“Bringing back those relationships with the land”: TERA returns cultural burning to Lake County

LAKE Co, CA, 11/10/22 — On a cold Thursday morning toward the end of October, some 70 people from Robinson Rancheria of Pomo Indians, Cal Fire, Lake County Cal-TREX, the United States Forest Service, and the Tribal Eco-Restoration Alliance (TERA) gathered to kick off a cultural burn on Robinson Rancheria lands. As TERA Crew Lead Stoney Timmons explained, part of the goal for that day’s prescribed fire was to tend to the slope’s legacy oak trees and cut down on the weevil population in acorns, a traditional source of tribal subsistence. 

This is just one of numerous ecological imbalances stemming from more than a hundred years ago, when colonizers first restricted Indigenous tribes’ ability to steward land with burns they’d been conducting for centuries.