Since 2018 I have worked with the Karuk Tribe's Department of Natural of Resources as an ethnographic researcher, media consultant, and filmmaker. I co-produced a series of short videos about northern California wildfire, the political-ecological impacts of climate change, and the benefits of Karuk cultural burning.

As wildfires throughout the U.S. west intensify, Indigenous fire practitioners fight for sovereignty and survivance while navigating between, on one side, a militarized firefighting apparatus premised on the settler state’s entitlement to environmental authority, and on the other side, a broad-based colonial impulse to appropriate and commodify Indigenous knowledge. Through participant observation, collaborative filmmaking, and interviews, my book-in-progress tracks how settler colonial relations of power and property can be reaffirmed or disrupted by the increasing frequency of environmental crises.

Like all researchers who work with Karuk communities, I have learned the Tribe’s “Practicing Píkyav” process. The policy documentation for “Practicing Píkyav” states that all projects should “support Karuk philosophies and practices of píkyav,” which “includes mitigating environmental and social damages that continue to have profound impacts on Karuk people, and Karuk Cultural Heritage, traditions, and Aboriginal Territory” (Karuk – UC Berkeley Collaborative 2014), and I work with a committee of local advisors. Píkyav—repairing the world—is a goal, method, and field of study in my work.





DEMILITARIZING THE ENVIRONMENT:
FIRE SUPPRESSION, COUNTERINSURGENCY, AND KARUK CULTURAL PERPETUATION

Seraphin, Bruno and Leaf Hillman. "Demilitarizing the Environment: Fire Suppression, Counterinsurgency, and Karuk Cultural Perpetuation." Routledge Handbook of Environmental Anthropology (2026).

This chapter examines historical and contemporary wildland fire suppression in Karuk aboriginal territory, in what is currently called northwestern California. The chapter analyzes the role of militarism and incarceration within fire suppression, drawing on oral as well as primary and secondary historical sources to re-frame fire policies and practices from the 19 th to 21 st centuries, with a focus on the early-20 th-century establishment of the National Forest system. The chapter argues that environmental governance institutions in the U.S. West retain anti-Indigenous war logics of territorial security, resource extraction, and counterinsurgency. The chapter illuminates the way that "small wars"-or counterinsurgency-practices were marshaled against Indigenous fire practitioners during the early days of the US Forest Service in Karuk territory. Historical examples demonstrate how federal agents employed multilateral tactics to construct Indigenous burners as viral threats to the legitimacy of settler occupation. The final section discusses some of the ways that Karuk people in the 21 st century are demilitarizing fire governance in their territory, with a specific focus on the Karuk Women's Prescribed Fire Training Exchange program of 2022.

INDIGENOUS FIRE FUTURES:
ANTICOLONIAL APPROACHES TO SHIFTING FIRE RELATIONS IN CALIFORNIA

Martinez, Deniss J., Bruno Seraphin, Tony Marks-Block, Peter Nelson, and Kirsten Vinyeta. "Indigenous fire futures: anticolonial approaches to shifting fire relations in California." Environment and Society 14, no. 1 (2023): 142-161.

Dominant causal explanations of the wildfire threat in California include anthropogenic climate change, fire suppression, industrial logging, and the expansion of residential settlements, which are all products of settler colonial property regimes and structures of resource extraction. Settler colonialism is grounded in Indigenous erasure and dispossession through militarism and incarceration, which are prominent tools in California's fire industrial complex. To challenge settler colonial frameworks within fire management, Indigenous peoples are organizing to expand Indigenous cultural controlled burning, fire stewardship, and sovereignty. These initiatives emphasize reciprocal human-fire relations and uphold Indigenous knowledge systems and livelihoods. Concurrently, Indigenous fire sovereignty is threatened by knowledge appropriation and superficial collaborations. In this article, we review contemporary research on Indigenous burning in order to highlight the strategies that Indigenous communities and scholars employ to subvert colonial power relations within wildfire management and actualize regenerative Indigenous futures.


"INDIGENOUS FIRE FUTURES," WITH DENISS MARTINEZ, ON THE LOOKOUT PODCAST



















"FIRES BEYOND CRISIS," PÍKYAV LECTURE SERIES, KARUK DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES, ORLEANS, CA