Sunday, June 16, 2024

Native Wisdom and Advanced Archaeology in a Time of Surging Wildfires


 
 JUNE 14, 2024
Facebook

After a sharp increase in uncontrollable wildfires across the northern U.S. and Canada in recent decades, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the U.S. Forest Service have been open to new approaches and ways to address the inherent weaknesses of their bureaucracies. Due to their lack of historical understanding of past fire management methods, they turned to archaeologists, who have collected information on more than 10,000 years of human activity. For their approach, these government agencies studied the perspectives and wisdom of Indigenous peoples offered through shared oral histories.

Outreach and deliberations by federal officials led to the creation of the People, Fire, and Pines working group in 2018. The working group was formed with support from the Coalition of Archaeological Synthesis (CfAS).

Thanks to the advances in technology and the accumulation of an increasingly detailed global data set of human history, modern archaeology has more usable information for government and society than in decades past. CfAS, one of the leading early drivers of this approach, helped the working group conduct two workshops in 2018 and 2019. These workshops attempted to bridge a gap between Western and Indigenous perspectives to create a more holistic understanding of human fire use in North America since the most recent ice age. The participants of the workshops studied the Indigenous knowledge of the Border Lakes region, developed across the millennia of living on and with the land, along with archaeological and tree-ring data gathered by researchers from red pine forests in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) and the Great Lakes region.

The first workshop reached out to members of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and the Bois Forte Band of Lake Chippewa, focusing on “Indigenous fire stewardship” and the “Western concepts of wilderness.” The second workshop was held at the Lac La Croix First Nation Reserve and delved further into the discussion on ways to propel collaborative efforts. The workshops, along with other outputs from the group, including museum exhibits, documentaries, and peer-reviewed papers, have helped reshape the perspectives surrounding Indigenous fire stewardship and the damaging effects of settler groups, who actively disrupted the long-standing relationships between people and their environment.

In a 2020 paper, People, Fire, and Pines project organizer Evan Larson, a dendrochronologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, along with two University of Minnesota researchers, analyzed tree-ring data from 500 years of red pine forest growth in the BWCAW of northern Minnesota. This research began with a focus on the scars left behind by forest fires and co-occurring cultural modification of bark removal for medicinal and utilitarian purposes, and it later broadened to include the historical relationship between people and fire. Though the Indigenous peoples fundamentally changed and shaped these landscapes with fire for centuries, the Western population, who later moved into these lands, designated culturally relevant landscapes as “wilderness” and inaccurately defined these areas as “untrammeled by man,” under the Wilderness Act of 1964. In fact, humans have shaped the region of northern Minnesota for thousands of years through fire and forest management practices.

The research conducted in the BWCAW and facilitated through CfAS support continues to expand the understanding of Indigenous fire stewardship through the Wisconsin Sea Grant-funded project Nimaawanji’idimin giiwitaashkodeng. The “Fire, blueberries and treaty rights” episode of the podcast, “The Water We Swim In,” offers a glimpse into the story that emerged from this work. In the episode, members of Nimaawanji’idimin giiwitaashkodeng, which translates to, “We are gathering around the fire,” share their experiences with cultural fire use and gathering blueberries among the pine trees. In the context of paleoecological and archaeological data, the ecological evidence of past surface fire activity obtained from the study confirms that the BWCAW was periodically burned to achieve forest conditions that were more desirable to the Border Lakes Anishinaabeg community and are linked to the resilience and ecological health of pine forests throughout the region.

Many other North American ecosystems burned periodically as well—sometimes through forest fires started by lightning strikes, but more often through intentional fires set by Native American communities. More than a mere tool for survival and achieving agricultural goals, fire became integral to and deeply rooted within the culture of Indigenous groups. For example, the Ojibwe of the Great Lakes region regarded fire as a sacred force, identifying more than 700 uses for it. The Ojibwe spirit of fire, Oshkigin, was a symbol of renewal and transformation.

Fire is one of our most ancient and important tools for human modification of local environments. Prescribed burning or controlled burning, when used responsibly, is particularly valuable in forest management. For instance, one of the ways in which managed fire benefits the ecology and ecosystem health of forests is that burning unwanted vegetation from the forest floor allows for new seeds to germinate, which increases variability in the type and height of plants growing.

Red pine forests, like those found in the Border Lakes area, especially benefit from this use of fire as their seeds require exposed soil to grow. Moreover, a greater balance between woody and grassy/herbaceous plants improves food availability for livestock, wildlife, and pollinators. Clearing dead or dry vegetation in this manner also allows for fire-dependent species and important food sources to grow, such as the blueberry in the Great Lakes region. Blueberries used to proliferate in the region due to fire-based interventions from the Ojibwe community, who cleared patches of the forest floor and made them conducive to berry bush growth. In addition, reducing the amount of dry vegetation on forest floors also limits the potential severity of future wildfires by minimizing the available fuels.

The arrival of European settlers to the North American continent, however, brought about a turning point in the relationship between people and fire. While North American Indigenous groups viewed fire as a great assistance to landscape management, the Europeans only saw it as a destructive force that needed to be avoided at all costs, and this led them to implement policies that suppressed all fire. The shift in attitude within the continent and suppression of Indigenous culture caused a significant loss in traditional fire knowledge and practices, leading to ecological consequences and large wildfires. As a member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Melonee Montano, mentioned in the podcast episode “Fire, blueberries and treaty rights,” the land has “literally been waiting” for fire and fire-based intervention.

By studying material cultural resources, such as evidence of bark collection and forest fires left behind in the form of scars on trees, archaeological researchers gain insight into past societies and the environments people lived in during those times. In the case of wildfires, a better understanding of past human involvement in shaping local landscapes can help prevent catastrophic fires in the future.

Collaboration between researchers, forest management agencies, such as the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service, and descendant communities creates an opportunity to reassess current practices and policies surrounding wilderness management. Since the formation of the People, Fire, and Pines group, fire management plans have been revised in partnership with the Lac La Croix First Nation to include prescribed fire in the Quetico Provincial Park of Ontario, Canada, where “[t]hese fires are important in allowing the regeneration of red and white pine and maintaining their presence on the landscape.” Burn plans for the Cloquet Forestry Center in Minnesota were also changed to include cultural fire use through a collaboration between the University of Minnesota and the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. This initiative was funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Since the change in burn plans, multiple successful prescribed fires have been conducted by Ojibwe firefighters in the Cloquet Forestry Center.

The resurgence of cultural fire practices, stemming from the initiatives started by the People, Fire, and Pines project, underlines the value of combining Indigenous and archaeological knowledge. By reclaiming controlled burns and implementing centuries-old fire practices to support effective forest management today, the relationship between people and their surrounding environments can be reestablished. This restoration will not only benefit all parties in the Border Lakes region and beyond but will also increase forest ecosystem diversity and resilience to fires, offering a hopeful future for forest management in a changing climate.

The success of these initiatives sets a precedent for other institutions, which may benefit from a similar collaborative approach by the sharing of temporal data among researchers, archaeologists, and descendent communities. Organizations, such as CfAS, have begun to change the context of archaeological research by fostering collaboration across multiple institutions and disciplines.

Analyzing prehistoric data to better understand the root causes of modern issues that originated in the greater global past, like human contributions to climate change, conflict, and disease, can be used to facilitate solutions to current issues and avoid greater ones in the future.

This article was produced by Human Bridges.

Schooled Straight: Confronting the Cis Hetero Compulsory School System

 
 JUNE 14, 2024
Facebook

Image by moren hsu.

“Humankind is innocent, loving, and creative, you dig? It’s the bureaucracies that create the evil, that make Honor and Community impossible, and it’s the kids who really take it in the groin.”

-Paul Goodman

Well, it’s another Pride Month and the so-called Christian Right’s increasingly statist culture war against Queer folk just continues to rage on with the reckless abandon of a runaway bushfire. And why the fuck not? It keeps the faithful stupid and the coffers heavy with their money, so let the hate legislation burn! None of this shocks me. I’m a genderqueer lapsed Catholic in cousin-fucker country, I grew up being terrorized by these goons. But what does disgust me is the way these cretins have targeted children, specifically trans kids, and the way they use the compulsory school system to do it.

2024 will be the fourth consecutive year in a row in which the sheer volume of anti-Queer bills being pushed across the country will shatter the record books. Less than halfway into the year and there have already been 38 of these bills passed and another 579 being considered. Most of these bills will likely fail to do anything but terrorize one of the most statistically vulnerable demographics in the country, but too many of them have already given the public school system a new set of fangs.

Seven states have laws in place that affectively silence any classroom discussion that acknowledges that Queer people actually exist. Eleven states have laws denying trans kids access to bathrooms where they won’t face the kind of mob violence that killed Nex Bennedict this year. And seven states have laws demanding that school officials violate the privacy of their students by outing them to their parents.

The strategy here, beyond the economics of crass political football, isn’t hard to discern. It’s a strategy pretty familiar to the American school system. Kill the Queer, save the child. These people see “transgenderism” as a contagion that should be eradicated, and they have been proven to be more than willing to use the strong arm of the state to strain it from impure children by any means necessary. This strategy can only be accurately described as a form of social genocide and with the suicide rate amongst its targeted demographic already through the roof, this slaughter is becoming increasingly literal.

Many mainstream LGBTQ people and their sundry liberal allies are attempting to push back with their own legislation seeking to make the public school system more inclusive. Washington has recently become the seventh state to enact legislation actually mandating that public schools incorporate some form of LGBTQ-inclusive curricula, and the Biden Administration is attempting to revise Title IX to protect Queer kids from sex discrimination. This all sounds wonderful on the surface, but I’ve received way too many false promises from straight white liberals with blood in their veneers to believe that the very system designed to crush us is suddenly going to become our salvation.

Title IX is actually the ultimate proof of this fickle duplicity. In this dwindling plutocratic empire, a law passed to be a civil rights act is just as easily transformed into a weapon of bigotry depending on whatever demographic the current breeder in the White House happens to be pandering too. Donald Trump used this same law to affect a nationwide bathroom apartheid system in order to protect the civil rights of cis parents who didn’t want their kids’ sharing bathrooms with designated perverts and he has promised the Bible thumpers back in cousin-fucker country that he’ll do it again if they just vote to make Israel great again.

The cold hard reality is that systems designed for oppression cannot be reformed and the compulsory school system itself is one of the most heinous examples of this fact in recorded history. Despite what the liberal teachers’ unions may tell you, public schools have never been bastions of inclusion and tolerance, they are in fact an invention of the original Christian Right, designed specifically for indoctrination and assimilation.

Compulsory schooling has its origins in the Protestant Reformation, with Martin Luther himself envisioning a system in which Christian education would be forced upon children in a fashion similar to the way that the draft forced war upon their fathers. The first public schools were established in Germany during the 14th century under heavy Lutheran influence and would become the seed for the militant compulsory school system of the Prussian Empire which would itself serve as the template for nearly all the public-school systems that followed across the west and beyond.

The Prussian school system was explicitly devised to create a compliant citizenry groomed from an early age into submitting their will to authority with a strict regimen of harshly enforced rules built around a centrally controlled curriculum. It worked. This system helped turn Prussia into an imperial military powerhouse by subjecting generations of children to the same kind of disciplinary indoctrination usually reserved for prisons and boot camps, and the line of morally blind nationalism that it fostered is commonly acknowledged to have created the foundation for the rise of national socialism. It also created the foundation for the American public school system.

The first American public schools were devised by the Puritans of New England as a means of perpetuating their own twisted blend of Calvinism and quite literally suppressing dissent in the cradle. Massachusetts enacted the first general school law in the country in 1789 but it was the Prussian school system that inspired these lunatics to take the system national in the 19th century as a means of enforcing homogeny upon the unruly and diverse masses of a rapidly expanding empire.

This remains the goal at the heart of America’s compulsory school system even in its current secular incarnation. Teachers and administrators across the country are encouraged to enforce a standardized curriculum not for the purpose of education but as a means of tracking and controlling large numbers of children with the ultimate goal of maintaining the order of an authoritarian status quo.

In these glorified prisons it is the individual that suffers the worst. This means any child unable or unwilling to conform to the manufactured will of the majority and among the disabled and the neurodivergent this has always meant Queer children who are defined by their inability to conform to a set pattern.

This is the system that is literally killing our kids. 86% of Queer students in America report having been harassed or assaulted at school and 84% of trans kids do not feel safe in these environments specifically because of their gender. All of this statistically leads to lower GPAs, lower self-esteem, higher dropout rates, and higher rates of suicide, with Queer kids more than four times as likely to commit suicide than their straight peers.

This is personal to me because I experienced the very worst of it firsthand in both parochial and public compulsory institutions. During my twelve-year sentence, I was beaten, molested, humiliated, bullied, demonized, and ostracized by both adult authority figures and the students who mimicked their cruelty. Nearly all of this abuse stemmed from a stubborn unwillingness on my part to conform to conventional gender norms followed by attempts to overcompensate by building a deliberately antisocial persona to protect myself from more abuse.

The result is Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The result is crippling agoraphobia. The result is violent flashbacks, seizures, and multiple personalities. But most importantly, the result is an unwillingness to cut deals with fucking child abusers in allies clothing.

The compulsory school system is a form of indentured servitude designed to break the individual in two. The notion that such a system can be reformed into anything worth salvaging is about as offensively absurd as believing that the prison system can ever be reformed into anything but a glorified plantation or that the police can ever truly serve the communities that they have been tasked with subduing.

As I said before, systems designed for abuse will always be abusive. Even under the best-case scenario, a woke public school system will never amount to much more than a bunch of straight authority figures teaching Queer kids how to be Queer and this is the kind of shit that results in phenomena like detransitioners when non-binary kids are forced to pick a gender defined by cis heteronormativity.

What Queer kids really need are Queer schools or no schools at all. The ideal would be a form of communal unschooling, governed by Queer parents, elders, and found families, that make children a vital part of a multigenerational community and helps them to learn through natural life experiences. However, for the sake of Queer kids in straight households, free schools of the Sudbury model in which students make their own curriculum and exist in a direct democracy with equal rights for both staff and pupils is likely the best option.

But the worst way to combat the Christian Right’s genocidal war on trans youth is to double down on saving the tools designed by authoritarian zealots just like them to destroy us. If we are ever going to protect our kids, then we must destroy these institutions. In other words, save the Queer, smash the school.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.