Eight firefighters in hard hats and work boots gathered around a gray utility truck on a sunny October morning, in a forest of tall pines, with Lake Tahoe’s glimmering surface a few hundred yards away.
“You’ll need your ear pro and eye pro,” said instructor Ian Colunga.
Ear pro—pro is short for protection—indeed. A pump in the back of the pickup, attached to a roll of flattened, red firehose, is louder than one might guess. His charges took turns fiddling with the pump’s controls and aiming a nozzle to spray a forceful stream of water at a fictional blaze.
The pump-operation exercise was part of the first-ever Washoe Intentional Fire Training, a week-long intensive on wildland firefighting skills. Colunga works with The Nature Conservancy, which collaborated on the event with a handful of other land-management groups, including the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California. The trainees were from the Washoe Tribe and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
The groups had gathered that day with two main goals. Buck Cruz—project manager for Washoe Tribe Conservation Corps and a tribal elder who’s been fighting fires professionally since he was 18—said one of them was to provide the tribe’s existing and aspiring firefighters with training to pave the way for better career opportunities.
The other: to help revive traditional Washoe fire and resource management practices.
“We use fire, and we view it as a living entity,” Cruz said. “We pray to it.”
Spiritual practices involving fire, he said, are just one part of Washoe cultural heritage that was decimated after settlers occupied the Lake Tahoe Basin a century and a half ago.
‘Cultural burning’
Until the mid-19th century, the Washoe tribe relied on a rich range of resources in Meeks Meadow, on the lake’s west side, near Tahoma, Calif.
“They would spend the summers up there collecting food plants, medicine plants, fishing and hunting,” said Rhiana Jones, environmental program director for the Washoe Tribe’s Environmental Protection Department. “In winter, they would go down to Carson Valley.” (The Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California’s headquarters are still there, in Gardnerville.)
“When you live that closely on the landscape, you’re in such connection with the land that you see things that need to be taken care of on a daily basis,” Jones said. In summer, for example, the Washoe would tend to the willows, thinning them and burning patches that were infested by caterpillars or bugs. After willow is burnt, she said, it grows back straighter and with fewer secondary nodes—qualities that make for better basketry material.
“Many of our medicine and food plants come back better with fire, like elderberry, yarrow and serviceberry,” she said. “A lot of those plants are in Meeks Meadow.”
At the end of summer, Jones said, the Washoe would burn their Meeks Meadow campsites, leaving a smoldering fire to burn itself out.
“And the environment was healthy enough at that time to where it wasn’t going to be a catastrophic wildfire,” she added.
This approach to resource and fire management, often referred to as “cultural burning,” declined sharply between 1850 and 1870, when the Washoe population was displaced from Meeks Meadow. This is what the tribe, The Nature Conservancy and the other groups involved are trying to revive.
A long process
Some tribes in other regions practice cultural burning, most notably the Yurok, Hoopa and Karuk in far Northern California. Efforts to bring back the practice in the Lake Tahoe Basin have been under way—but moving at a snail’s pace—for decades.
In 1997, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore traveled to the Lake Tahoe Basin to discuss the land-management topics with tribal leaders and other stakeholders.
“We have a letter from Bill Clinton talking about stewardship in the basin and saying how the Washoe tribe needs to be included in these land-management decisions, because they’re happening in our homelands, and we don’t have access to these cultural resources,” Jones said. “So, all this work is being done to improve recreation or tourism, but what about the Washoe tribe? We just kind of got left in the dust.”
She listed several reasons for the holdups, among them budget, staff turnover, red tape with the many government organizations involved—and one that seems particularly difficult to surmount: the market value of land in the Tahoe Basin. The Washoe tribe only owns two parcels of it right now. They’re small, less than 30 acres, and hard to reach.
The tribe is currently working with other agencies to try to advance plans for cultural burns.
“I have a couple conversations lined up with LTBMU (Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit) to burn Baldwin Meadow, and then to do pile burning and prescribed burning with (California) State Parks at Sugar Pine,” Jones said.
She added that it’s possible the tribal fire experts may be able to proceed with a burn that they’ve been trying to plan for a long time—one at Meeks Meadows, which is owned by the U.S. Forest Service and operated by the Washoe tribe—in fall 2025.