Since 1992, the California Indian Basketweavers Association has been working to protect native plants and animals and their habitats. Living cultural resources, which are essential to native culture, are in danger from industrial timber harvest practices, herbicide uses, development, CIBA works to restore fire’s traditional role to the California landscape
Many of the plants that are necessary for basketweaving require regular fire. Gathering areas today have become overgrown or have completely disappeared. In historic times, Indian people set fire in the fall to patches of plants that they used for weaving in order to produce straight, long, and flexible new shoots the following spring. Sites were burned in rotation, so that there would always be a steady supply of the necessary materials for weaving a tremendous variety of sizes, shapes, and types of baskets that were used in daily life. Some plants that require burning to provide the best materials include deer grass, bear grass, redbud, hazel, deer brush, sumac or sourberry, and choke cherry. Basketweavers today may have to travel great distances to obtain a small amount of the materials necessary for weaving traditional baskets. Bear grass, Xerophyllum tenax, a material that forms the white overlay design in the intricately beautiful baskets of the northern tribes (Hoopa, Wiyot, Karuk, Yurok, Tolowa, Wintu, Pit River, Yana, and Mountain Maidu tribes) cannot be used unless it has been burned one or two years previously. The fibers become brittle when they are not burned, but grow to be soft and flexible the year after burning.
CIBA works continually to encourage the US Forest Service and BLM to conduct cultural burns, for the benefit of basketweavers. Beargrass burns have been conducted on the Shasta-Trinity, Six Rivers, Klamath, Plumas, and Tahoe National Forests in recent years. However, burns need to become a regular part of the agency’s yearly routine plan of work. Areas which are burned are only productive for one to two years after the burn. For beargrass, the best weaving materials come from plants which grow under the canopy of old forests which have been burned regularly. Reduction of surface fuels has been identified by forest ecologists as necessary to restore old forest fire resiliency. Thus, cultural burning to restore good basketry plants is exactly the right prescription to promote the other forest values that the agency is trying to promote. So, why isn’t the agency burning more? Barriers to regular prescribed burning include agency budget shortfalls, air quality concerns, the real and perceived risks involved if fires get away and threaten homes and other property, and lack of institutional knowledge and capacity in the beneficial uses of fire. An excellent source of information about efforts to restore fire to California’s fire adapted landscapes can be found at The Nature Conservancy’s fire website. Additional resources can be found in the Tribal Wildfire Resource Guide.
Prescribed bear grass burn on the Plumas National Forest, October 2005. Photo courtesy of Kevin McCormick, Plumas National Forest. CIBA secured grant funding for the Forest Service to offset the costs of the burn. For more information about CIBA’s Resource Protection Program, contact Vivian Parker in the Sierra Nevada region at vivparker@starband.net, or Jennifer Kalt in the Northcoast region at jkalt@asis.com. |
and other types of impacts. In addition, a century of active fire suppression has severely reduced the abundance and variety of plants and animals. 
