Planning: FIRE-PLAN: Exploring fire as medicine to revitalize cultural burning in the Upper Midwest

This planning project-- Fire as Medicine-- aims to develop training and knowledge development for Indigenous land management practitioners to promote healthy ecosystems and communities. Indigenous people used fire for centuries to not only ensure ample supplies of important resources, such as food and fiber materials, but also to connect with the land. European colonization changed the close connections between Indigenous people and fire. Today, many land management agencies use prescribed fire to achieve several goals, but these efforts often have limited cultural value for Tribal communities. This project first seeks to understand the cultural context of burning in Indigenous lands and what Indigenous peoples aim to achieve in terms of both ecological and cultural objectives. In developing this research the project provides knowledge, training, and resources to conduct culturally-meaningful burns that are safe and effective. Strong connections with the Tallgrass Prairie and Oak Savanna Fire Science Consortium and the USDA Agricultural Research Service ensure broad dissemination and use by a large stakeholder community in the region. Many Indigenous communities believe regaining control of fire in their landscapes will help heal damage passed down from generation to generation. This project develops capacity for underrepresented communities in the Upper Midwest to understand and implement cultural burning themselves. Specifically, listening sessions with elders and land managers in Indigenous communities aim to inform what is currently known and practiced with respect to cultural burning across the upper Midwest, and identify barriers, knowledge gaps, and under-developed opportunities that currently limit cultural burning. Following the listening sessions, common themes are presented to a focus group of regional Indigenous stakeholders to identify priorities for education and training to be addressed in subsequent phases of the Fire as Medicine project. The team facilitates the development of an Indigenous model of fire regimes based on Traditional Ecological Knowledge for the prairies and woodlands of the Upper Midwest and adjacent regions in Canada. The project includes under-represented groups in all stages of the project development, implementation, and dissemination. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.