How Indigenous Knowledge of Forests and Landscape Benefit the Earth and Humanity: Policy Change can Allow for Greater Native Involvement in Management of Federal Lands Considering Fire as a Tool

This thesis aims to examine what existing policy and new policies can be taken advantage of to allow Native people to be more fully involved in land management practices, using traditional Indigenous land management practices, and considering fire as a land management tool. One goal of this writing is to give examples of how existing data and proposed organizational systems can be combined to lift up the marginalized positions that many Native groups approach to negotiating access to and ability to manage traditional territory. This thesis considers questions of how an Indigenous perspective of human relationships with land shapes the difference between Western land management practices and traditional Native land management, how the Earth benefits from the regular inclusion of Indigenous land management practices, and how improvement can be made to the organizational structures currently used by state agencies like the US Forest Service and Cal Fire and Indigenous communities to initiate permitting for the use of fire to manage land. Scholarly works were reviewed and referenced that study the history of the foundations of the American government, early and modern studies of Native American life, collaborative work between Western science and traditional ecological knowledge, as well as testimony from Native people directly. Looking at the Karuk tribe native to the Klamath River Valley, California, this thesis aims to showcase the work that has been done by the tribe to legitimize Indigenous knowledge of the land and illustrate the urgency of collaborative work between Indigenous knowledge and Western science to tend to the land using fire in the face of climate change. Barriers are examined that exist for the Karuk that limit the use of traditional fire burning as land management, and how a polycentric governance system could be beneficial to bring about long-lasting cooperation and collaboration between government and state agencies and Native tribes, to adjust policy and create new policy that allows for more freedom for Native people to participate in land management with the support of government and state agencies.