burn and completes the incineration of the upper-slope Metolius watershed forest. The scar of incinerated old-growth now extends from Warm Springs in the north to the South Sister, a scorched earth sear of over 150,000 acres. The following Burns make up this destroyed forest landscape (this list is missing a few smaller ones):
Cache Mountain Fire (2002) - 3,894 acs
Eyerly Complex Fire (2002) - 23,573 acs
B and B Complex Fire (2003) - 90,769 acs
Link Fire (2003) - 3,574 acs
Black Crater Fire (2006) - 9,400 acs
Puzzle Fire (2006) - 6,150 acs
Lake George Fire (2006) - 5,740 acs
GW Fire (2007) - 7,500 acs
Total - 150,600 acres in six fire seasons
The GW Fire was the last piece of the puzzle and completes the awful picture.
Some lower-slope forest remains near Camp Sherman, clearly slated for incineration in the next year or two. Recent Angora-style “thinnings” along the Camp Sherman Road have left a dense canopy over-topping unburned piles of red slash, a virtual guarantee of 100 percent mortality via firestorm soon.
For a larger image click (here, 434KB)
The entire Metolius watershed forest was anthropogenic: created and maintained by human-set, stewardship fires. Thousands of years of regular, frequent, seasonal, human-set fires engendered an open, park-like forest of scattered, gigantic, old-growth ponderosa pine trees (and Douglas-fir trees at the western edges) towering above prairie-like understories of bunch grasses, wildflowers, lily fields, and berry patches that stretched for miles.
No area of the Metolius watershed hosted more human activity than the area of the GW Burn. The Santiam Pass ’southern route’ was the main trafficked way in the Central Cascades for the last 6,000 years, at least. The first Euro-American route, the Old Santiam Wagon Road, followed the main Indian road through the area that is now the GW Burn.
[Sidenote: Mt. Mazama exploded about 7,700 years ago, buried Santiam Pass in 20 feet or more of volcanic ash, and obliterated signs of earlier use. Archaeologists have discovered “campsites” as old as 11,000 years at nearby Paulina Lake, however. So-called “campsites,” that are actually caves with deep middens showing continuous use over thousands of years, might be better termed “homesites.”]
An old-growth hearth tree in the vicinity of Santiam Pass. Travelers built their warming/cooking fires up against big trees in those ancient days. For a larger image click (here, 394KB)
The GW Burn marks the last of this special heritage forest. There is none left to burn, on the east side of the Pass. The western extensions and routes have a few (not many) unlogged and unburned patches of original forest left. That is, some relic trees still stand, and few patches of ancient montane prairie remain here and there, west of the crest.
Local residents are still concerned about wildfires emanating from the Federal Estate. The hazard has been reduced but not abated, and sprouting brush will soon fuel new fires.
The local residents have good reason to be concerned. In 2002 the Cache Mountain Fire destroyed 2 homes and 13,000 homes were evacuated, and the Eyerly Fire destroyed 37 structures. Residents have been evacuated during the B&B Fire (2003) and the Black Crater Fire (2006), as well as the GW Fire, still smoking.
In 1996, the Skeleton Fire damaged destroyed 30 homes near Bend, six years after the Awbrey Hall Fire (1990) burned 22 homes, in a platted subdivision, inside the Bend Urban Growth Boundary.
The Awbrey Hall Fire was an arson-caused fire in the unkempt and holocaust-ready Deschutes NF northwest of Bend that roared ten miles into town on medium-light west winds. The homeowners whose houses burned down were blamed for their losses because they didn’t have “defensible space” to withstand a firestorm generated on unmanaged Federal land. The Awbrey Hall Fire led to the invention of the concept “Wildland-Urban Interface,” or Whooie, as a means to penalized private citizen victims and distract attention away from the true criminal perps, the USFS.
No homes burned down in the GW Fire. No modern homes, that is. Plenty of ancient “campsites” burned, though, and were obliterated beyond recognition or recovery.
It is almost as if Mt. Mazama has erupted again and wiped the past, our human past, off the face of the Earth forever.
The forest burning today in the GW Fire is a green, multicohort, mostly ponderosa pine forest. The older cohort consists of mostly green, living, old-growth ponderosa pine trees that date back to the pre-Euro-American Conquest era. That is, they are Native American heritage trees, and the older cohort was at one time a Native American-tended heritage forest.
That forest is not “bug-killed,” or “beetle-killed,” or “blown down,” or “timber litter,” or “wildland,” or any other obfuscation. It is a green, old-growth pine forest with a dense, fire-hazardous, second growth thicket below.
The erroneous appellations are promulgated by a sick and twisted bureaucracy that wants to kill by incineration our public forests. They make up disparaging words and phrases to impugn worthlessness on something that is actually priceless. The derogatory and lying aspersions are crudely fashioned to justify their scorched earth policies.
In addition to old-growth ponderosa pine, there are two other forest types burning in the GW Fire (the fire is ten miles long west to east, and so it has crossed some eco-tones).
At the highest elevations to the west, the GW Fire is burning or has burned old-growth sub-alpine forest containing mountain hemlocks over 450 years old. There are also noble fir in the 100 to 200 y-o category, and a thicket of younger sub-alpine fir, Engelmann spruce, and pacific silver fir.
At lower elevations to the west, the GW Fire is burning or has burned old-growth Douglas-fir. The wetter, westside plateaus in the High Cascades have six-foot diameter Douglas-firs over 400 years old, scattered in an open, park-like, savanna density over above a thicket of 75-year-old-and-younger mixed conifers, though very few ponderosa pines. Prior to Euro-American influences, the understory was mostly open huckleberry fields and beargrass meadows, with occasional giant trees, and maintained by anthropogenic fire.
In some sections, whatever was there was clearcut in the last 40 years and planted to a thicket of even-aged Douglas-fir or ponderosa pine. Occasional pockets of lodgepole pine in dense thickets mark lightning fires of the modern era.
The lodgepole pine thickets are the DESIRED FUTURE CONDITION of the wacko burritos whom we have hired to care for our forests. Shocking but true, believe it or not.
Most of the GW Fire is in the Pass, the Santiam Pass ’southern route’ that goes south of Cache Mountain and along the Old Santiam Wagon Road. That was the principal crossing/trade route of Native Americans who occupied both sides of the Pass for at least 6,000 years and probably much longer than that.
The Old Wagon Road, when it was new, followed the main Indian trail. The Cache Mountain route, going from east to west, drops down into Fish Lake and the headwaters of both the South Santiam and McKenzie watersheds. The northerly route drops down into the Lava Lake Plateau and additional passes, such as Tombstone Pass, must also be traversed to get into the Middle and North Santiam watersheds.
Both routes were heavily used by Native Americans. Among the evidence are the bark peeled trees, hearth trees, anthropogenic meadows, and anthropogenic open, park-like, old-growth forests. The southerly route, however, where the GW Fire is burning now, got more traffic because it passed closer to Obsidian Cliffs.
Obsidian Cliffs, in it’s day, was the Pittsburg of much of Oregon. Most of the tools with edges, like arrowheads and knives, came from the ancient quarries at Obsidian Cliffs.
The entire area is blanketed in history, a very ancient history of human stewardship, use, trade, and travel. The GW Fire is burning right through the heart of that ancient landscape right now, and destroying heritage with every torching old-growth tree.
The impression left by some racist anthropologists is that the Paiute-Shoshone people were less evolved than other tribes, particularly less so than the transplanted Euro tribes that generate modern anthropologists.
The august (even in death) Dr. Julian H. Steward claimed that, “the Basin-Plateau–or “Numic”–division of Shoshonean-speakers had the simplest culture in the Western Hemisphere, and in some respects the entire world.”
Omer Stewart claimed otherwise in a series of Indian Land Claim cases that O. Stewart subsequently won and J. Steward lost (see here).
The proof of ancient culture, one way or the other, might be found in the petroglyphs of the Cosos Mountains. The Cosos are adjacent to Owens Valley and Death Valley in California. Although dwarfed by the nearby Sierra Nevada and Panamint mountain ranges, the Cosos are home to the greatest collection of prehistoric rock art in North America and possibly the world.
SOS Forests is delighted to present, for your archaeological pleasure, Paradigm Shifts, Rock Art Studies, and the “Cosos Sheep Cult” of Eastern California by Alan Gold (formerly Garfinkel), hot off the press from the North American Archaeologist, Vol. 27(3) 203-244, 2006. This entire article has graciously been made available by the author and can be downloaded (here) (813 KB).
Besides photos and renderings of petroglyphs, Alan Gold has laid out an excellent discussion of the meaning behind the Cosos rock art and the intentions of the ancient artists.
Now, that’s not an easy task even when the subject artist is alive. What the heck was Picasso all cubed out about? Nobody who asked him ever got a straight answer. So what can be said about the motivations of artists dead for hundreds or thousands of years?
Quite a bit, actually. Here are some excepts from Paradigm Shifts, Rock Art Studies, and the “Cosos Sheep Cult” of Eastern California by the estimable Alan Gold. Please enjoy.
We are extremely pleased and gratified to present another guest essay, this time by the top wildlife ecologist in America today, Dr. Charles E. Kay of Utah State University. Dr. Kay’s subject is a book review of a recently published tome, Fire in California’s Ecosystems. His message is much more universal than that, though.
Please enjoy. Comments are invited.
Fire in California’s Ecosystems. 2006. Sugihara, N.G., J.W. Van Wagtendonk, K.E. Shaffer, J. Fites-Kaufman, and A. E. Thode, editors. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA 596 pp.
Reviewed by Charles E. Kay
email: charles.kay(at)usu.edu
May 2007
Fire in California Ecosystems contains 24 chapters by 45 authors and covers most aspects of fire ecology in that state. As my experience is primarily in the Intermountain West, I will not comment on the accuracy of the data contained in this volume. Instead, I would like to discuss the general tone of the book, which unfortunately is exceedingly Eurocentric.
Author after author describe “pre-settlement” conditions apparently ignorant of the fact that California has been settled for at least the last 10,000 years!! Kat Anderson is the only author to use the correct term, “pre-European settlement.” Kat Anderson is also the only author who apparently understands that California was densely populated prior to events set in motion by Columbus’ accidental “discovery” of the New World. And finally, Kat Anderson is the only fire ecologist to have written about the genocide that Europeans inflicted on California’s original owners.
To the best of my knowledge, the Nazis never passed a law making it legal for the average German to kill Jews or other “undesirables”–instead the Nazi State did the killing. Not so in California, for there, elected representatives passed laws making it perfectly legal for “Whites” to kill any and all “Indians” without cause–men, women, and children.
Look at a map of California. Did you ever wonder why there are no large Indian reservations, as there are in other western states? Or why there were never any major military campaigns against California’s native peoples, as happened in other areas of the West? It was because in California’s history it was largely average Euro-American citizens who took care of the “problem” themselves.
All this, of course, is swept under the rug when authors use “pre-settlement” to imply that this country was not settled until Europeans arrived. So what is in a single word?
Everything.
As various authors note in their respective chapters, some parts of California receive very few lightning strikes, and accordingly, there are few or no lightning-started fires in certain vegetation types. Fire history studies, however, indicate that those areas experienced a high frequency of fire prior to European settlement, leading the authors to conclude that burning by aboriginal people once dominated many plant communities. Other parts of California, though, experience a greater number of lightning strikes and lightning-started fires, and in those areas the authors largely discount the influence of native burning.
That is to say, in some parts of California, native people were intelligent enough to figure out the beneficial uses of landscape fire and burned accordingly, while in other parts of California, native people apparently did not recognize the benefits of human-set fires and instead had to pray for precision lightning strikes to manipulate their vegetal resources.
This assumption is untenable. If one group could figure it out, surely every group could figure it out. Moreover, strong evidence uncovered in a variety of scientific and historic research indicates all Californian Indian cultures burned landscapes, as did most (if not all) pre-European settlement indigenous residents across pre-America.
As part of my research on the aboriginal use of fire, I have compiled lightning-fire ignition rates per million acres for every national forest in the continental United States. I then compared those data with potential aboriginal ignition rates based on estimates of native populations plus the number of inadvertent and purposeful fires set per person per year. Those data show that potential aboriginal ignitions were 270 to 35,000 times greater than known lightning-ignition rates. Thus, lightning fires have been largely irrelevant for at least the last 10,000 years–the exact opposite of the message in much of this book.
There is, though, one ray of light in the book when hidden fire scars are discussed (pp. 204-205), but even that glimmer of hope was lost on most authors. Fire scars tell us how often a tree was damaged by fire, but they do not tell us how often fire swept the area but was not recorded by the scarred tree. Taylor and Skinner note “that 86% of Douglas-fir trees (stumps) with internal fire records had no external evidence of having been scarred by fire.” When those hidden fire scars were taken into account, the estimated fire-return interval shrank by nearly 50%. Thus, fires were at least twice as common as reported by standard fire-scar analysis. Other datasets I have uncovered document that only 1 in 3, or 1 in 7, fires were actually recorded by scarred trees. Thus, there was a great deal more fire on the land prior to European settlement than is commonly believed or reported.
It would be very interesting if we could go back to 1491. Unfortunately, most ecologists apparently do not have a clue as to what they would find. Kat Anderson’s contribution to Fire in California’s Ecosystems is worthwhile reading. Unfortunately, the rest of the book is not.
Suggested Reading (instead of Fire in California’s Ecosystems):
Anderson, M.K. 2005. Tending the wild: Native American knowledge and the management of California’s natural resources. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. 526 pp.
Churchill, W. 1997. A little matter of genocide: Holocaust and denial in the Americas 1492 to the present. City Lights Books, San Francisco, CA. 531 pp.
Heizer, R.F., ed. 1974. The destruction of California Indians: A collection of documents from the period of 1847 to 1865 in which are described some of the things that happened to some of the Indians of California. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE. 321 pp.
Heizer, R.F., and A.F. Almquist. 1971. The other Californians: Prejudice and discrimination under Spain, Mexico, and the United States to 1920. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. 278 pp.
Kay, C.E. 2007. Are lightning fires unnatural? A comparison of aboriginal and lightning ignition rates in the United States. Pages xxx-xxx in Masters, R.E. and K.E.M. Galley, eds. Proceedings of the 23rd Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conference - - Fire in grassland shrubland ecosystems. Tall Timbers Research Station, Tallahassee, FL. (in press).
Kroeber, T. 1961. Ishi in two worlds: A biography of the last wild Indian in North America. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. 255 pp.
Loewen, J.W. 1995. Lies my teacher told me: Everything your American history textbook got wrong. Simon and Schuster, New York, NY. 383 pp.
Mann, C.C. 2005. 1491: New revelations of the Americas before Columbus. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY. 462 pp.
Preston, W. 1996. Serpent in Eden: Dispersal of foreign diseases into pre-mission California. Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 18:2-37.
Preston, W. 1997. Serpent in the garden: Environmental change in colonial California. California History 76:260-298.
Rosenbaum, A.S., ed. 1998. Is the holocaust unique? Westview Press, Boulder, CO. 222 pp.
Stannard, D.E. 1992. American holocaust. Oxford University Press, New York, NY. 358 pp.
Stannard, D.E. 1998. Uniqueness as denial: The politics of genocide scholarship. Pages 163-208 in Rosenbaum, A.S., ed. Is the holocaust unique? Westview Press, Boulder, CO. 222 pp.
Svaldi, D. 1989. Sand Creek and the rhetoric of extermination: A case study in Indian-White relations. University Press of America, Lanham, MD. 382 pp.
Paiutes! aka “digger” Indians. The least evolved of all the Tribes encountered by Homo european superior.
In the Foreword to Rock Drawings of the Cosos Range by Campbell Grant, James W. Baird, and J. Kenneth Pringle, 1969 (we’re going to discuss this book and topic more later soon) the esteemed dean of American Anthropology, the late Dr. Julian H. Steward had these things to say about Paiutes:
In historic times, nearly all of the Great Basin and the Columbia Plateau which extends across the semi-deserts of southern Nevada, Utah, southern Idaho, and Colorado to the Rocky Mountains, had only a sparse population of Shoshonean-speaking Indians. My own fairly extensive study, between thirty and forty years ago, of the Shoshonean Indians disclosed that they knew nothing of the authorship or meaning of the petroglyphs, and that their culture seemed unlikely to manifest itself in this medium.
First, the Basin-Plateau — or “Numic” — division of Shoshonean-speakers had the simplest culture in the Western Hemisphere, and in some respects the entire world. … the Great Basin Indians pecked their petroglyphs [the Cosos rock art] on extremely hard basalt or granite cliffs, which is a major chore. The degree of Shoshonean nomadism seems to me not conducive to such effort. Moreover, none of the various Shoshonean activities or categories of culture, except basketry, were expressed in any art form…
… A few petroglyphs, such as bear tracks, may have been made by the ancestors of the Western Shoshoni or of the Ute- Southern Paiute- Chemehuevi, who occupied the deserts to the south, but I find it difficult to recognize much in the recent Shoshonean culture or society that might have inspired or even supported the greater part of this art.
In a recent reassessment of the nature of Basin-Plateau Shoshonean society, I recognized … [t]hey had no ceremonialism, such as the sheep cult suggested by the authors, and they lacked virtually all aesthetic expression…
… The interesting conclusion about this rock art is that it signifies culture loss in the area, owing either to deculturation of the present inhabitants or to the earlier presence of a different people.
The author of these words, the late, great Julian Steward, was a racist, a Social Darwinist, and a cultural elitist. His anthropology was biased by racial prejudice, ahistoric, unscientific, and wrong.
Twenty years before the aging Steward penned this assessment of Paiutes, he was bested in 12 of 12 Native American land claims cases by Dr. Omer Stewart, author of Forgotten Fires. From Henry T. Lewis’ Introduction to that book:
Appearing in twelve land claims cases for Native American litigants, [Omer] Stewart challenged and successfully rebutted the evidence provided by some of the leading figures in American anthropology at the time…
On the other side, Julian Steward acted as a witness for the defense, the U.S. Department of Justice; because of his earlier studies in eastern California, the government considered him to be especially important for contesting the claims made by the Northern Paiutes to the traditional ownership of Owens Valley. Omer Stewart’s expertise came from having worked widely with a number of indigenous groups throughout the West and having an encyclopedic knowledge of the anthropology and history of the region. At the same time, he concentrated on empirical evidence, while Steward relied heavily on his own highly contested theory of cultural evolution…
In addition to Steward, the Department of Justice obtained expert advice from other leading anthropologists–notable among them Ralph Beals, Harold Driver, Waler Goldschmidt, Abraham Halpern, and William Strong. Like Stewart, they were former students of Alfred Kroeber; unlike Stewart they provided testimony against Native American Claimants. In the hearings that followed, several students of Julian Steward and of the others supporting the government position also made representations for the Department of Justice. [Omer] Stewart challenged each one in turn and, in the end, won all twelve cases in which he participated… [including three head-to-head with Julian Steward - M].
The modern myth that Paiutes were inferior originated during the Spanish genocide of indigenous Americans and was adopted later by 19th century Euro-Americans. Julian Steward gave scientific credence to this racist myth, until he was blown out of the water by an empiricist (someone who deals with solid evidence, not wild theories).
But the myth was already ingrained in Euro-American culture. Twenty years later Julian Steward was still fighting his losing (lost) battle with Stewart, but he had unfortunately won over the popular Mass Mind, not through superior science but by convincing others that his racist myths were fact.
The actual facts are that Uto-Aztecan speakers (see here) were hugely successful members of a language family who occupied vast portions of Northern and Central America before Columbus. They were masters of harsh environments, and of fire, and of hunting, and of culturing and harvesting hundreds of plants, had great ceremonialism, deep spiritual beliefs, and incredible art in song, dance, basketry, pottery, clothing, and other facets of culture.
The southern Uto-Aztecan branch, the Aztecs, ran the largest and most advanced city on the planet for awhile, until Cortez brought them smallpox. Tenochtitlan was far more evolved than any city in Spain or the rest of Europe at the time (see here).
The Paiutes maintained forests and animal populations from Death Valley to Montana, which is where Sacagawea and her fellow Shoshones saved Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery, and led them to the Pacific Ocean and back.
The lady on the coin? She was a Shoshone, a Paiute.
John Wesley Powell vociferously recommended that western forests be tended with light burning. Gifford Pinchot and others derided Powell and called his notions “Paiute forestry.” It wasn’t meant as a compliment. Powell lost his job as head of the US Geological Survey over it, and Paiute forestry was buried in the ash heap of history.
Powell was right, of course. He had witnessed the Kaibab Paiute underburning that magnificent forest, and he understood what their intentions were and saw the results. The Indian fires sustained the forest.
It is difficult to find a work of art in Euro heritage that comes close to the beauty, grandeur, or scale of the open park-like ponderosa pine forests of the Paiute. Julian Steward was blind to artifacts of Paiute culture; Powell, Omer Stewart, and many others were not.
We have written on this subject before (see here and here and the entire Back to the Rim category). The Murphy Fire brought it to mind again, since that fire is in Northern Paiute country. That, and we wanted to demonstrate once again the pivotal role played by Omer Stewart in advancing modern thought in anthropology and ecology.
A lot of what Omer Stewart thought and taught has not been fully grokked by science or society. The old racist myths hang tough. But Omer was right, again and again, and his prescient insights will be appreciated someday (if we have anything to do or say about it).
