Description
Jared D. Aldern, of Norwegian and German ancestry, is a historian, grant writer, fire practitioner, and a cofounder of the Sierra-Sequoia Burn Cooperative; he has over thirty years of experience partnering and collaborating with Tribal Nations in California. Theresa Lynn Gregor, a Kumeyaay and Yoéme scholar, researches California American Indian women, Tribal sovereignty, cultural revitalization, and environmental resilience. She leads Mataguay Consulting Services LLC to support Indigenous sovereignty, nonprofit leadership, community service, and survivance.
With rising temperatures, longer summers, drought, and more wildfires occurring in the United States and Canada, there is growing interest in the impact and efficacy of Indigenous fire and cultural burning practices. Indigenous communities throughout this region known as Turtle Island have long used fire to manage their homelands. An interdisciplinary anthology that includes extensive Native views, Landkeeping provides engaging perspectives on the role of Indigenous fire and its importance to our ecological health, cultural continuity, and land-based kinship.
Indigenous-identified and non-Indigenous allies and researchers in ecology, natural resource management, forestry, ethnobotany, and Native American/Indigenous Studies demonstrate how Indigenous knowledge offers sustainable, relational approaches to land care and resilience. Each chapter builds on the idea that fire stewardship is a manifestation of TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge)—a system of knowledge that is rooted in place, transmitted through oral traditions and embodied practices, and guided by values such as reciprocity, responsibility, and interdependence with more-than-humans. By recognizing that fire is part of a larger cosmology, Landkeeping contributors share how fire stewardship is a path toward ecological balance, cultural revitalization, and just climate futures. This book contains 38 photos, 4 charts, 8 maps.