Restoring Los Angeles: Opportunities for Indigenous Leadership After Wildfires
The Los Angeles wildfires have brought incomprehensible loss, damage, and death to storied terrain and communities across the City. Time shrouds the infernal origins of the Los Angeles landscape, and amidst devastation and loss, a rush to assign blame muddies the picture, obfuscating the violence of the settlers of the Santa Monica Mountains who displaced, killed, and enslaved the Chumash and Tongva residents and then remade the landscape into one of colonial control.
Wildfire and The Legacy of Colonialism
In the late 18th century, as the Spanish solidified their colonial program, colonists banned cultural burning and Indigenous land management, and by the middle of the 19th century the Gold Rush had begun and the United States and California had commenced a genocide against California Tribes. By the turn of the century, the Indigenous population in California was one-tenth of what it had been just fifty years prior, and in 1910, the U.S. Forest Service implemented its “10 a.m. rule”–a policy of all out fire suppression.
By 1925, early Angeleno settlers declared their intent to ride the coattails of manifest destiny into the fire-prone Santa Monica mountains, with the Los Angeles Times writing that “the day for white invasion of the Santa Monicas has come.”
In 1998, legendary L.A. activist and writer Mike Davis used that quote when he made the case for letting Malibu burn, in a chapter of The Ecology of Fear that has been making its rounds on social media since the Palisades fire began two weeks ago. Missed in many of these screenshots has been Davis’ recognition that the dislocation of the Chumash and Tongva created the circumstances for this firestorm: “Despite–or, as we shall see, more likely because of–Spanish prohibition of the Chumash and Tongva Indian practice of annually burning the brush, mountain infernos repeatedly menaced Malibu through the nineteenth century.”
Banning cultural burning and replacing careful land stewardship with policies focused on total suppression resulted in the buildup of tons of dangerous fire fuels–the main cause of wildfire. Historic fire analysis, beginning in 500 CE, has been used to construct an infernal timeline that correlates extreme fire variability with the growth of the colonial state, documenting increases in fire variability beginning with the Spanish ban on cultural burning, amidst the rapid colonization of the Gold Rush era, and snowballing after the inception of the 10 a.m. rule.
Since the onset of colonialism, California Tribes have resisted the genocidal policies of the state of California and the United States government. In recent years, for both federally recognized and non-federally recognized Tribes, efforts to reconnect to ancestral lands and revitalize ancestral knowledge have resulted in some landmark wins. In September, 600 miles north of Los Angeles, a decades-long effort by the Yurok and Karuk Tribes to restore the salmon population, critical for the livelihood of culture and of people, was won when the last of the four Klamath River dams was taken down.
Klamath River Dam Removal: A Blueprint for Los Angeles’ Restoration
One day into the Palisades fire, in the midst of an information vacuum and a media environment swirling with frustration, fear, and sadness, Fox News anchor Jesse Watters falsely claimed that “Native Americans” and the Klamath dam removal were to blame for Palisades hydrants running dry. Laughable as this declaration is for its obvious racism and geographical wrongness, Watters unfortunately, speaking through his TV screen, has a direct line to Donald Trump. On his first day back in office, President Trump issued a memorandum directing the Secretary of Commerce to stop “putting people over fish.” Convenient symbols through which to launder his longstanding beef with California’s agricultural water delivery management, fish protection and California Tribes have nothing to do with the Palisades fire hydrants running dry, as UCLA law professor Cara Horowitz pointed out last week.
Still, Watters is bringing something important to our attention–recovery in the wake of these horrific fires will require taking a page from the Klamath book.
It’s well documented that dam removal and landscape restoration in the Klamath River Basin will decrease wildfire risk, increase water retention, filter healthy water for drinking, and provide more water and infrastructure for fighting fires. Non-tribal communities in the Klamath Basin, inculcated with a commitment to maintaining property values above all else, fought the dam removal. Regardless, the win for the Tribes will extend to the entire watershed, benefitting these communities even if it might be hard for them to see at first. An immense effort is already underway to restore the land that is no longer under the cover of river water. The watershed restoration projects, led in a collaboration that includes the Yurok, will result in the planting of 98 species of native plant species. 18 billion propagated seeds will be used to create firm sediment, as food sources, and for cultural uses. Some of these restoration projects have already begun, resulting in a huge uptick in biodiversity, healthy habitats for birds, insects, and humans.
The model of Indigenous leadership and collaboration in the Klamath dam removal offers a blueprint for the restoration of the burned Los Angeles landscape and for the restoration of tribal land management. Like water, fire also brings major benefits to the California landscape, supporting “the life cycle of plant and animal communities through stimulating seed germination, replenishing soil nutrients, promoting new plant growth, reducing competition among trees and maintaining open stand structure, reducing the fuels that feed more severe fires, and maintaining ecosystem and habitat diversity.” Moreover, historic analysis has shown that policies of fire management, rather than suppression, make California’s land base “more adapted to the Earth’s climate variability and fire effects…less severe.” Catastrophic fire is not an inevitability. Heeding the Chumash, Tongva, and Fernandeño Tataviam Tribal leadership in land management will be crucial to restoring landscapes that are adaptive to the increasingly extreme climate variability California is facing.
At the micro-scale, restoration in Los Angeles might include integrating bioswales for water retention, expanding buffer zones, and adopting resilient building codes. Thoughtful restoration and rebuilding might include considering benefits to the greatest number of people, like expanding public beach access and public land trusts, which Davis suggested in 1998. Tribal land management might embed resilience through the restoration of native vegetation, increasing water retention, flood risk reduction, and traditional fire management practices.
Infographics and pithy posts on X often point to Indigenous people and Indigenous land management as the “solution” to climate change. It’s an idea that’s not wrong, but is often far removed from the climate policies that are actually implemented. It also erases the ongoing and daily efforts of Tribes to resist colonialism, the resources needed to preserve the traditional knowledge at risk from centuries of colonialism, and the immense responsibility on those outside of Indian Country to be collaborators in adapting to climate change. Climate policies that do make nods to Tribes often do so minimally and without the money and resources that Tribes actually need–a fact that can feel like Tribes have been set up for failure. Giving the land back might sound like a monumental win, but for Tribes to really win, it will take a lot more than that.
A Path Forward: Collaborative Restoration and Indigenous Leadership
The Yurok and Karuk Tribes fought for a long time to make dam removal happen, and to get the money, resources, and commitments to make it a success. In rebuilding Los Angeles, a true commitment to tribal leadership, empowerment, and of course, land return, will be central to creating a better future.
As much as the white “invaders” of the Santa Monica Mountains may have longed to control the landscape, Los Angeles is always reminding us that there is no separation between humanity and nature. The wildfires have taken lives, livelihoods, and have likely irreparably damaged communities. In their wake, we have the opportunity to "learn anew" how to live with fire and to scale existing tribal restoration practices.
It is the responsibility of regional leaders to examine and act upon the colonial origins of these fires. Failure to do so will not change the outcome the next time the Santa Ana winds flare, and will leave us again wondering how we got here. With a bold vision and committed collaboration between Tribal leaders, city, regional, and state authorities, utilities, landowners, and community members, the City can once again remake its landscape, this time in the image of our interdependence. The time is now to build on the growing momentum of tribal cultural revitalization, strengthen our commitment to tribal land return, and to embed tribal land management practices and leadership in restoring Los Angeles.