Abstract
Anthropogenic fire is generally accepted by contemporary foresters as shaping historical landscapes in the southern Appalachian Mountains, the ancestral lands of the Cherokee people. However, the consensus on historical Cherokee cultural burning practices is largely limited to artifactual inferences and colonial documents. While the historical importance of fire for Cherokee people is richly woven into their oral histories, information on historical Cherokee cultural burning in forestry literature is typically presented in the context of contemporary land management practices, themselves rooted in settler colonialism and institutionalized conservation strategies. However, in the broader literature and cultural context it is clear that Cherokee cultural burning likely had deeply rooted symbolic importance and twentieth century fire exclusion policies banning certain burning practices flouted Cherokee rights through direct interference and significant landscape-level change. Our research explores Cherokee fire traditions prior to the exclusion era and assesses the impacts of fire exclusion policies on landscape change as well as Cherokee cultural practices and sovereignty.
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Notes
The US Forest Service and other foresters disapproved of woods burning (1940), describing it as “incendiarism” (Shea, 1940: 1) or “Paiute forestry,” (Pyne, 2017: 100–110). Yeater (1940) refers to the practice as ignorant and irresponsible, practiced by the “hillbilly” (p. 3) and the “firebug” (p. 1) for excitement, out of spite, because it “is in their blood” (p. 12) or because of “sour on the government and everything in general” (p. 11).
We avoid use of terms such as cultural services or ecosystem services as both stem from Western economic concepts of costs and benefits that view Cherokee stewardship as a set of practices focused exclusively on production (Coeckelbergh, 2017; Winthrop, 2014). We prefer to use benefit to describe any constructive consequence provided to the Cherokee people by their stewardship practices; we derive the qualifiers tangible and intangible from Ryan et al. (2012).
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the support of Clemson University’s National Scholars Program and Honors College. Technical Contribution No. 7146 of the Clemson University Experiment Station. The authors would also like to thank Dr. John M. Coggeshall and Dr. Matthew H. Hooley of Clemson University for their respective inputs in the preliminary stages of this research.
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Colenbaugh, C., Hagan, D.L. After the Fire: Potential Impacts of Fire Exclusion Policies on Historical Cherokee Culture in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, USA. Hum Ecol 51, 291–301 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-023-00395-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-023-00395-z