The After the Fire USA Wildfire Leadership Summit
September 20-22, 2022 in Sonoma, CA
KEYNOTE: "Indigenous Land Care Practices in Wildfire Recovery"
SPEAKER: Margo Robbins, Executive Director of Cultural Fire
https://www.culturalfire.org
About Margo Robbins
Margo Robbins’ keynote speech focuses on the beneficial traits that fire provides to the landscape, and how California’s procedures and regulations over the past 100 years have increased our risk of megafires. The policies of fire suppression and prevention have left our landscapes packed full of fuel that is primed to burn. With regular intervals of burning, as indigenous people have practiced for millennia, this kind of beneficial fire would be a healing element for the entire ecosystem. Putting fire back onto the landscape is essential to rebalancing our relationship with nature, and Robbins, through her work with Cultural Fire, has many projects to teach people how to initiate prescribed burns.
Margo Robbins is the co-founder and president of the Cultural Fire Management Council (CFMC). She is one of the key planners and organizers of the Cultural Burn Training Exchange (TREX) that takes place on the Yurok Reservation twice a year.
The Training Exchange (TREX) program has been utilized across the country and throughout the world to bring together fire practitioners to learn and burn together. TREX is a unique opportunity for new and seasoned fire practitioners to share their passions and knowledge while managing natural resources with intentional use of fire. CFMC hosts a twice annual TREX in Yurok Territory focusing on sharing Yurok culture and conducting cultural burns.
She is also a co-lead and advisor for the Indigenous People’s Burn Network. Starting in 2015 with a single landscape in the combined ancestral territories of the Yurok, Hoopa and Karuk Tribes of Northern California, the IPBN has grown to include participants from multiple pueblos in New Mexico, land managers from the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota, and the Klamath Tribes in Oregon. The network is also exploring connections with tribes in North Carolina, Texas and Washington.
Margo comes from the traditional Yurok village of Morek, and is an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe. She gathers and prepares traditional food and medicine, is a basket weaver and regalia maker.
She is the Indian Education Director for the Klamath-Trinity Joint Unified School district, a mom, and a grandma.
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