means participating—that the natural world relies on us to do good
things. You don’t show your love and care by putting what you love
behind a fence. You have to be involved. You have to contribute to
the well-being of the world.
“The land gives us so many gifts; fire is a way we can give back.
In modern times, the public thinks fire is only destructive, but
they’ve forgotten, or simply never knew, how people used fire as a
creative force. The fire stick was like a paintbrush on the
landscape. Touch it here in a small dab and you’ve made a green
meadow for elk; a light scatter there burns off the brush so the
oaks make more acorns. Stipple it under the canopy and it thins the
stand to prevent catastrophic fire. Draw the firebrush along the
creek and the next spring it’s a thick stand of yellow willows. A wash
over a grassy meadow turns it blue with camas. To make
blueberries, let the paint dry for a few years and repeat. Our people
were given the responsibility to use fire to make things beautiful and
productive—it was our art and our science.”
The birch forests maintained by indigenous burning were a
cornucopia of gifts: bark for canoes, sheathing for wigwams and
tools and baskets, scrolls for writing, and, of course, tinder for fires.
But these are only the obvious gifts. Both paper birch and yellow
birch are hosts to the fungus Inonotus obliquus, which erupts
through the bark to form sterile conks, a fruiting body that looks like
a grainy black tumor the size of a softball. Its surface is cracked
and crusted, studded with cinders as if it had been burnt. Known to
people of the Siberian birch forests as chaga, it is a valued
traditional medicine. Our people call it shkitagen.
It takes some effort to find a black knob of shkitagen and then