0:05

I'm Eli Chen from the Overheard team. All

0:08

of June we're playing some of our favorite episodes.

0:11

Here's this indigenous practice, Fights Fire

0:13

with Fire. What

0:18

you're hearing is the sound of grass burning

0:20

in a dense forest in Northern California.

0:23

It's full of coniferous trees, brush, and

0:25

shrubs. And tons of

0:27

branches and tons of dried out foliage because

0:29

the area is so dried up thanks

0:32

to the warming climate.

0:35

You walk around, you can hear the crunching of

0:38

the branches, crunching of leaves and everything. So

0:40

it's dry and hot.

0:43

And there are a bunch of people here, the ones

0:45

who set the spot on fire, and Kili

0:47

Rian, a National Geographic photographer,

0:50

observing the scene. And

0:53

as they're walking around dripping fire

0:55

out of their torches, which basically look like

0:58

giant oil cans, kind of the fire

1:00

drips out and forms a thin little

1:02

line and they're able to create these lines

1:04

of fire and the fire spreads downhill.

1:08

Kili then watches the fire creep slowly,

1:10

burning leaves and branches as it goes.

1:13

Maybe the flames get as high as six feet

1:15

at the maximum as they kind of climb

1:17

up these bushes and these

1:20

small trees and open up big areas

1:23

in the forest underneath the main

1:25

canopy.

1:26

Some of the people leading the burn are members

1:28

of the Yurok tribe, carrying out a tradition

1:31

that's been practiced for thousands of years here

1:33

in their ancestral homeland. They're

1:36

training fire lighters to carry on

1:38

the tradition.

1:39

They're learning an important thing, which is how to

1:41

heal the land. They're learning how

1:43

to have a relationship with fire and

1:45

land again. And they're starting to understand

1:48

that that relationship with fire means that it's

1:51

not about mastery and control,

1:53

but it's about moving with

1:55

nature.

1:56

Even though the world around them is going up in

1:58

flames, everyone is calm. They're

2:00

working with the fire, not against

2:02

it.

2:03

What you don't see is all of this background

2:06

knowledge that everyone has in their heads. Their

2:08

mental maps of what was going on was completely different than

2:10

mine, right? Because they're looking

2:12

at what's going on and they know. They

2:16

know exactly where that fire is going. They have that entire

2:18

landscape mapped out in their heads and they

2:21

know where that fire is going and where it's going to end and

2:23

where that fire is going to be burned to by the end

2:25

of the day.

2:26

Yeah,

2:28

yeah, and that speaks to the level of knowledge

2:30

that these people who've

2:33

been working with fire for millennia

2:35

basically have had, right?

2:36

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Because

2:39

I know I grew up in an era when Smokey the Bear

2:41

was all the rage with national parks, right?

2:44

And Smokey the Bear was always the thing where Smokey

2:46

was like, you know, only you

2:48

can prevent forest fires. Like, yeah,

2:51

by burning.

2:57

I'm

2:57

Eli Chen, and this is Overheard, a show

2:59

where we eavesdrop on the wild conversations

3:01

we have here at NatGeo and follow

3:04

them to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful

3:06

world. This week, we'll talk about

3:08

fire. It's not just that agent

3:10

of destruction that Smokey kept warning us about.

3:13

It's also a necessary element that heals

3:15

natural spaces, keeps wildfires

3:17

at bay, and gives people and animals

3:19

food and resources to live. And

3:22

we'll learn about cultural burning, an indigenous

3:24

practice that the U.S. government suppressed for

3:26

decades, and how climate change

3:29

and increasingly disastrous wildfires in the West have

3:32

made its revival critical to our future. More

3:35

after the break. But before we get

3:37

on with the episode, thanks for listening. If

3:40

you like what you hear, consider a National Geographic

3:42

subscription and get exclusive access

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to stories published daily, curated

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5:03

Cultural burning is pretty straightforward. It's

5:05

lighting low-intensity fires, which burns

5:07

up the fuels in the forest and helps living

5:09

things there regenerate.

5:11

Enchilid says that the Karuk, Yurok, and

5:13

Hoopa tribes in Northern California have

5:16

been burning the land for 13,000 years. Like

5:20

back in the

5:20

day, I think estimates are that about 8 million

5:23

acres of California was burned

5:26

every year in these cultural burns, these,

5:28

you know, low-intensity burns. In fact, they've

5:30

been doing it for so long that

5:32

there are certain species of tree that

5:34

a lot of the pines there, for example, can't

5:37

germinate unless they

5:39

are, the cones are opened by fire.

5:42

And you might think, oh, well, that's because it's evolved alongside

5:44

wildfire, but that's not going to be true. If you think about

5:47

it, a wildfire is so hot that when it

5:49

comes through, it'd burn up the cones and

5:51

it would burn up the seeds as well.

5:53

So it's amazing to think about how long that's

5:56

been happening for.

5:57

Cultural burns can change the environment

5:59

in pretty dramatic ways. ways. Basically

6:01

the air turns the smoky dark gray

6:03

and then the sun turns into this red thing and it looks

6:06

like the end of the world. And that can

6:08

have some fascinating effects on animals

6:10

like salmon.

6:11

Salmon need cold water to migrate

6:13

and research suggests that the smoke from cultural

6:16

burns may actually cool the rivers

6:18

that they swim through. We're talking about

6:21

using the smoke from the cultural burns to

6:23

specifically to help the salmon on their

6:25

trip up. It's

6:27

an amazing thing. I

6:30

mean it's all another thing. Everything's interrelated

6:32

you know so it's hard when you start talking about these

6:35

single issue things especially with indigenous

6:37

knowledge. It's so holistic. Everything is

6:39

related to everything else. The cultural burning is related

6:41

to the removal of the dams, saving the salmon,

6:44

the fire, all of it's all related you know. So

6:46

super cool.

6:49

For thousands of years indigenous people

6:51

managed forests, land, and other natural

6:53

resources in the Americas and

6:55

developed what's known as traditional ecological

6:58

knowledge.

6:59

Then European settlers arrived and

7:01

Keeley says that initially they weren't opposed

7:03

to cultural burns. People even

7:06

way back when in the 1800s and

7:08

1700s actually knew

7:11

that Indians were burning and a lot of them actually

7:13

saw the wisdom in doing

7:15

that kind of burning.

7:17

Nonetheless Europe had a cooler and wetter

7:19

climate that didn't really depend on fire

7:21

the way areas of the American West or

7:24

Australia do and

7:25

as settlers moved west they and

7:27

their descendants became concerned about fires

7:29

damaging their homes farms and businesses.

7:32

That along with the forest removal of Native American

7:35

tribes from their ancestral homelands led

7:37

to a decline in cultural burning activity

7:40

in the 19th century.

7:41

Then in the early 20th century there was a major

7:44

event that really became the turning point for

7:46

how Americans viewed fire.

7:49

The Great Fire of 1910 also

7:52

known as the Big Blow-Up or the Devil's Broom

7:54

Fire burned over 3 million acres

7:56

of the Rockies killing 78 firefighters.

7:59

Forest Service had just been formed a few

8:02

years prior, in 1905.

8:04

The agency received a lot of attention for

8:06

how it responded to the Great Fire of 1910 and

8:09

emphatically pursued a policy of

8:11

fire suppression.

8:13

Officially, the Forest Service stance

8:15

became to avoid burning,

8:18

avoid doing that kind of burning precisely

8:20

because the Indians were doing it.

8:22

Burns of all kinds, including cultural

8:24

burns, were suppressed in law and

8:26

culture. Like in 1944,

8:29

when the U.S. Forest Service created the mascot

8:31

Smokey Bear to promote forest

8:33

fire prevention.

8:34

You know, I had read that campaign

8:37

is like, it's the longest running American

8:40

public service announcement. It's really

8:42

fascinating how long that messaging

8:44

has sort of been pervasive in

8:46

our society.

8:48

Yeah, I think that the Smokey

8:50

Bear is a funny kind of

8:52

relic of a bunch of things. You know, it started

8:54

out with a sort of racist notion that the

8:56

Indians were doing something and thus we shouldn't

8:58

do it. But, you know, I think even

9:00

more than that, there's sort of a deep seated cultural

9:03

bias among Westerners in general, I

9:05

would say, is a fear of fire.

9:08

Fire is this big scary thing. Even

9:10

Europeans almost certainly used cultural

9:12

burning at some point in time, but they forgot,

9:14

you know, and then it became a scary thing.

9:17

To be clear, it's not that people who invented

9:19

Smokey were necessarily thinking about

9:21

cultural burns. It's more that Smokey

9:24

reflected this larger fear of fire

9:26

among the American public.

9:28

And also you have Smokey

9:31

the Bear and very much a

9:33

educational

9:35

paradigm of, you know, only you can prevent

9:37

wildfires. And so much of that wildfire

9:40

narrative has been at the expense of indigenous people's

9:42

cultures and being able to use fire.

9:44

That's Frank Lake, an ecologist for the

9:46

U.S. Forest Service who studies climate change,

9:49

wildland fire, ethnoecology and traditional

9:52

ecological knowledge. He actually worked

9:54

on the study looking at how cultural burns

9:56

might affect salmon,

9:57

and he's a member of the Karuk and Yurok

9:59

communities.

10:01

So, I grew up a lot around that tension between

10:03

the federal government and local tribes around

10:05

environmental and resource management, around

10:07

the effects of fire exclusion and fire suppression,

10:10

and heard the stories, oh, our people used to burn

10:12

a lot more. We're dependent

10:14

upon fire for healthy wildlife

10:16

like the deer and elk we would hunt, the

10:18

connection between water is sacred and

10:21

by burning you reduce the plants or the trees

10:23

that use up the water.

10:25

I take it that most people maybe of your generation

10:28

or older have not seen very many cultural

10:30

burns, is that right? That's correct. Coming

10:33

up after the break, we'll get into how one wildfire

10:35

devastated a Caroot community and

10:38

meet a woman who's leading the way in training

10:40

the next generation of firelighters.

10:46

Over the years that cultural burning has been

10:48

suppressed, wildfires have become more

10:50

frequent and destructive. In the 1990s,

10:53

wildfires burned an average of 3.3 million acres

10:55

a year. That

10:57

rate more than doubled in the 2010s, during

11:00

which wildfires burned an average of 7.5 million

11:02

acres a year. Many

11:05

of these impacted areas are in California,

11:08

and they often hit communities where native people

11:10

live.

11:11

You also have the tribes here who lived

11:13

with some of the highest census

11:15

levels of smoke in emissions

11:18

where you had severe air quality

11:20

days that were so bad that they

11:22

had to develop a new chart for

11:25

relating how dangerous and how thick the smoke

11:27

was. Imagine being an elder with

11:29

emphysema or other

11:32

heart and lung complications and

11:34

now you have a power outage, you can't run the air purifier,

11:37

you don't have air conditioning, you're breathing smoke,

11:39

you're a disadvantaged and low-income family

11:42

so you can't be smoke refugees and go out

11:44

to the coast or get a hotel someplace else.

11:46

You have to stay here and eat it.

11:50

In the fall of 2020, Keely went to

11:52

Happy Camp, a town with many Carrook

11:54

residents.

11:55

It had just been devastated by the Slater

11:57

wildfire, which burned nearly 200,000 acres. homes,

12:00

many of which belonged to Karuk families. I

12:03

mean, even massive trees were completely

12:05

torched, you know, were burned to

12:07

cinders and structures were

12:10

only just just metal standing. There

12:12

were tons of vehicles that were just pulled

12:14

off the side of the road that there was nothing

12:17

left. Yeah, it was incredible to

12:19

see the level of

12:20

devastation of it. Yeah,

12:22

it looked like

12:24

an apocalypse to come through.

12:25

Keely was traveling with a Karuk friend who

12:28

lived there and was seeing it for the first

12:30

time in person. When we got out

12:32

of the car, we were looking at this devastation,

12:34

this burned out hulk of a wreck of

12:36

a vehicle and nothing left of

12:39

a structure except some tin sheets

12:41

on the ground that were all burned up. And the first

12:43

thing she did was she hauled out a bucket from the

12:45

car and asked her, I was like, what's in

12:47

the bucket? You know, and she

12:49

started tossing acorns around and

12:51

she said, this

12:53

is an opportunity. This is an opportunity

12:55

for me to heal

12:56

the land by planting these acorns

12:59

here. You know, right here in

13:01

this place originally, there weren't that

13:03

many oaks. This is a chance for us to heal the land.

13:06

And she said also

13:08

that in healing land and

13:10

planting the acorns and doing cultural burning,

13:12

all of this is also a chance for me to heal myself.

13:15

In your conversations with, you

13:17

know, members of the Karuk and Yurok

13:19

tribes, like how do people talk

13:21

about fire and what can

13:23

we learn from these tribes about how we

13:25

should think about fire?

13:27

You know, like my friend Ron told me

13:29

that when he was a kid, you

13:31

know, his grandmother gave him a box

13:33

of matches one day when he was out playing in

13:35

the yard and told

13:37

him to not come back in until he had used

13:39

up the whole box of matches. Right.

13:42

And yeah, it's so different.

13:45

She was teaching him to not

13:47

fear it and to also to how to learn

13:49

how to deal with fire. You know, like clearly she

13:52

wasn't afraid of the fire and she knew that

13:54

it's possible that it could get out

13:56

of control, but she would be watching and she

13:58

would deal with it.

13:59

with it. And so she knew

14:02

that by teaching him

14:04

very young not to fear it and learn

14:07

how fire works that she would

14:09

be creating someone who would keep

14:11

their culture going through cultural learning.

14:13

Right. Yeah, that's sort of the antithesis

14:15

to what I think a lot of

14:17

people have heard when they were kids, which is don't

14:19

play with matches, right?

14:21

Yeah, right. Exactly. That's

14:23

right. It's right up there running with scissors. Yeah, don't

14:28

run with scissors and don't play with matches.

14:31

But I would definitely say my Karuk

14:33

and Yurok friends would say otherwise.

14:36

To be clear, Keely is encouraging

14:38

kids to play with matches. It's more

14:41

about encouraging kids to have a healthy relationship

14:43

with fire.

14:44

Even though there's no absolute way to control

14:47

fire, Keely says the damage that a cultural

14:49

burn could cause would be small

14:52

compared to a wildfire.

14:53

And there is a greater risk to consider in not

14:56

burning the land regularly.

14:58

And a wildfire does actually go through

15:00

and you've missed the chance to stop that wildfire.

15:03

That wildfire is going to destroy way

15:06

more, way more than a cultural burn ever

15:08

would. In a cultural burn, something gets out of

15:10

control and you know, you

15:12

burn out a couple of houses by accident or something like that.

15:14

When a wildfire comes through, that entire

15:17

place is just burning to a cinder. There's not

15:19

going to be anything left. Entire settlements,

15:21

entire towns are going to be burned to a crisp

15:23

like in Paradise, California, where

15:26

everything's gone and it's unrecoverable.

15:29

According to the U.S. Forest Service, 99.8 percent

15:33

of prescribed burns stay where they're supposed

15:35

to. The agency is currently reviewing

15:37

its approach to prescribed burns. I

15:40

definitely think that cultural burning is a real

15:42

legitimate tool. It's one of the few

15:45

legitimately scalable tools

15:48

that we as human beings, as a species,

15:50

have to actually combat things like climate

15:52

change. You know, it's an amazing tool.

15:56

Fire is also necessary for indigenous

15:58

tribes to carry on their tradition.

15:59

Margot Robbins, a Yurok

16:02

tribe member, is a basket weaver, so

16:04

she depends on cultural burns in order

16:06

to grow basket weaving materials.

16:09

When our babies are born, we

16:12

carry them in baskets. We

16:14

use baskets to cook, eat,

16:17

carry things, and

16:20

we use baskets to

16:22

lift up prayer. And

16:25

finally, when our time on this earth

16:27

is done, we send

16:30

off the person's spirit by feeding

16:32

them on a basket.

16:35

The basket's margot weaves are made of California

16:37

hazelnut. On its own, hazelnut

16:39

grows into a bush, but when you burn

16:41

it every now and then, new shoots come

16:43

up straighter and stronger, excellent

16:46

basket weaving material.

16:48

Up until 10 years ago, government

16:50

officials wouldn't allow margot to burn the land.

16:53

There's no paper anyplace in existence

16:56

that says we gave up our right to

16:58

use fire. In recent years,

17:00

the Forest Service has come around to seeing the value

17:02

of cultural burns.

17:04

But to conduct a cultural burn, you still

17:06

often have to get a permit from the government.

17:09

And often, emergency personnel have to be stationed

17:12

nearby in case the fire gets

17:14

out of control.

17:15

Very frustrating to

17:18

have to ask people who

17:20

some have never even seen our land

17:24

to get permission to burn.

17:28

They don't have enough knowledge,

17:31

really, to be in the decision-making

17:34

place that they are. And

17:38

so it's frustrating, but

17:41

it is what it is.

17:44

So Margot started advocating for cultural

17:46

burns.

17:47

The movement gained steam, and she

17:49

got to actually attend her first cultural burn

17:52

in

17:53

2012, one where she watched hazel burn. Margot

17:56

says that was the moment she realized that

17:59

it was really possible. to bring fire back.

18:02

And then it really cemented

18:06

our drive to continue to make

18:08

that happen. We knew that this would be

18:10

the first of many that once

18:13

we started, we would not stop. That we

18:15

would continue to grow this ability

18:18

to put fire on the lands

18:21

and that we would have

18:23

our own people from our own homelands

18:25

trained so that they could legally

18:28

put fire on the land and not have to

18:30

risk going to prison.

18:32

In 2015, Margo co-founded

18:35

the Indigenous Peoples Burn Network, a

18:37

growing organization that works to bring cultural

18:39

burns back.

18:41

The organization is made up of various Native

18:43

nations, nonprofit organizations, researchers,

18:46

and government agencies.

18:47

Today, Margo doesn't just advocate

18:50

for fire. She trains fire

18:52

lighters.

18:53

We are teaching the next generations

18:56

how to burn. The

18:59

time is long past when they shoot

19:01

people for using fire.

19:04

So I'm able to take my grandkids

19:07

and my kids out

19:09

on the land and we can burn. I

19:11

teach them how to burn. You start

19:14

at the top. You bring your fire

19:17

slowly down the hill. If things

19:19

are dry, you put a line around it.

19:22

Make sure that you have water.

19:24

Frank, meanwhile, has been using a scientific

19:27

approach to advocate for burns. He

19:29

has been running research to see what the data

19:31

says about the effect of cultural

19:33

burns.

19:34

Lo and behold, that

19:36

Indigenous knowledge and cultural practice usually

19:38

results in a better, higher quality resource,

19:40

such as acorns, such as hazel shoots

19:42

for basket material, such as greater fairy

19:45

abundance. That changes the game

19:47

because now you're saying, here, look, we've demonstrated

19:51

we don't need Western science to validate or substantiate

19:53

Indigenous knowledge and cultural practices,

19:55

but it certainly could corroborate that and say this is where

19:57

they're aligned. He's found that

19:59

when...

19:59

When groups burn underbrush regularly, the

20:02

brush doesn't build up and turn into massive

20:04

wildfires.

20:05

They've reduced that wildfire threat because the wildfire

20:08

burned into a recent cultural burn and was

20:10

able to be easier to contain.

20:11

Right? So the more you break up

20:13

the high fuel loading areas and you reduce

20:16

the wildfire risk based on your treatments

20:19

and your prescribed fires or your cultural burns, the

20:22

less you have a wildfire risk actually threatening

20:24

your life and property and your community.

20:26

So that has been demonstrated that conducting

20:29

multiple cultural burns or

20:31

prescribed fires in a year, that can help combat

20:34

wildfires.

20:35

It definitely reduces the fuels, reduces

20:38

the fuel continuity of the howl, but fuels there

20:41

that could burn under the most severe conditions, moderates

20:44

it or reduces that fire intensity and

20:46

makes it less damaging.

20:47

I'm just curious, you know, in the 20 years

20:50

that you've been at, you know, the Forest Service,

20:53

have they become a lot more receptive

20:55

to Indigenous knowledge?

20:57

Very much so, even down to the current administration

20:59

and the Council on Environmental Quality's direction on

21:02

Indigenous, traditional ecological knowledge, the

21:05

USDA Department of Agriculture's direction on

21:07

how the agency, the particular Forest Service of Research

21:09

and Development, is going to respond to that.

21:13

This year, the White House announced that it was committed

21:15

to using Indigenous knowledge in policy

21:17

dealing with the relationship between humans

21:20

and the environment.

21:21

Frank currently helps the Forest Service run

21:23

cultural burns. When

21:24

it comes to the fall time, there's an indicator

21:27

where

21:27

usually the infertile and buggy acorns browntop

21:30

bad fall first, and then you start to see

21:32

this transition of the whitetop

21:34

acorns falling, and that's our indicator locally

21:36

for burning. And I try to time that just

21:38

right before the next rainstorm

21:41

to burn off clear, nice little understory

21:44

fire under the acorn trees

21:45

that reduces the buggy acorns, clams up the

21:48

small sticks and leaves, and then you

21:50

have on that open charred understory

21:52

whitetop good acorns falling on there that are

21:54

easily obscene and picked up.

21:56

Keely actually visited one of Frank's acorn

21:59

burns in the Klamath River. River Valley.

22:01

You kind of like look over the Klamath River, which

22:03

is a river that's just sort of like always painted

22:05

with rainbows. And

22:08

there's this beautiful bright green

22:10

forest full of conifers. So even in the wintertime,

22:13

it's always green.

22:15

He recalls what the ground looked like after

22:17

the burn was over. The whole ground was

22:19

this carpet of black, you know, kind of this black

22:21

ash that has strewn everywhere.

22:24

And on top of it was sitting tons of acorns

22:27

and they were all beautiful. And they were like

22:30

big and plump. And none of them

22:32

had any holes in them.

22:34

And the thing that Frank said was, well, they don't have

22:36

holes in them is because the cultural fire burned

22:38

up and killed all the acorn pests. We

22:40

time it so that the acorn

22:43

weevils and the acorn moths that normally

22:45

go down there, they get burned up in that

22:47

cultural fire. So we time that fire just

22:50

right so that it does that. And then, you know,

22:52

while we were there, we gathered a bunch of acorns to take home,

22:54

to make it into food.

22:56

Frank says that it's important his kids understand

22:58

how these fires are connected to the food they

23:00

eat and the things they use in their house.

23:03

My kids see good acorns. They know what a

23:06

soup tastes like. They know the deer we've hunted,

23:08

the nice bucks we've shot in the areas that have been burned.

23:11

They see the basket material that made the

23:13

hazel sticks from their cradle that they were carried

23:15

in.

23:17

Frank was partially inspired to teach his kids

23:19

about fire by visiting Australia. There

23:22

he visited the Martu, a group of

23:24

Aboriginal Australians living in the country's

23:26

Western Desert.

23:27

And I got to see Aboriginal

23:29

kids take a lighter and go burn

23:31

off a small patch. And then I saw the teenagers and

23:34

older ones burn off a bigger patch. And

23:36

then I got to go out with the men

23:38

and burn off like a whole big valley. Like we're

23:40

talking like, you know,

23:42

quarter mile to like a two mile plus

23:44

burn across spin effects

23:46

and through other patches of forest and shrubs and

23:49

then hunt kangaroo. And so for me, it was

23:51

like, oh, you know, most

23:53

of the time we tell kids not to play with matches and we kind

23:55

of scold them and Smokey the Bear

23:56

says, be careful with fire, but we

23:58

need to teach our kids. respect it. Frank

24:01

thinks kids need to start off with that mindset

24:03

when they're young. Kids help burn sometimes.

24:06

My kids are in fifth grade and third grade. They already talk about it.

24:08

Especially Leland, it's more of a matter of a fact.

24:11

The kids are like, well, you just think fire's bad, but

24:13

there's this, this, this, and this, and there's these plants,

24:15

and these are your medicines, and these are your berries. And

24:18

we share those foods with the animals and the

24:20

bears and the squirrels. And my kids

24:22

can burn off a small little 50 by 100 foot

24:24

area under a few acorn trees.

24:26

They're going to be, when he's 20 or 25 years old,

24:29

going to be able to carry out much bigger landscape burns

24:31

that have multiple types of places like that, right?

24:34

We're going to be able to know the direction of the wind, the

24:37

sounds of the birds or the animals that are there that are

24:39

indicators. You're going to know when it's

24:41

the right time to use fire in the best way and the

24:43

good way for safety, for

24:45

security, and to the benefit of, again,

24:47

your family and the community.

24:49

Yeah, I have to say I love the idea

24:51

of like, you know, your kid teaching

24:54

other kids about the value of fire. It's

24:57

really great. They need to. And particularly

24:59

with what we see in the news and how sensationalized

25:01

the catastrophic fires,

25:04

we need to hope stories, right?

25:06

We need to know that there is a positive

25:08

relationship that people can have in living with

25:10

fire.

25:21

If you like what you hear and want to support more

25:24

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25:40

a month at NatGeo.com

25:42

slash explore more. Cultural

25:45

burns are just one of many stories that Keely

25:47

and writer Charles Mann covered about the ways

25:49

indigenous groups are trying to reclaim sovereignty.

25:53

That's coming out in the July issue of the magazine.

25:56

And if you want to hear more from Keely, you

25:58

can also listen to a previous. the previous overheard

26:00

episode where he shares stories about the many

26:03

weeks he spent camping on sea

26:05

ice with native Alaskan whale hunters. If

26:08

you're dying to see his photography, check out his website

26:11

to see portraits of indigenous people, Arctic

26:13

wildlife, and more. Also,

26:16

if you want to learn more about Margo Robbins and

26:18

her efforts to revive cultural burns, check

26:20

out our article on the subject. That's

26:23

all in the show notes, right there in your podcast

26:25

app. This

26:31

week's episode of Overheard is produced by Alana

26:34

Strauss. Our producers are Kyrie

26:36

Douglas and Marcy Thompson. Our

26:38

senior producers are Brian Gutierrez and

26:40

Jacob Pinter. Carla Wells is our

26:42

manager of audio. Our executive producer

26:45

of audio is Devar Ardilon, who also

26:47

edited this episode. Our fact checkers

26:49

are Robin Palmer and Julie Beer. Our

26:52

copy editors are Caroline Braun, Amy

26:54

Kolozak, Cindy Lightner, and Jennifer

26:56

Villaga. Hans-Dale Su composed

26:58

her theme music, sound design, and engineered

27:01

this episode.

27:01

This podcast is a production

27:03

of National Geographic Partners. The

27:05

National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating

27:08

and protecting the wonder of our world, funds

27:10

the work of National Geographic grantee,

27:12

Keely Rian. Michael Tribble is the

27:14

vice president of integrated storytelling. Nathan

27:17

Lump is National Geographic's editor-in-chief.

27:20

And I'm senior editor and host, Eli Chen.

27:23

Thanks for listening and see y'all next time.