Long before the arrival of settlers, Indigenous peoples used effective methods to preserve the integrity of forests, lakes, and rivers, these essential food stores that needed to be protected. These methods are making a comeback.
Preventative burning
In order to prevent forests from spontaneously consuming themselves, ancestral practices led communities to burn, outside the forest fire season, wood, twigs, dried leaves and grass anything that could be used as fuel. In the spring and fall, fire keepers would set fire to patches of forest where there was an accumulation of branches as well as dead and dry leaves. These fires were controlled by fire keepers.
These techniques are mainly documented in communities in British Columbia, but they seem to have been applied universally. This knowledge, which has suffered from a breakdown in transmission, makes it possible to achieve two objectives: preventing forest fires and regenerating flora.
Helping nature to regenerate
Cultural fires, which are less hot than large fires, leave the rhizomes intact and open up space for small shoots by destroying the accumulations of dead leaves and branches. Berries grow in large quantities on burned land and, in British Columbia, in the community of Skeetchestn, a fire keeper managed to regrow a plant that had not grown for 100 years.
