By: Juliette Beck
As California searches for solutions to wildfire, the mismanagement of water and climate change, a growing movement guided by Native practitioners in Yolo County is turning to an older, life-affirming approach: cultural burning and wetland stewardship. Along Cache Creek, their work is creating a bridge to a healthier, restorative future.
In the early 2000’s, a group of Native cultural practitioners and a UC Davis landscape architecture student met at the Cache Creek Nature Preserve to listen and learn from a true culture-bearer and master basket-weaver named Bertha Mitchell. A member of the Kletsel Dehe Wintun Nation, Bertha Mitchell had grown up speaking a dialect of the Patwin language with her family—the last people she could speak the language of the Wintun homeland with. Because of attempted genocide, this unique language that holds the original instructions on how to care for the land, was almost lost.
“Auntie Bertha,” as she was affectionately known, described Cache Creek as Kaltipoo Kapi Schloembeck or “gathering wealth creek.” For the Wintun people, this jungle-like riparian corridor was an abundant source of flora and fauna, sustained by the waters that ran from above Clear Lake in the Inner Coastal mountains through the Capay Valley and into the heart of what is now Yolo County.
These rich conversations with Bertha Mitchell, who passed away in 2018, inspired a plan to grow fifteen native food, fiber, and medicine plants essential to sustaining Wintun lifeways. Two-acres of a former Teichert gravel pit were designated by the Cache Creek Conservancy to create the Tending and Gathering Garden (TGG), which is located just a few miles west of Woodland.
The garden sits at the edge of a shallow tule and cattail wetland fed by irrigation water set inside the aggregate mining pit. It includes culturally-significant plants such as dogbane—a fibrous plant used by native people to make strong cordage for fishing nets, traps, baskets and regalia. Dogbane had been intentionally eradicated in Yolo County by settler ranchers because it was poisonous to their cattle. Growing numbers of livestock consumed the plant after overgrazing the native grasslands that once sustained large herds of tule elk, deer and pronghorn.
Remnants of dogbane—also called Indian Hemp—were found growing in Sonoma County and carefully transplanted to the TGG. But their growth was stunted. Something was missing.
Fire: The Ultimate Steward
“The first thing that returns during a burn are the hawks. They see smoke and know that rodents will be fleeing the flames. They come in close for a meal,” Diana Almendariz, Wintun-Maidu cultural practitioner, shared.
Almendariz frequently leads cultural burns at the TGG and is a guest teacher with the Keepers of the Flame class, which was started by Yocha Dehe Endowed Chair in Native Californian Studies Beth Rose Middleton Manning. Both are contributors to a new anthology called Landkeeping: Restoring Indigenous Fire Stewardship and Ecological Partnerships, published by the Oregon State University Press.
Since time immemorial, Native people have used fire to manage landscapes for a variety of purposes aimed at enhancing biodiversity and the health of the land. They intentionally lit fires to clear excess biomass, stimulate healthy plant regrowth, replenish nutrients, control pests, and boost food yields.
Burning also replenishes water tables. When vegetation is cleared by fire, more water percolates into the ground rather than being absorbed by plants and trees.
These sophisticated, place-based fire stewardship regimes, practiced for thousands of years, helped to cultivate the natural wealth—dark, nutrient dense soils and abundant water—that gave rise to California, the fourth largest economy in the world. Yet cultural burning had been abruptly curtailed by the state’s founders when Native people were targeted for genocide.
California’s first governor Peter Hardeman Burnett made it illegal for Native people to burn in 1850, setting the stage for the catastrophic fires that have engulfed the state in recent years. Imagine 176 years of dead plant matter and forest duff piled up, creating a tinder-box in the hotter, dryer conditions spurned by a rapidly warming climate. Fifteen of the largest fires in the state’s history have occurred since 2003.
The folly of the government’s racially motivated fire suppression policies are gradually being acknowledged and attempts are being made to reverse the harm. In September 2024, a bill that makes it easier for Native tribes to conduct culturally-prescribed burns passed the California legislature and was signed by Governor Gavin Newsom.
“When I heard we could put fire on the ground once again, I could not be happier,” Almendariz said. “We can now take careful and mindful steps forward into a future with fire as a tool, not an enemy.”
Wetlands Need Fire Too
Over the past five years Almendariz has led cultural burns at the TGG, she has witnessed a cascade of environmental benefits. The dogbane has finally become well-established and the melodious red-winged blackbirds are proliferating.
“All of nature responds to fire,” she said.
Look closely at Almendariz’s “Good Fire and Water” painting that depicts the burning of stands of tule. You will see specks of ash floating on the water. Carbon-rich biochar is falling into the water where it stimulates the growth of beneficial bacteria.
Now trace the long green tule reeds down to their roots at the edge of the wetland. Tiny aquatic insects – invertebrates – are feeding off bacteria attracted to the sugars exuded from the roots. This creates a living biofilm-hat some might think of as pond scum.
As a wide array of invertebrates such as copapods and mayfly nymphs feast on bacteria, they continuously filter and clean the water—maintaining a critical equilibrium that keeps toxic algae blooms, harmful bacteria outbreaks and disease-carrying mosquitos in check.
Almendariz has partnered with UC Davis Medical Entomologist Geoffrey Attardo to demonstrate the ecological benefits of restoring wetlands with traditional practices. Attardo explains:
“The water has this 24-7 workforce of tiny organisms, living their lives, that help break down nutrients so that plants can use them. The ash and biochar from the burn creates a buffet for the bacteria, which feed the insects, which feed the fish, which feed the otter and so on all the way up to the food chain. The foundation of all life is in wetlands.”
Preparing for Climate Change?
Wetlands are one of the most effective ways to draw carbon pollution down from the atmosphere and store it in biomass and soils. More than 95% of California’s Central Valley wetlands were destroyed to make room for fossil-fuel intensive, industrial agriculture. Restoring wetlands with guidance from Native people is a critical solution to today’s existential climate and nature crisis.
“The Native cultural lifestyle sequesters carbon. Every time we burn or gather tule, it grows back healthy and strong using carbon from the atmosphere,” Almendariz explained. “Tule grows back quickly, so it can sequester a lot of carbon and detoxify the atmosphere and the water.”
Yolo County, which considers itself a leader in responding to climate change, currently oversees the mining of gravel from nearly three thousand acres of the Cache Creek floodplain. Four major construction companies—Cemex, Granite, Vulcan and Teichert—operate over a dozen deep pit gravel mines where toxic methylmercury has been detected in fish living in the groundwater filled pits. Signs warn people, especially women and children, against eating fish which were once a staple of local diets.
At a public hearing in December, the Yolo County Board of Supervisors voted to extend the largest mine, operated by the $18-billion cement behemoth Cemex, near the rural town of Madison, for an additional twenty years. Calls by community members to restore the pits to shallow wetlands similar to those at the Cache Creek Nature Preserve were largely ignored. Despite the permanent impacts to the aquifer, sensitive groundwater dependent ecosystems, the accumulation of toxic methylmercury in the food web and the industry’s climate footprint, supervisors claim mining is a necessary sacrifice to meet the region’s demand for economic growth.
The Marsh Economy
Reflecting on Almendariz’s painting, we see a contrasting worldview: an understanding that life is an interconnected, intricately woven web of symbiotic relationships. The tule wren, the giant garter snake, the invertebrates, the red-shouldered hawk, and the humans that tend the land with fire are all essential elements in the cyclical, regenerative economy of the marsh. Nothing can be sacrificed without sacrificing the whole.
Almendariz, whose mother died of leukemia at an early age, asks, “How can we grow healthy if we get sick from mercury or diseases from mosquitoes and we no longer have clean water or enough funding for healthcare?”
Yolo County will soon begin a ten-year review of its Cache Creek Area Plan—a regulatory framework established in 1996 that governs this vital bio-cultural lifeline. As officials reconsider the future of the creek, examples of what restoration can accomplish are taking shape on the ground.
At the TGG, glimmering traces of the creek’s traditional landscape are coming back into view. The return of good fire and water under Native stewardship is not only possible, it is well underway. The knowledge shared by Bertha Mitchell lives on in these practices, demonstrating with each turn of the seasons what needs to be recognized and supported.
Author bio:
Juliette Beck is the co-founder of YoloSol Collective. She combines art and activism to bring awareness to the complex social, economic, and environmental issues of our time.
[Image caption: Diana Almendariz’s latest painting “Good Fire and Water” shows how cultural burning can restore degraded ecosystems such as this wetland in a former Teichert gravel pit]
