This perception is a myth. The indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest shaped their lands with many intentional practices long before settlers came to the continent. One of the most important was controlled burning, which cleared areas of crowded trees, undergrowth and pests, making space for new growth and wildlife.

But European settlement and disease upended Native populations and culture, stifling these practices. For hundreds of years after, fire suppression became the favored means of management, which brought back woods dense with fuels and higher wildfire risks.

That’s changing: Research from more recent decades has realized the merit in controlled burning. Some tribes in Northern California have recently partnered with the Forest Service to implement Native approaches to controlled burns. Others, like the Fort Apache in Arizona, were able to bring back the practice of controlled burns as a means of fuel reduction even earlier. Here in Washington, some tribes have continued their usage of indigenous land management practices by conducting controlled burns on a local scale.

Crosscut spoke with a group of researchers, land managers, policymakers and firefighters who make indigenous wildfire management in Washington a part of their daily lives. We asked them to share more about its importance — how it can both preserve indigenous culture and offer solutions in the West under a changing climate.

Where did your personal connection to fire start?

Cody Desautel, natural resource director of the Colville Tribes, Colville Reservation: I've been fighting fires since 1995. When I was young, it was very common to do a lot of burning in the spring [on the Colville reservation]. That was just something you did, and lots of people did it around the community. It wasn't anything that was official. It was just people in the community that had just grown up that way. It was a common practice to go out and, if there were dead grass and brush, burn it because it reduced fire risk. You usually got a good “green-up” afterwards, which was good for deer and elk and horses and cattle and whatever else you had there, and it reduces your fuel risk later in the summer. There was obviously less people around 20 years ago, so you have less risk of impacting your neighbor, or burning down a structure. We hadn't had any huge fires like we saw in 2015, so smoke in the air was something that was still kind of accepted, and not necessarily recognized as a bad thing.

Emily Washines, CEO of Native Friends and adjunct faculty member at Yakima Valley College, Yakima Valley: I'm a Yakama tribal member. I am an adjunct faculty at Yakima Valley College, and I also run a blog called Native Friends.

I grew up on the Yakama reservation. My dad was a firefighter and continues to work in forestry today. I have very early memories of just seeing his different fire gear at different hours, whether he was coming or going, and then I remember him giving small anecdotes about what fire means, what our lands mean, what this could potentially be a sign of.

Ernesto Alvarado, research associate professor of wildland fire sciences, Seattle: I grew up in northern Mexico. A group of people received a land grant in Mexico as part of the agrarian reform in the ’30s. They were given this land and they had to deforest it, to clear it, which meant they had to cut all the mesquite — this is in the Chihuahuan Desert — and all the creosote bush and all that, burning it to open the land for agriculture. So when I was growing up, we were burning. And then at the end of the agricultural season, they burned the agricultural residues.

I was in forest protection and fighting fires in 1980. I was doing firefighting, and then I started coordinating the firefighting for 2 million acres in the north of Mexico. After a while I realized, OK, I was interested in fire but I don't really know anything about fires, and people who know about fires are my dad, my grandfather. So I went to grad school and I started studying fires.

Steve Rigdon, former Yakama Tribe firefighter and general manager of Yakama Forest Products, Yakama Reservation: I was 18 years old when I started fighting fire. Fighting fires is like a family business, to be honest with you. My older brothers, a lot of cousins — we all fought fire. It's like an apprenticeship program for people interested in forestry, people that like the mountains, like to hunt, like to fish, like that outdoor life, and fighting fire is a way to earn your stripes. It's almost a kind of warrior vision quest, rite of passage into adulthood, because you have to grow up very fast. You're challenged with a lot of things, and you learn the behaviors of fire and incident commands and the weather and the environment and your sense of place and what you're doing and protecting. For Yakamas, it's been a very sound, sustainable avenue for our membership to become a part of protecting our resources, learning about them and taking steps forward on career paths.

Native people used fire centuries before European settler contact. What did this look like?

Washines: Fire management early on was really about resource management. Whether the foods would need additional help, we noticed that they were weak or there were other invasives coming in, or if the plants just weren't regenerating to be strong enough — then we would do a traditional burn method. And this wouldn't be something that would happen every year. It's something that we would watch and monitor for the plants’ growth. It’s a part of something that's thousands of years old, a data set that we used for land management in early years.

This was noted in the 1850s through different journals from non-Natives. It was really a source of confusion on their part for not knowing why we did that. To them, we were just burning things up for no reason and it was very peculiar that they would be walking through areas that were charred. They didn't understand why.