Environment

Using Fire to Fight Fire: California Tribes' Cultural Burns Restore Land and Keep Flames at Bay

KlingbielEL — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 17:14:53 +0000

Environment

Using Fire to Fight Fire: California Tribes' Cultural Burns Restore Land and Keep Flames at Bay

From Issue: Summer 2021 / Vol. 22 No. 2

by David Helvarg

From a 25-foot granite ledge in the foothills of California’s southern Sierra Nevada, one can look out onto a large golden meadow next to a wide creek where for millennia a Miwok village of some 600 people thrived. This view had been obscured by thick brush, thistle, poison oak and gnarled dead trees. But this past February, the dense overgrowth was devoured by fire. Not wildfire, but flames carefully ignited by the descendants of the Miwok and other American Indian tribes from the region.

During the fall of 2020, the Creek Fire devastated nearly 380,000 acres in or near California’s Sierra National Forest. The blaze burned for more than three months before it was fully contained.

Photo by Stuart Palley

Keith Turner (Dumna/North Fork Mono) offers a sage smoke blessing during a four-day cultural burn on the sight of a former Miwok village near Mariposa, California.

Photo by Stuart Palley

Jesse Valdez (North Fork Mono) shows how Miwok villagers once used stone pestles to pound acorns into meal in bedrock mortar holes.

Photo by Stuart Palley

Firefighter Elijah Knight (North Fork Mono) protects himself from the radiant heat coming off a fire he’s ignited with his drip torch.

Photo by Stuart Palley

Danny Manning (Mountain Maidu/Navajo/Sioux), the assistant fire chief of the Greenville Rancheria in northern California, uses a drip torch to direct streams of flame to ignite a meadow in what was once a Miwok village.

Photo by Stuart Palley

University of California, Berkeley, Associate Professor Elizabeth Hoover (foreground) and graduate student Melinda Adams (right) as well as other volunteers attempt to spread the flames across the meadow.

Photo by Stuart Palley

John Saucedo (Chukchansi) watches as a dead tree is felled. It will soon be set afire in a slash pile along with invasive plants and other incendiary undergrowth.

Photo by Stuart Palley

Theresa Williams-Lundy (Mono/Chukchansi) bundles sourberry stalks that have grown back straighter and more abundant from where their patch was burned a year earlier.

Photo by Stuart Palley

Danny Manning holds two cradleboards he made to demonstrate how the one on the right, which is made from a willow exposed to fire, has straighter, finer wood than the one on the left.

Photo by Stuart Palley

Sheila Santamaria and Elijah Knight receive a “pusak,” or cradleboard, for their expected first child from Theresa Williams-Lundy. Keith Turner gives them a blessing.

Photo by Stuart Palley

Ron Goode (North Fork Mono) sings, keeping time with a clapper made from an elderberry bush gathered after a cultural burn.

Photo by Stuart Palley

Between the rains, a rainbow appears above as a slash pile burns and tribal and other volunteers get ready to apply more good fire to the main meadow of the former Miwok village.

Photo by Stuart Palley

Members of the Miwok, North Fork Mono and Chukchansi Tribes gathered at the former village site for a four-day “cultural burn” to clear overgrown fields on private land outside Mariposa, California. They were joined by neighbors and dozens of volunteers, including staff from the Forest Service and California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire). Following an early morning prayer in the rain sung by Mariposa Miwok Tribal Chair Bill Leonard and a sage smoke blessing by Keith Turner of the North Fork Mono Tribe, seven columns of orange flame and smoke began rising where slash piles of foliage and branches along with the stump of a just felled 40-foot dead oak were set on fire.

This annual cultural burn is one of many efforts to bring Indigenous fire management back to the landscape. These efforts are meant to restore plant growth, benefit wildlife and put nutrients back into the soil while helping clear the dense underbrush that fuels the massive wildfires now common across the West. Today’s uncontrolled fires are hotter, larger, more intense and in large measure the result of increased temperatures, drought and tree-killing insect infestations—all linked to climate change.

Archeologists have estimated the former size of the Miwok village from the many bedrock mortar holes and stone pestles found in the area. Families once used these to pound acorns into meal. The Miwok knew the oak trees that grow here produce more acorns when they are exposed to periodic ground fire, and so fire became an intrinsic part of their culture.

By a shallow, 5-foot-wide depression in the earth that appears to have been an ancient “house pit” where a family might have once cooked acorns, brodiaea bulbs (Indian potatoes), wild onions, venison and other fire-enhanced foods, North Fork Mono Chairman Ron Goode explains how the land has changed. “When people lived here, this forest floor would have been clear. They’d gather all the loose stuff and dying trees for wood,” he says. They could then more easily “harvest acorns and mushrooms, and stomp on and ruffle up the sourberry, elderberry, soap root and other plants that like being disrupted.”

For the past 20 years, Goode has coordinated cultural fires set on this rural 400-acre property as well as on several other sites within the historic range of his tribe in the southern Sierra Nevada region. He distinguishes “cultural fire” from “prescribed fire,” a term used for burning to reduce the fuel loads that feed today’s huge, out-of-control conflagrations. While “cultural fire” also reduces incendiary dense underbrush, it primarily aims to produce healthy new growth for food, medicine and fibrous plants that can be made into baskets and other traditional items. Native Californians and other Indigenous people have applied this land management technique for thousands of years before colonists settled here and it was banned by local officials and later the Forest Service.

A Burning Need

About 500 miles to the northwest, the Karuk, Yurok and Hupa tribes of the Klamath River Basin also set cultural fires. A number of local Native families lost their homes during the devastating 2020 fire season, something that rarely happened when slow-burning ground fire was a part of their harvesting practices. “We had permanent houses and villages made out of Port Orford cedar plank, and fires out of the high country wouldn’t flow fire down into the villages because of the reduced fuel load,” explains Bill Tripp, director of natural resources and environment for the Karuk Tribe. “We need to burn to benefit wildlife, including salmon, to do it all right.”

“I would like to be able to use modern tools and our ancestral knowledge and integrate it with Western science so we can restore the natural landscape,” Tripp explained in a later interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. “We are trying to work with the Forest Service. We’ve been trying to do that for decades.”

Goode says many tribes in the West have made ongoing efforts to work with state and federal agencies to allow cultural burns on Native lands. Yet the tribes have been met with some resistance. “They haven’t understood when we tell them that with fire, we don’t destroy,” he explains. “We refresh the underbrush so it’s green, not dry and dying, and it’s going to be restored for a long period of time.”

In the past, naturally occurring fires ignited by lightening combined with cultural burns may have cleared as much as 10 percent of California’s underbrush each year. However, more than a century of misguided forest management denigrated traditional practices and aimed at total fire suppression. This policy has allowed two to four times the normal amount of woody fuel to accumulate while the largest, healthiest, fire-resistant trees were logged.

In addition, the population boom of the past 50 years has led to rapid growth on the wildland-urban interface. Disaster has followed in places such as Paradise in northern California, where 85 people died and more than 18,000 structures were destroyed at a cost of more than $16 billion in the 2018 Camp Fire. Climate change has also extended the state’s fire season by at least 75 days since the 1970s, creating the hotter conditions that resulted in a record 4 million acres—an area larger than Connecticut—being burned in California in 2020. Massive fires also swept Oregon, Washington, Montana and Colorado last year.

These trends have forced state and federal agencies to reassess how to protect and restore forest health. These organizations now recognize fire as essential to many ecosystems, including California’s giant redwood and sequoia forests. Part of this recognition is reflected in California Governor Gavin Newsom’s 2021–2022 budget, which sets aside $20 million to help fund tribal fire programs.

An example of how managed fire can reduce the impact of megafires at a landscape scale came as an unplanned experiment during the 2013 Rim Fire. This conflagration burned more than 400 square miles in the Sierra Nevada, including 77,254 acres in Yosemite National Park, where the Park Service had been using periodic ground fire since 1970. Such fire is essential to redwoods and sequoias in that it clears forest floors and heats open seeds, encouraging them to germinate. In the park’s controlled-burn areas, according to a 2017 study by Penn State geographers, the impact of the big fire was far less severe than in its other 400 square miles.

The 2020 Creek Fire burned 379,895 acres, most of which was in the Sierra National Forest. Although now managed by the Forest Service, “that was Mono people’s land,” says Jeff Irwin, an archeologist with the agency. It has since been looking to the tribe for advice and proposals about how to prevent another megafire in the area. “Now there’s an opportunity for a major restoration project, and we’ve been talking about cultural burns on the forest,” says Irwin.

Len Nielson, staff chief of prescribed fire at Cal Fire, says his agency is consulting with the Native American Advisory Council (which is made up of tribes from northern, central and southern California) about “incorporating tribal ecological knowledge into our tactics.”

Restoring One’s Roots

At the cultural burn near Mariposa this past winter, Irwin and Nielson were among the dozens of volunteers who came to help that weekend. Others included Goode’s North Fork Mono nephews Jesse Valdez and Elijah Knight, who work on a Forest Service “Hot Shot” firefighting crew, as well as Danny Manning (Mountain Maidu/Navajo/Sioux), the assistant fire chief of the Greenville Rancheria 300 miles to the north.

Because these three would be among those wielding drip torches to carefully ignite the grasses and brush, they wear fire-resistant clothing. The torches have extended spouts that release small drizzles of mixed flaming diesel and gasoline. Other essential tools for the job include Pulaskis (a combined ax and adze), McClouds (part rake, part hoe), shears, chainsaws and pole saws.

Knight has been working as a firefighter for six years. This is his third year helping on this project. He and his partner, Sheila Santamaria, pause by a circular patch of chest-high sourberry and redbud stalks growing from the ashes of last year’s burn. “I came here the first year just to have fun,” he admits. “What I didn’t know is that fire does a lot of good. I’m kind of new to this whole tribal thing. I didn’t know we were burning for so long. Now seeing regrowth like this, seeing how much life has returned, is cool. I realize we’re doing something important.”

Amid the ka-chunk of hand tools and loud buzz of chainsaws at this cultural burning Theresa Williams-Lundy (Mono/Chukchansi) and her granddaughter Alanna Clark are using pruning shears to cut sourberry stalks for cradleboards. “This is a blessing, this site. Sourberry sticks are rare this year because of the drought,” she explains, wrapping a bundle of 25 to 30 tightly in yarn for drying. She scrapes the reddish bark off one stalk to show the inner cream-colored stem that is used for weaving. Its berries are also much sought after as a tasty and valued traditional treat.

Danny Manning creates traditional items from wood, such as clapper sticks played during songs and ceremonies. At the back of his dark green truck, he reaches past some of these notched sticks made of elderberry to show a pair of cradleboards he made of willow. The cradleboards demonstrate how fire can help trees grow straighter. One cradleboard is constructed of thick rudely uneven stalks, but the stalks used for the other are slim, straight and tightly bound. “I ask people would you want your baby to lay on this one or that one?,” Manning asks. “The difference is after you burn them, willows grow back with straighter shoots.”

Lois Bohna (North Fork Mono/Chukchansi) is a master basket maker who learned her art from her great aunt and collects material from the property. “My grandmother would talk about our people burning and said that’s how you get really good basket materials. You can prune all you want but if you just cut a bush back you get a fatter stick, not the long, fine, skinny ones when you burn,” she explains. “Redbud also makes a fine string. Deer grass that we use in our coil baskets has to be burned for the spring sprouts to come back beautiful, and soap root—if you can burn a brush pile—the seeds will germinate. I’ve seen thousands of soap root buds coming up. Everything has to have fire.”

Also known as the Acorn Lady, Bohna says, “My great grandmother was known for making the best acorn [meal] in the mountains. My mother helped her and my mother schooled me. I called her ‘quality control.’ There’s an art to processing acorns, pounding, grinding and cooking them with hot rocks,” she says, “I’ve got 2,000 pounds of acorn sitting in our barn right now. I’m an acorn-picking whizz. A good crop’s not buggy, and so trees need to be smoked. The trees need fire.”

“To feed one person in the old camps took 1,000 pounds of acorns a year,” Bohna says. “We’d trade acorn for pinion nuts with Paiutes and put stinky stuff in the granaries to keep the grizzlies away.” (The last California grizzly bear was seen in 1924.) Just as more than 150 million pine trees have been lost from drought and bark beetle infestation, California’s oak trees are now threatened by forest crowding and global warming. “I see a day when we don’t have any oak trees,” worries Bohna. “And the animals—the squirrels, deer and bears—depend on acorns.”

Scaling Up Good Fire

Cal Fire cites more than 130 scientific studies that make the case for controlled burns as a way to combat this growing threat. The challenge is scaling up “good fire” in time to save the state’s forests while dealing with vexing issues such as air quality permits, insurance liability and a shortened burning season due to climate change.

The Forest Service and Cal Fire estimate that 8 to 10 million acres of the state’s 33 million acres of forest need urgent thinning. The agencies have committed to selectively cutting and burning up to 1 million acres a year by 2025.

“We had not appreciated burning, and then it became popular in the 1970s and ‘80s and we called it prescribed burns and ‘something new,’ which is not true,” explains John Williams, who works on the Prescribed Fire Monitoring Program at the University of California, Davis. “It was done long before, when Native people would get arrested for arson for doing their burns.” Williams attended this cultural burn along with archeologists from the University of California, Berkeley; students from Middlebury and Montana State; and a small team from the 3,200-acre Pepperwood Preserve located in Sonoma California, which is doing its own burns working with a locally based Native advisory council.

During the past two decades, the Mariposa cultural burns have brought together many Native communities. “We have tribes now from four to five counties who come here and gather sticks and berries and acorns because we’ve been restoring cultural resources with fire,” Goode explains.

On the third morning of the burn it’s raining hard, yet this hasn’t dampened anyone’s spirits at the tent camp by the main gate. Under an open-sided tent, Williams-Lundy presents Elijah Knight and Sheila Santamaria with a “pusak” to carry their expected first child. When the infant is around 6 months old, the supporting sticks of the cradleboard will begin to break and it will be time for a larger hoop carrier. She shows them how to wrap their infant in a blanket and secure the child with straps to the backboard as Keith Turner blesses them with sage smoke to the rhythmic sound of split clappers.

Turner then speaks to those assembled, “We’re doing burning for Mother Earth and in all our hearts, there is a loving fire. I was raised by my great-grandmother and she never said ‘pray’; she just said ‘talk with the Creator, think about the seven generations [after you].”

After the gathering, a team forms to cut, rake and burn a path through an overgrown trail several hundred yards from the campsite down to Mariposa Creek. Later in the afternoon, experienced firefighters Valdez, Knight, Nielsen and Manning line up at one end of the meadow with drip torches. A double rainbow forms overhead. They move forward, drizzling fire in a steady line to light off the tarweed and invasive star thistle across several acres where fire-tolerant native grasses have begun making a comeback. But instead of generating a wall of flame like the previous year, yesterday’s downpour and today’s early rains, cloud cover and humidity set the grasses to crackling, burning and sizzling before sputtering out and dying. They decide to try again in a week or so.

Ron Goode is not bothered. “I feel fulfilled with the burn when these people arrive,” he explains, “because they come to help us be a part of the land and nature and take the spirituality back with them to all the places they’ve come from. Once we put fire on the ground to restore it, we know we’re taking care of Mother Earth. You can wash Mother Earth with rain,” he adds with a smile, “but she still needs a new dress to feel good, so that’s what fire does.”

Chukchansi firefighter John Saucedo is descended from generations of forest workers. Photo by Stuart Palley.

A Logger, a Topper and a Hot Shot

Chukchansi firefighter John Saucedo’s maternal great-grandfather, Jack Roan (Southern Sierra Miwok) used cultural burning long before controlled burns were adopted by non-Natives. But as the displacement of Indigenous people increased, many Native Californians were forced to find jobs as workers in the booming timber industry, laboring in logging camps, often doing the most dangerous jobs for half the pay of white workers.

Saucedo’s maternal grandfather Bill Bolton (Southern Sierra Miwok/Chukchansi), born in 1895, worked in timber mills and also as a “topper,” chopping the canopies off tall trees before they were felled. Saucedo has a picture of Bolton more than 150 feet up, on top of a tree whose canopy he’d just axed away. His son, Saucedo’s father, also worked in a timber mill as did Saucedo for a couple of years starting in 1989. He went on to be a logger, doing the industry’s most dangerous work—high-lead logging, attaching fallen trees to Yarders, or machines that drag the logs up steep hillsides. Then he decided to fight fires.

“I was 17 and logged three seasons before going to work in an all-Native American Hot Shot [firefighting] crew for the Forest Service,” he recalls. “In the southern Sierra in 1989 to ’90 the logging ended, but the fires grew with the bugs [tree-killing bark beetles]. So I started working fire.” He now contracts with the Forest Service and Cal Fire to drive a bulldozer to take down burning trees.

In recent years, many Indigenous loggers have become firefighters to help combat the more destructive wildfire seasons. “I’ve seen death and burns and mudslides,” says Saucedo.

Saucedo attended the cultural fire event near Mariposa this past February. He is proud that “I did a full circle from logging to fire fighting to good practices like this, preparing the land.”

This past spring, the Chukchansi held their first cultural burn on their tribal land in Coarsegold, California, to encourage sourberries growth. “We have documentation of cultural fires in the Coarsegold area during the late 1800s (near Chukchansi land),” adds Saucedo. His great-grandfather Jack Rowan may have helped set those fires.

Photographer Stuart Palley covers the environment, art and other subjects. His recent book “Terra Flamma: Wildfires at Night” documents catastrophic wildfires in California.

Authors

David Helvarg

David Helvarg is an author, journalist and frequent contributor to American Indian magazine. His latest book is “Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp.”

A Silent Killer: Black Ash Basket Makers are Battling a Voracious Beetle to Keep Their Heritage Alive

ChampionC — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 14:00:00 +0000

Environment

A Silent Killer: Black Ash Basket Makers are Battling a Voracious Beetle to Keep Their Heritage Alive

From Issue: Spring 2020 / Vol. 21 No. 1

by Anne Bolen

In 2014, Renee Wasson Dillard was standing near her truck, getting ready to put on her rubber boots and walk into her “honey hole”—her favorite grove of black ash trees a few miles from her Anishinaabe community on the northwest coast of Michigan. A member of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, Dillard had been making her living as a basket maker for 18 years. She visited this swamp at least once a month to find at least one straight tree that could provide wood for her baskets. Then it happened: a glimmering emerald ash borer landed on her shoulder. She knew this invasive beetle had infested the forest and her precious ash trees would soon be gone. “I just sat there and cried,” she recalls. “It was devastating.”

Smaller than a penny, deceptively beautiful emerald ash borer beetles have killed millions of ash trees in North America during the past two decades. Photo by David Cappaert

A seemingly healthy forest could be infested by the invasive emerald ash borer for years before showing signs it is dying, such as this grove of black ash trees. Photo courtesy U.S. Forest Service

The emerald ash borer larvae burrow through a tree’s inner bark, leaving “galleries” behind that that disrupt the tree’s ability to transport water and nutrients. Photo courtesy of U.S. Forest Service

Sarah Medawis Church (left, with her niece, Nancy, in Allegan County, Michigan, in the 1930s) was a skilled basket maker and the great-grandmother of contemporary basket artist Kelly Church. Since the 19th century, basket makers may have sold their works to local farmers and resort tourists. Photo courtesy of the Church family

Kelly Church (left) shows her fellow basket makers how to choose a straight, basket-quality tree. Photo by Jennifer Neptune

Church's husband, Jeff Strand, helps fell and carry the heavy logs out of the forest. Photo courtesy of Kelly Church

Renee Wasson Dillard pounds a black ash log to split the wood into strips, which are fed into a splitter (next image). Photo courtesy of Renee Wasson Dillard

To make splints for weaving, strips of black ash wood are fed up through the splitter, pulled apart and smoothed. Photo by Jennifer Neptune

At NMAI’s Cultural Resources Center, Cherish Parrish (left) and her mother, Kelly Church, discuss the variations in strawberry baskets, a common gift for life events such as births and marriages for tribes ranging from the Great Lakes to the Northeast. Photo by NMAI Staff

Parrish smells a century-old Potawatomi basket to see if she can confirm its type of wood. Photo by NMAI Staff

Researcher Adriana Greci Green (left) and Renee Wasson Dillard consult on the construction of an Odawa cedar bark bag, much like the ones Dillard is now making. Photo by NMAI Staff

Jennifer Neptune takes a photo of a plethora of fancy baskets, many from her own Penobscot community. Photos by NMAI Staff

NMAI Collections Manager Kelly McHugh talks about the resources available to Native researchers. Photos by NMAI Staff

Dillard and the other basket makers examine an Ojibwe cedar bark mat from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota dating to at least 1925. Photos by NMAI Staff

At a workshop at Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, Parrish teaches how to weave a black ash basket, using water to make the wood pliable. Photo by NMAI Staff

Neptune demonstrates a Penobscot technique of weaving around a block of wood to help a basket keep its shape; she adds sweetgrass (in foreground) as a symbol of health. Photo by NMAI Staff

Dillard will frequently add feet to her baskets to help stabilize them. Photo by NMAI Staff

Kelly Church’s “Sustaining Traditions-Digital Teachings” black ash basket evokes a Fabergé egg, which represents a beginning. Inside is an emerald ash borer and a flash drive, which she says, is “the bug’s kryptonite—all of the teachings you would need to bring back black ash basket making if they were ever lost.” The piece is currently part of the “Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists” exhibition on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery. Photo by Richard Church (Odawa/Pottawatomi)

“Sustaining Traditions–Digital Teachings,” Kelly Church, 2018; 9.5" x 4.5" black ash, Rit dye, copper, velvet, vial containing emerald ash borer, and flash drive.

Smaller than a penny, these deceptively beautiful bugs have killed millions of ash trees in North America during the past two decades—and they show no signs of stopping. Many American Indian and First Nation basket makers have relied upon black ash for its pliable, durable wood for centuries. Now this unique species is disappearing before their eyes. Yet they are not giving up without a fight. In addition to their on-the-ground efforts to protect remaining black ash, an innovative Smithsonian partnership is enabling a band of Native sister basket makers to study a rare collection of baskets that could help them keep their heritage alive.

Femmes Fatal

As have many other basket makers, Dillard first heard about the emerald ash borer from Ottawa/Pottawatomi basket maker Kelly Church. Growing up in southwestern Michigan during the 1970s, Church was in her thirties before she and her 12-year-old daughter, Cherish Parrish, decided to learn black ash basketry together from Church’s father and cousin. In 2003, she was demonstrating basket making at Michigan State University when Deborah McCullough, a forest entomologist from the institution, handed her a flier about a new invasive insect that was devastating ash trees. “My whole world changed,” says Church.

McCullough remembers receiving the call in June 2002 to go out to look at some sick ash trees near Detroit. When she pulled off a section of a tree’s bark, she was shocked: its inner bark was covered with extensive “galleries,” S-shaped tunnels dug by boring insect larvae. Trees can usually survive such damage from a few native boring insects, but this was massive. “They just had larval galleries all over them,” she says. “I had never seen that on ash trees. No native insects feed on them like that.”

Researchers sent beetles collected from dying trees to Oregon State University, London's Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian, but experts could not match it to any known North American species, even in the Museum of Natural History’s 35 million insect collection. Eduardo Jendek at the Institute of Zoology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences finally identified the species as Agrilus planipennis. McCullough and her colleagues dubbed the metallic-colored beetle the “emerald ash borer,” or EAB.

The researchers suspect the invasive insect was transported to the United States on wooden crates, pallets or dunnage. Indigenous to China and South Korea, EAB does not kill healthy Asian ash species. However, it can colonize all of the 16 ash tree species in North America, and it is partial to black and green ash. The adult beetles that nibble on leaves aren’t really the problem. Females lay eggs on the bark. When the eggs hatch, the larvae burrow into and feed on the inner bark, leaving trails that disrupt the tree’s ability to transport water and nutrients.

Because the larvae’s damage is hidden beneath bark, landowners often don't realize their trees have been infested until signs such as dying branches become apparent—which could be up to five years later. Many people are also unaware of or have ignored U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) quarantines barring the transport of ash trees, logs or firewood from infested states. As a result, this near-invisible invader has spread quickly. The Emerald Ash Borer Information Network reports the insect is now found in 35 states and the Canadian provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Manitoba.

Nothing Quite Like It

Black ash occupies a unique ecological and cultural niche. It can grow on well-drained stream edges and ridges but is also one of the few woody plants that thrive in wetlands and bogs. It supports a variety of plant-eating species, including Hercules and rhinoceros beetles, rare moths such as the Canadian sphinx and tadpoles, which feast on its fallen leaves. An average tree lives 35 to 100 years, but some can survive more than 200 years.

Native weavers in what is now the Great Lakes and Northeastern United States and eastern Canada have known for centuries that when it comes to a hard but flexible wood that can be coaxed, bent and twirled into a basket, nothing compares to black ash. Jennifer Neptune, a Penobscot basket maker from Maine’s Indian Island who has been creating intricate baskets for 30 years, agrees: “I’ve tried different trees. There’s nothing that can replace black ash.” It is even part of the Penobscot people’s creation story.

Adriana Greci Green is a curator of Indigenous Art of the Americas at The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia. She explains that the sturdy wood of black ash was first used to create utilitarian baskets to carry food or other heavy objects. By the mid-19th century, settlers began buying laundry and shopping baskets from Native women who would sell door-to-door. Later, resort tourism in some towns developed a market for “fancy” baskets, ones decorated with complex curls or colored with dyes made from berries or other natural materials. In her Michigan community, says Dillard, “If you ate well or had new shoes for your kids, it was because you made baskets.”

By early 20th century, more Native people were living in urban areas. While the Depression in the 1930s greatly reduced demand, many Native people still eked out a living with their weaving skills. But by the 1940s, other jobs, such as cleaning houses or factory work, paid more. Greci Green says, “getting the tree, hauling it out—young people didn’t want to do that backbreaking work.”

Another factor that impacted basket making was that beginning in the late 1800s and well into the 20th century, U.S. government officials forced American Indian children into boarding schools, where teachers forbade them to continue their cultural practices. “It’s an amazing story that anyone recalls making baskets,” Dillard says.

The Personality of an Ash

The process of making a black ash basket starts in the woods, usually a muddy swamp. While collecting a tree can be a family or a community affair, doing so is still no easy matter. “Any basket maker worth her salt has had her boots sucked off her feet,” says Dillard laughing.

In the forest, you have to be able to identify not only a black ash, but a “basket-quality” tree, one that is at least 25 years old, straight and not full of blemishing knots. Once a good candidate is found, the gatherer will cut a small wedge from the trunk to make sure it shows at least eight growth rings and that they are wide enough to be split apart. If the tree is not appropriate, the hole will be patched with mud and the gatherer will move on.

However, if a choice tree is found, it is thanked for what it is about to offer. Dillard says she asks the tree for its permission to be taken and then tells it, “They are going to love you. You are going to be in a new form.”

After the tree is felled, it has to be cut into logs and carried out, often on a shoulder. To separate the annual growth rings, the log is laid down and its end pounded with the blunt end of an ax. The resulting strips are scored with a knife and fed into a “splitter,” a tool made of two slabs of wood held between the legs. The strips are fed up through the splitter and pulled apart. Each has a rough and a smooth side. For fancy baskets, these will be smoothed and sometimes split into thinner splints for decoration. Before weaving, splints are moistened with water so they become pliable.

“Each tree has its own personality and you never know what is going to happen or what it is going to be,” says Dillard. The darker, inner brown wood might be used to weave a utilitarian basket or a colored pattern into a fancy basket, while the smooth side of the blonde sapwood will face outward. And the thinnest splints of wood will be reserved delicate decorations, such as curls or bows.

Dillard says that “from bush to basket and all the steps in between, it is a spiritual process.” When she is weaving, she calls her ancestors home. “My body is moving in the same motions that my ancestors have,” she says. Each piece of wood is treated with respect. After a basket is finished, any unusable pieces are burned in a clean fire and blessed with tobacco.

Neptune says in her community, people take on different tasks in the basket-making process. The harvesting of trees is primarily taken on by men, while others, such as herself, gather materials such as decorative sweetgrass from the wetlands along the coast.

Church still harvests with her family. She says they used to be able to “drive 15 minutes any direction” and find a good tree. Now she says EAB has wiped out much of the ash in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula—“we’ve lost the trees that are viable”—so they sometimes drive up to eight hours north to search for one.

Giving Baskets a Voice

With millions of ash trees at risk, so is much of Native basket making. Ash baskets are valuable time capsules: they capture a great range of distinct uses, styles and techniques, and the materials used to create them reflect what is available at that time in the environment. Yet for this bounty of information to be unlocked, someone has to tell these baskets’ stories.

Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) and Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage have partnered on the Recovering Voices program to ensure that Native people who visit Smithsonian’s vast collections can bring what they learn back to their communities. Since 2009, this initiative has enabled 35 groups from Indigenous communities around the globe to come to Washington, D.C., and interact with items related to their cultures in Smithsonian archives. The program “utilizes the best of both museums,” says NMAI Collections Manager Kelly McHugh.

The Recovering Voices team arranges the groups’ transportation and lodging, helps develop their research focus and videotapes and takes notes during their sessions with the objects so “they can be in the moment,” says Emily Cain, the program’s community research manager. They also receive a copy of the recordings and notes from the sessions. “It is vital for community members to spend time with their heritage objects and be able to record all of this knowledge,” says Gwyneira Isaac, NMNH curator of North American Ethnology.

As part of Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Initiative, Isaac worked with the Recovering Voices team to enable Church, Parrish, Dillard and Neptune to visit NMAI’s Cultural Research Center and NMNH last fall. At the two museums, they examined more than 140 baskets that were mostly from Ojibwe, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Mohawk and Seneca communities. Made of black and white ash, elm, basswood, bulrush and sweetgrass, they ranged from those that were more than century old to contemporary art pieces. During four days, the women were able to scrutinize every basket.

As some early records were incomplete, part of the mutual benefit of the program is that both the basket makers and the museum staff could collaborate to try to confirm any missing information, such as the materials used. Basket makers rarely signed their works before the second half of the 20th century, so some of the visiting women recognized an artist or a family by their paticular techniques or styles. Other characteristics are indicative of the culture or region. For example, a “star flower” design on top might indicate the basket was from the Great Lakes, or feet on the basket might be a sign it was Anishinaabe. Curls often decorate Penobscot and other communities’ fancy baskets. “Together, we were able to learn so much about the styles unique to our own areas,” says Church.

Some baskets filled in a gap of information that might have been missing for decades. In the early 1900s, anthropologist Frank Speck collected many basswood baskets from Neptune’s community, taking the knowledge of how they were made with him. “It makes a hole. People were doing it out of memory. Things made after that weren’t as intricate,” she says. Talking about one of the many such baskets that she found in the collection, she says, “To see that actual basket up close and the details. It was remarkable.”

All of the weavers agreed that what they enjoyed most was being able to share their observations and skills. “It was really amazing to be with other weavers, looking at things together and seeing things through their eyes,” says Neptune. Parrish adds, “It was fantastic to be in their presence and able to learn in the traditional way: through conversations with baskets in hand.”

Church encourages others to come to NMAI’s Cultural Resources Center to learn from the collections and keep basket making alive for their people and their ancestors. “I always believe they are with us,” she says. “They are happy when we are still using the baskets.”

“As you create a basket, you put in a lot of tradition and a piece of yourself or your spirit,” explains Neptune. So being with the baskets, she says, “was like visiting old friends.” When it was time to leave, she was a bit remorseful and told them goodbye. “I touched every Penobscot basket so they knew we were there.”

For the Next Generation

Ironically, the insect that is devastating these basket makers’ ash trees may be making them more determined to preserve their heritage. “We all have the emerald ash borer on our minds,” says Church, who has been leading workshops about its destructive force for basket makers and the public ever since its discovery in Michigan.

On November 2, the women spent their last day together teaching about black ash basket making at NMNH. Dillard and Neptune demonstrated how they make a black ash basket while Church and Parrish taught children and their families to make their own. All of the presenters talked about how their art is at risk from EAB and what everyone can do to help stop its spread, including learning how to inject their own trees with a targeted insecticide and not transporting firewood from ash trees.

The team’s education efforts will continue in their communities and beyond. They are collaborating with Shelia Ransom from the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation in New York and Canada to create a set of flash cards that will feature photos of baskets in the collections, basket making techniques and related plants with descriptions in English and the Native languages Anishinaabemowin, Mohawk and Penobscot. EAB was found on Ransom’s reservation in 2017. Tribal members have taken steps to combat it, including planting groves of basket-quality black ash.

Neptune also teaches dozens of young people in her community to make baskets each year and has been tapping into her large network to spread the word about EAB. She is a board member of the Abbe Museum (a Smithsonian Affiliate) and is the head of the Penobscot Nation Museum and the Maine Indian Basket Makers Alliance, which has more than 100 members. The alliance has partnered with the University of Maine and U.S. Forest Service to increase outreach about the beetle. Even so, EAB was discovered in Maine in 2018.

Recently, some hope for ash has emerged. Researchers have reported some green and white ash trees appear to not succumb to the beetle, and perhaps the genetic resistance of such “lingering ash” could be captured in a breeding program. Meanwhile, many tribes are working with the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and U.S. Forest Service on “biocontrols,” releasing Asian wasps that feed on EAB on their reservations. Woodpeckers also love the juicy bug and are devouring them—just not fast enough.

If all else fails, some tribal members, including Church, have collected hundreds of black ash seed samples, many of which have been sent to the USDA National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colorado. Here they are stored frozen, awaiting the day that the EAB is no longer a threat and they can be replanted.

A Changed Landscape

The art of weaving inspired by black ash basketry may continue, although for some, it has taken on a different form. Dillard doesn’t visit her favorite grove of ash trees anymore. “It is incredibly sad. There were acres and acres of ash, and it is all gone,” she says. She now uses cedar and basswood to weave baskets and bags, and she is helping refurbish her community’s meeting houses with bulrush mats. However, in her converted Amish barn studio, she still teaches basket making to anyone who wishes to learn. Recently, she wove with her 8-year-old granddaughter and 9-year-old grandson. “I just want them to remember how important that this is to our culture.”

Church says the art of black ash basket making is far from dead. “You can still be living as you are dying.” She is using some of her artworks to teach about the destructive power of EAB. To show the shortage of black ash, she started making baskets out of venetian blinds. Inside one of her other baskets modeled after an emerald Fabergé egg is a vial containing an adult ash borer and, as she calls it, “the bug’s kryptonite” —a flash drive containing “all of the teachings you would need to bring back black ash basket making if they were ever lost.”

Also a leading basket artist, Parrish says she hopes that “the current focus on sustainability will bring [black ash] products like baskets back into common household use, so that they may have more of a place outside of the art world again.”

Meanwhile, Neptune is trying to remain optimistic and warns people not to panic and start cutting down their ash trees. “You can’t give up all hope and destroy what you are trying to save,” she says. “We have an obligation to that tree to do everything in our power to help it survive—for itself, our culture and our baskets.” Black ash “is a metaphor for being Native.” she says. “It is Indigenous. It is how we survived: being flexible, without breaking.”

Authors

Anne Bolen

Anne Bolen is executive editor of American Indian magazine.