Thom Alcoze Interview
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Garcia Hunt: We're here today [July 23, 2001] with Thom Alcoze, working with the Environmental Research Center at NAU. Jennifer Kern is present. We're doing a project called "Fire on the Plateau" for the Cline Library. I'd like to introduce Thom Alcoze. Good morning, Thom.
Alcoze: Good morning, Robert.
Garcia Hunt: We'll be asking a few questions on your role here at NAU and what type of research you're doing. I'll start off with what brought you to Flagstaff?
Alcoze: Well, the University of Northern Arizona brought me here. I started off with what is now the Center for Excellence in Education, which is the College of Education here, directing a Native American education division to increase and encourage more native students to be successful, and certainly for mainstream students to understand more about Native American culture and educational issues. I'm currently with the School of Forestry in the College of Ecosystem Science and Management. I rose in the field of education as an ecologist. I've been working in university native programs before. That's it on how I got started here.
I moved into the College of Ecosystem Science and Management, said, "Well, I could really be closer to my own roots from my own training and background." I was trained as an ecologist, and I found that I could work and directly apply some of the research I'd been involved with through the College of Ecosystem Science and School of Forestry, kind of directly applying Native American science and Native American ecology concepts through the School of Forestry, rather than talking about it and teaching about it in the College of Education.
Garcia Hunt: Can you give us some insight on your education and not just what brought you here, but where you came from also?
Alcoze: Well, let's see. I started out on Army bases. My father was in the service and we traveled a lot. We traveled and I grew up in places as distant as Japan and Germany. Japanese was actually my first language, which I've forgotten most of it. I spent most of my time, if it wasn't overseas, in Texas. And then I went to university in Texas. At that time there were no ecology—the discipline of ecology existed, but there were no real formalized departments or programs in most universities—and so I ended up just studying biology, focused on field biology, which is sort of like applied ecology. So we were out catching bugs and looking at birds and all kinds of environments of ecological things. I went from there to Michigan State, actually went from there and practiced as an ecologist for a couple of years as director of [structural?] ecology—in my mind, impact study on nuclear power plants up in Pennsylvania. After that I went back to university again and completed my doctorate in zoology with a focus on animal ecology in that area.
One of the things that I really started back to get my doctorate for was to look at what I was thinking of and defining at that time—and that's about 1970 or so—I was looking at Native American traditional knowledge, and really trying to focus on an issue that was important to me individually, and I think since has proven to be an important topic in general, and that is trying to answer the question, "How did Native Americans sustain their populations and societies and sustain themselves as nations here in North America?" Well, I'd say that was about thirty years ago. And one of the things that got me actually to complete my work and research there and continue in the same area, which is Native American land use relationships, was a comment from one of my professors who said I could talk about Indians hunting deer and harvesting deer, but I didn't talk about deer management or management of resources in general. And he kind of looked at me kind of funny and said, "You see, Thom, resource management is a science, and Indians didn't have science." Well, I thought some interesting thoughts, I suppose, but I shuffled out of there and completed my Ph.D. with a different approach, not trying to look at Native American culture or Native American ecology at all.
When I finished my degree, I still had this idea to look for Native American science. One of my professors said it didn't exist, they didn't have any. Well, I guess students all tend to believe teachers infallibly. But I still kept with the idea, and I remember—not to get too carried away with all that history—but one of the things that changed my approach and where I found some ways I could actually identify and actually study about Native American science was in medicine. I happened to come across a medical anthropology seminar, and this is about, oh, mid-1970s. You know, within a couple of decades, at that point.... Well, the birth control pill came on the American pharmaceutical market. These medical anthropologists had discovered some first nations people in South America that were actually using plants as a birth control technique. And so after studying that and discovering that in fact they were using plants for birth control, in the process of that they discovered that there was another plant that was taken with this birth control medicine in order for it to work. They found out that the active ingredient was being digested by stomach enzymes, in the laboratory. And the way that the native people had dealt with that, they had come up with a plant that actually locked up all the enzymes that would dissolve the active ingredient, keeping it in the body and making it work. Well, that's a pretty sophisticated medical practice. It goes beyond trial and error. You know, if you have a headache, and you eat bushes until you find one that cures you, is kind of a simplistic notion about how native people use medicine and discovered their medicine. And it's just too simplistic for me.
At that point I had discovered or proven that native people do have elements of science in their cultures—widespread, this medical knowledge. In fact, there's still over 200 drugs in the modern American pharmacopoeia that are from Native American-derived plants. Well, that really led me into looking at what I'm doing now, very carefully looking at not only different aspects of science, but native people have science; well, do they have an ecology? Do they have any ideas about what we would call ecology today? They weren't probably using the ecology word. I found out that it was looking very clear to me that there was a lot more going on in native North America prior to Columbus, than Columbus or the Puritans or the pioneers or even in the recent historical past of the United States of America. People have tended not to look at native nations as nations. They're just kind of a group of wandering savages. I guess I put it that it was the assumption from the time of Columbus until very recently, by the mainstream people or idea generators, that while native people were living on the continent and the researchers put it clear that they were quite significant populations, the assumption was that they had a benign ecological impact. Thinking of Columbus, and it has really stayed with the literature, much of that history—and you can find it until the last couple of years—people still coming up, assuming that the human beings that lived in North America really didn't know what they were doing, and they were lucky to get food, even to the point of generating a myth of—what I consider a myth—about feast and famine, where savages, if they get a chance to eat, they just gorge. And then a week later, or some period of time in the future, they don't have any food, and so they starve, and that's the kind of.... Well, that's not, to me a sustainable lifestyle or sustainable pattern for any human community. What I've come to conclude is that human beings, all of us have always tended to ensure the survivability and the sustainability of our offspring. We don't want to set up a situation where our offspring, our kids and other generations, are going to be starving and feasting. That's not a very positive or healthy model to set a society upon.
When we look at Native American first nations, I haven't found any situations or people where at the time of contact, these sort of negative practices were really in place. The first contact with Europeans, Indians—the Native Americans—were seen to be benign, they didn't have any impact on the ecology of the environment. And that is, I think, a mythical— it started out as an assumption— has become a very viable myth in modern—because it's in the modern mindset about native people. And so what I started looking at was ways to demonstrate whether that was true or not—how could we prove that? And one of the ways that we are still using, and one of the ways that's been established for a long time, is a way to find this kind of historical hidden information, is go to the historical records. Let me say first off that there are a couple of main points here. First, when the Europeans arrived in North America, they saw human beings, didn't recognize them as being civilized or having any civilized characteristics. I mean, if you looked into the back and said these people—they weren't really calling them people at that point—but, for the sake of argument, these people, they didn't have language or government or social structure or territory or any kinds of things that.... They didn't have castles, and so they didn't have nations. Well, looking at the explorers' records, we find a consistent pattern, absolutely consistent pattern. The letters and the chronicles and the reports that went back to Europe talk about an abundant landscape where deer were abundant, there were chestnut trees in the east, just loaded. The chestnut, before its demise, before they died out or were killed out by disease, on average 35 percent of the eastern forest was in chestnuts, for example. So there's beautiful food, there's fish in the stream, there's deer, there's a lot of plants, a lot of trees, a lot of great trees to make ship masts out of, and all kinds of things like that. When you go to New York or Georgia or the West Coast, or the California coast, the descriptions of the explorers were always consistent. They talk about this abundant landscape, and they describe it as a park land or a park-like environment. If not using that word, again, they describe an area that is large, sparsely distributed trees, there's a few big trees on the landscape with a lot of grasses and flowers and herbs in the understory. What you're really seeing is something like a savannah in the majority of cases where these ecosystems were described. Now, if you go to those same areas today, 500 years later, a little over 500 years, you discover that they're not park-like, you don't have abundance of understory vegetation, you don't have abundance of deer, you don't have abundance of a lot of these resources. And we can track—I'll call it the degradation—of that historic environment. You know, you get the first chronicle of, say, in the example of Washington state, that area. A good work has been written on historic environmental conditions in the state of Washington. They found the characteristic of a savannah-like place, and that within a hundred years after the removal of the native people, and therefore a change in environmental practices, you don't have a park land anymore. The trees come in, and anywhere you have a prairie, trees—there's always kind of a struggle between trees and meadows. The trees are always trying to encroach on the meadow. The meadow is, of course, always trying to keep the trees out. The conclusions I've gotten, some of the conclusions I've reached based on all this kind of historical analysis, is that the predominant landscape type on this continent was one that was managed, the habitats or the environments of North America was a managed landscape at the time of Columbus. And even though the Europeans didn't recognize it as a landscape that was managed, they assumed this was just Eden. They assumed it was pristine. And that word is still plaguing native communities all over the place. Because the idea was that when the Europeans arrived in North America, it was a pristine landscape. Pristine means people weren't there, people weren't having an influence. And so even with the Wilderness Act that's been written in the last couple of decades, very recent times, pristine in the ideas of wilderness are very predominant. America wants to maintain its wilderness areas. I find it very ironic, though, that even in that regard that people were living on the North American landscapes. They were influencing those landscapes. And the question we have to convince people today of is how they actually did that. And it's only a vague outline, there's some kind of barriers to people looking at the savage Indians of the West as having sophisticated land management practices in their life. And that's exactly what we're putting together now in this time.
Finding the how that was using fire - that gets us to the idea of fire on the plateau. And to me it's no longer an assumption, but it's a fact, that native people were in fact living on these landscapes on the plateau, they were quite high in population. The population was high enough to disrupt or destroy or over-harvest the resources, but again, if you look at human populations,
what humans tend to do, if we do in fact wipe out a resource and suffer because of it, we learn from the experience and pass on some sort of ideas and knowledge to the next generation of how not to do that in the past.
Australia. Let me jump continents for a moment, but for a reason. In the last 120 or so years, and in some cases in Australia, in the last 40 years, traditional aboriginal people were practicing aboriginal or indigenous management on the continent of Australia. And I say that because in the last hundred years, that has changed. The people were removed from much of the landscape in the last 50-60 years. There are actually examples of them observing what the landscape looked like when aboriginal people were applying aboriginal management practices to the landscape, using fire. When they were removed, and fire is removed, the landscape changes. And there's clear evidence that when aboriginal people were on the landscape and burning and maintaining that landscape, and again they're maintaining it for one thing, really, for the benefit of people. And so while they were maintaining that landscape, it sets up a certain condition. And you can say, "Well, what happened when they left?" The biodiversity crashed, the productivity of the environments crashed, whole species go to extinction as one of those factors with the removal of fire, because a lot of the living plants and animals of the Australian continent are fire dependent or fire adapted. What that's saying in the short version is when people arrive, they start burning. And they chase out one set of organisms, both plants and animals—those that can't cope with either being hunted, or can't cope with fire on the landscape. However, what you have is the development of a whole set of animals and plants that do respond positively to fire, and human, say, harvest. And that's the kind of landscape that is maintained by humans. And that's what I say in the case of Australia: when people were removed from the landscape, the landscape changed and the biodiversity and productivity—diversity crashed. And you have kind of a serious extinction.
There's a parallel in North America. At the end of the 1800s, right around 1900, there was an extinction event. There were a number of things came together. The chestnut trees were being attacked by a chestnut blight and wiping out the chestnut productivity. Remember I was saying there's 35 out of 100 trees in the forest were chestnuts. So there were a lot of chestnuts, the nuts being produced and being eaten by things like deer, turkey, bear, wild animals, as well as by people. You have another coinciding factor, the Industrial Revolution really is getting kicked off around 1900. The deer that were in the East Coast have been harvested—I mean seriously harvested, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of deer hides per year coming out of eastern North America and going to Europe. So you're talking about a tremendous—actually, you're looking at the deer population, a tremendous resiliency, a strength in the deer population, that they can handle that kind of harvest and still keep their numbers up. Well, they were able to do that 'til the harvest got so intense in the late 1800s and the deer populations crashed—again, about the same time that the chestnut is crashing and the turkey are being exterminated. And what we have in 1900 is the clear evidence of a significant land management shift concerning natural resources in North America, the way in which they're used.
And actually, you arrived here in the summer of 2001, and we had the Leroux Fire up on the San Francisco Peaks. I'd like to make it very clear to people, they say, "Oh...." like we had a fire over in Los Alamos a year ago, and people were blaming the people who started the fire. And I think it's very important that we recognize that those people didn't start the fire. The fire started a hundred years ago when America quit burning the leaves and the twigs and the pine cones and the branches that fall off the trees. That builds up for a hundred years, and while it may be me who set the match to do the fire, it's not that individual who set up these catastrophic fire conditions that burned out Los Alamos, that burned out the Leroux Fire. And that's simply the thing that started about 1900. And a hundred years later we're seeing that those fuel buildups are so high that it causes catastrophic wildfires, crown fires, the whole forest is burning. And that's where we are today.
I want to go back now and put together some things I've said already. The landscape in North America is a managed landscape. It was being managed by fire. That's provable now. People can still argue about it, but there are ways to prove that. And I'd say at this point that Native American first nations occupied all habitats on this continent—period, the end. Somebody was living there. Everybody in North America has a neighbor. Another way of saying it, to break this myth: there were no vacant habitats in North America at the time of Columbus's arrival or at the time of settlement. People were living here, they were organized with language and government and territory. There were nations established on this continent, and they occupied the whole continent. That's one important.... Another thing is that all these people used fire. All of these people used fire. Fire is a human condition. When you look at an archaeological site, if you find charcoal, you say, "There were people here." You know, the little fire ring and that sort of thing. Without that, the assumption is people are not there. I mean, you say the Inuit maybe in the Arctic may not be burning, doing prescribed burns like we have found in the southern part of North America. But they'll be using fire for cooking and for light and for heat and different things. So people use fire, period.
The first nations in the Americas were using fire as a management tool to maintain their habitat characteristics that benefited people and benefited the resources that people depend on. I'm going to give you a couple examples of actually how that was done, then we can debate about how extensive it was, at length. I'm thinking it was extensive, it was all over the continent. Let me talk about one of the newest pieces of information we've come up with in the southeastern woodlands, southeastern forest, the original territory of the Cherokee Nation and Choctaw and Seminole and the Iroquois people—the whole East Coast. And we still have to think about what it was like. And some of our evidence, we've been talking to some Cherokee elders who have verified these sort of things. Well, you know, there's a condition where if we put it into a story form, the chestnuts are a very important and abundant food resources for people, deer, bear, turkey. And the Cherokee people, for example, would burn every year, or every other year, they would burn the understory. And as one of the elders quoted to us this year is that the flame length would only be about that high, and they would burn, like I say, every year or every other year. And he made a comment, they would never lay off two or three years. Meaning they would never let the forest build up fuels for three years and then put fire to it, because then you have higher flame lengths and you can kill your chestnut trees. And if you can imagine that.... Well, as one of the archaeologists out here on the plateau said, "Native people consumed anything that was of nutritional value." Period, the end. And they may not eat them all the time, but if it has nutritional value, maybe it's only eaten during scarce resource times, but they were used. In fact, one of the elders actually said it this way, "The chestnut provided for all our needs. It gave us food, it gave us clothing, it gave us shelter." Building materials. And by clothing and shoes, what was meant is that the deer eat the chestnuts, and people use the deer hides for clothing and shoes. We used to hear something similar when the Sioux people and the Lakota people talk about the buffalo and its importance in their life.
You have a situation there where you are burning frequently for food resources. It's the same condition out here in the Southwest on the plateau, and you probably want some information about the plateau in a little bit. I'll try to focus some ideas on that and say that first it was the connection with mass production, which is the nut meats, like in the chestnut. The piñon pine out here in the Southwest is a perfect parallel for a tree that's long-lived, has a high food production value. One of the things they did mention was the Cherokee? tradition, that's also parallel up here, and that various families were responsible for certain piñon groves, if you think of it that way. And they would burn them, like on the Paiute.... The Paiute Nation I'm working with, doing some research with here. We were talking to an elder just recently again, and did some interviews with him. This man, named Ben Pickett [phonetic spelling], said that what they would do with the piñons, they would certainly burn them, but they would burn them on a four-year cycle. They would harvest the pinons on a four-year cycle. They'd burn them for four years, the understory, and harvest piñons in that particular stand or clump of piñon trees.
Alcoze: ... a system of rotating their harvest over a many-year period, but by these four-year blocks. The Paiute are really a fascinating example when we talk about fire on the plateau. One of the plateau first nations. If you go back a hundred years ago, the literature, the scientific or the literature of, oh, the people who were worried about forests and plants and animals and land use, one of them coined a phrase which was "Paiute forestry." A hundred years ago, it was a label that was really derogatory. It's like that joke, if you were to put it in the way it was presented then, it went, "Hey, did you hear the one about how Indians manage a forest?" You say, "No." "Well, the Paiutes manage the forest by burning it." Ha ha ha, Paiute forestry. How do Indians burn a forest? By burning it down. Well, they burn it, but they don't burn it down. They would burn it across the continent, but they didn't burn it down.
There's been some recent publications that have analyzed that idea of Paiute forestry, which is representative of Native American fire use on the plateau. And they discovered that—I guess to summarize quickly—the conclusion now, a hundred years later, is that if we had been practicing Native American land use management techniques, using prescribed burning as they did, we wouldn't have had the Los Alamos Fire, we wouldn't have had the Yellowstone Fire, because there would have been fires consistently and frequently in those systems to burn up the fuel loads.
I guess that some of the other uses of fire that make it very clear that people have.... I want to make it very clear that the use of fire by the native people was incredibly sophisticated, more sophisticated than we are able to understand today in modern America. We're trying to relearn that in modern forestry practice, because we're trying to stop Los Alamos from happening again.
On the plateau, let's look at how fire was used in very diverse ways. And so the first would be looking at something like basket making, basket materials. If you're familiar with the kind of high quality and very specific, I guess, specifications for basket materials. When you talk to basket makers, they're not willing to take any old twig that you can pull off a willow tree and make a basket out of it. They want long slips that are uniform and don't have a lot of knots on 'em and stuff like that. Well, of course, you have knots on your willow, and you start bending it around, it's going to break there, or it might break in two or three years, making the basket useless. So before they would put all that work into making a basket, they made sure that they'd have the highest quality materials available. If those high-quality materials were not available to them, say, like if we were to go out today and say we needed to get 100 pieces of willow branches that are four feet long and don't have any knots in them, don't have any knuckles or anything—we'd be hard-pressed to do that, because willows tend to not grow that way. They kind of branch out and do all kinds of things. We found that the women, the basket-makers, recognizing that, would either coppice—they would either use coppicing or cutting—just cut their willow branches, or burn them. Willow certainly wasn't the only basket material used. They used rabbit brush—that's one other of the common ones. But there again, they would burn these areas, and then the resulting growth spurt from the plant would provide the basket maker with great materials.
I mean, think what's happened. Imagine a gnarly willow plant—we're talking about willows—all gnarly and a lot of dead stems and dead leaves all over the place. If you burn that area, you burn all those stems, you burn all the leaves that are on the ground, it turns to ash. A guy named Covington says that "ash is like ice cream to the soil." And so you've got this willow that you want to be harvesting, making baskets out of. You burn it, put the ashes into the soil, that's where it's going to go, so the plant then is getting this pulse of high nutrients because of the ashes. It's also getting a pulse of sunlight, because this new growth now, when you burned it, you've opened up the canopy, even if it was just local. So you get more light to those plants, they have more nutrient, and they're going to grow faster. And so they ended up making these long, beautiful slips that you can use for basket making. I guess that's one example that seems pretty clear to many people how that would work. But there are other plants....
Oh, I mentioned examples of being fire adaptive. The ponderosa pine tree, which is the pine tree for the Colorado Plateau, is a fire-adapted plant. It has a very thick, fire-retardant bark. It's hard to get that bark to light. And I mean you can compare that with other trees, if you're familiar with something like a white birch. White birch bark will burn when it's wet. (chuckles) So we know that the ponderosa pine, because it's fire adapted, the only way a plant or an animal becomes adapted to fire is when it's exposed to fire a lot. When we reconstruct the historic conditions of the Colorado Plateau as has been done with the Ecological Restoration Institute, they've done some extensive work on reconstructing what the environment, what the ponderosa pine forest was like 200-400 years ago. They're able to do that because of some unique characteristics that exist here in the Southwest: one is the dryness. And so you can go out today and you can find a stump that was cut 100-150 years ago, and it's an old, gnarly, weather-beaten stump, but you can still get an accurate tree ring profile out of that stump. And that's one of these we've been using.
And if you go around this landscape, you can do this now. You can find areas where you can go now and find trees that are four or five inches and just real thick. We call those dog hair thickets. You can find those dog hair thickets, and every now and then you'll find either a big tree or a big tree stump. Not very many of them, they're kind of sparse on the land now. Well, when that tree was cut, let's say it was cut 150 years ago. That'd put it, what, 1850?, which is probably too early. The settlement didn't occur 'til the late 1800s. Let's say the tree was cut a hundred years ago, 1900. The settlement was here, they were, in fact, doing a lot of logging. Well, first we can go back to that tree stump and find out how old the tree was. We're finding that those trees were 400-500 years old. Ponderosa pine will live to 600 and 700 years, as an outside extreme. So whatever forest was here before European settlement, the trees lived 500-700 years. It also means that that tree only has to reproduce itself one time in 500 years.
With ponderosa pine, if I were to put words into the ponderosa pines' mouths I'll probably make people shudder and cringe, but I'll do it anyway. And so a ponderosa pine kind of looks at it and says, "Well...." The ponderosa pine responds by being fire retardant at the bark, because you had frequent grass fires, is what's going on—very frequent, every three, five, sometimes seven years—that frequent, and low intensity. The grasses are all burning up, but the trees don't burn. The trees don't burn, and I can prove that, real simple. Come with me out into the woods, we find a big stump, we measure it?, that stump was cut in 1900, and when it was cut it was 600 years old. That takes us back to 1900, go back six [hundred] years, so you're talking, what, 1400? And I can say to you right here and now that between 1400 and 1900 there were no catastrophic canopy destructive wildfires around that tree. If there had been, it would have burned up.
Now, what does that say? There were no catastrophic fires on the Colorado Plateau until recent times. Now, you may have had some stands in local conditions go up into a dog hair thicket and be real clumped and they might burn out. But for the landscape, the trees weren't that close, the trees weren't close enough together. So what you had, though, then was a frequently fire regime, either lightning—probably most of the fire in ponderosa pine, the current assumption is that most of them were natural lightning ignitions, dry lightning. But there's some fire history that says some of the fires occurred in the spring, and some occurred in the fall, at which times you either don't have lightning, or you don't have dry lightning. So the question is, if lightning didn't start those fires in the spring and fall, some of the lightning seasons, what did? The answer, who did?
The indigenous nations of the area burned or were ignition sources where fuel buildups were severe. And the fuel buildups have a couple of detrimental things that people would want to avoid: first is fire threat. You have a bunch of grasses and bushes and shrubs growing up around your house, and you get a grass fire, then you could burn your house down. That's the kind of thing that people learn quickly how to avoid that. As well then, if you examine this fuel buildup, it prevents animals from getting at the food on the ground: the nut trees and the walnuts and the hickory nuts and the chestnuts and all that. Out here it'd be piñon nuts. Or just the kind of food resources that are available to plants. If you pile up all that biomass in dead twigs and leaves, it's not doing anything any good. And so people burned. They burned very frequently and for an incredible array of purposes. I mentioned basketry.
Let me skip one—get off the plateau a bit, say, go up into what it classically buffalo country, if you will, where the Lakota burned for food resources, and they would burn civilly twice a year. When they left the prairies, they burned the prairies. Went into the woodlands for the winter where they'd be warmer. When they left the woodlands to go back to the prairie, they would burn the woodland grasses. And if you look at buffalo behavior, you learn that buffalo require or prefer forage that's been burned within the last three years. Once it's three years old after a burn, they tend to move off of that area, because that's when you have the highest protein and, I guess, forage nutrient value in those grasses—after a burn. Well, that means the folks, when they would burn the woods, they'd burn off the prairies and force the buffalo into the grasses, or the woodlands, that they burned last spring. And they keep this rotation cycle going.
Something similar was going on here on the plateau with the Paiutes. The Paiutes, for sure—I think other first nations on the plateau have similar practices, but let's stick with just the Paiute for now—they were burning for deer, deer as well as mountain sheep and Rocky Mountain goats, the sheep. What they were doing, they established a burn mosaic on the landscape, which means that they were burning every year in different places, and they're burning to bring in deer into areas. And so you'd burn an area out that might be an acre. Burn that out, say, in the spring. And now imagine what's happening now. That particular area burned in the spring is now covered with black ash, and the spring rains come, and the blackness on the ground heats up the ground faster. When the rain gets there, it's able to get to the ashes better, being dissolved in the soil and setting up great conditions for new growth. You can compare that to an area that hasn't been burned, where you have last year's old dry grasses and other things—old dry grasses and plants. What they're doing is creating a shade for the soil—all those dry leaves are shading out the sun from reaching the soil. So those areas don't warm up as fast, and the plants and the grasses aren't stimulated as early as when you can burn in the spring. Now what does that do? When you come to another spring, your people are wanting to make up for a hard winter and get some food resources, get some of that going. Burning those areas stimulates the grass and the forage growth for things like deer and antelope or Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep and other animals as well. They would be like magnets where the people could then set up ambushes or go in and get.... They know the animals are preferring those high-quality-nutrient new grasses. I mean, those are apparent… I can demonstrate and have demonstrated exist on the plateau, relation of native people and fire.
I mean, to summarize, I'd say that once again, the landscapes were managed either directly or indirectly—maybe just harvesting them in certain ways, sustainable harvest. To me, that's an issue in this whole—that is raised with the whole question of the use of fire. Why would people use fire? My answer to that is it is a way in which a fewer number of people can manage a large area effectively. I mean, a few people, a hundred people or a few thousand people, can manage a landscape if they're using fire. I mean, we find that in Australia, we find it in Canada, Mexico, North America. And as recently as this last couple of years, we've started to branch out with the European fire use history. We find that in Europe, even today, people are still burning the heath. There are people in Italy that are burning, the peasants are burning their areas for their purposes—sometimes contradicting the federal law, for example, in Italy, because the peasants are burning when it's ecologically appropriate to burn, not when it's on somebody's schedule. So burning has occurred by humans all over the continent. All humans have used fire.
And we find that in North America, in the plateau specifically, there were a number of methods and effective techniques that employed fire to manage resources, to manage a habitat for resources, to improve the quality of life for those human beings that were living here. And I think we talk about it, the many examples of how fire is used, and some of the indigenous people I've worked with have over a hundred different ways for using fire, depending on what plant or animal they're trying to promote or inhibit.
Garcia Hunt: That's something we would probably maybe want to talk to you more about in the future—use also—and maybe get information from your center to put into the Archives and [Special] Collections Department here within the Cline Library, so that resource can be brought up. And for individuals from the East Coast all the way to the West Coast, to provide them with information on the web. So we'd be very interested in having you come back and within your research also, keep in touch with the Cline Library and with (inaudible) for next year and the years following, and keep everyone update on that. But I wanted to also go into what other native partnerships do you acknowledge or use besides you've talked with the Paiute and them, within the Colorado Plateau area, meaning Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and south, or either here within the Arizona area also?
Alcoze: Well, we've got a couple of different potential places to work with. White Mountain Apache is one that's very strong, and they're burning—they've got a very strong burning program. We've gotten involved with them—or we're initiating some involvement with them. One of their tribal members is a master's student in forestry that happens to be—I'll be involved with her as an advisor. She has been working for the tribe for the last few years. She graduated from [your?] School of Forestry [with] a bachelor's degree. And so that's sort of one place. Second is the Pueblos over near Los Alamos, because they lost, I heard one estimate as a rumor, like 70 or 80 percent of their landscape, or their resources, were burned in that fire. So that's an area we will be working with. We're focusing on the Kaibab Paiute and the Southern Paiutes for a couple of reasons. The biggest one is that we've been doing some ecological restoration research in the wilderness area that used to be recognized as Paiute territory, the Mt. Trumbull Wilderness Area. As we get involved with the Paiute groups and Southern Paiute, there's the Shivwitz Paiute and a number of other Paiute groups that we're working with that are up in Utah. I guess generalizing, the Southern Paiute groups, there's eight or nine of the Southern Paiutes we're working with.
Before we actually branch out into other areas on the Colorado Plateau, what we're doing as our strategy is to establish the Paiute community project in ways that it empowers that community and actually creates a pipeline from young kids into the university studying ecology, or really anything they want to, but getting them into the university in ways that they can apply the university training back to their own reservation. We've been focused on the Paiute Reservation now for about four years.
Garcia Hunt: And with that focus, I'm interested also in manpower, native manpower/womanpower who want to work with this. Is there restrictions on reservation lands, since they are such small parcels of land, at some time? Some reservations are real small, some reservations are really large. Is there a manpower resource cost?
Alcoze: I call it a manpower crisis-people-power crisis. I believe it's important for people to understand that it's really a crisis that has been building for a couple of generations, as they've become wed, you know, to a social-political track, but it still has to be reckoned with as the social-political oppression of native people in North America has resulted in what you would predict: fewer high school graduates, fewer university graduates, fewer doctors and lawyers and scientists and people—well, the kind of oppression I'm talking about has an educational component. The boarding schools kept the kids there 'til they were sixteen years old, and then they turned them loose, but they kept them at a third-grade educational level. So that has some serious implications for the last twenty, forty years of Native American history in the United States, at least. What we're looking at, then, is to work with the tribes and with the tribal community leaders and parents to stimulate their kids to do good work and give them rewards, and will reward them positively, not just with trinkets and candies, but actually being able to reward them with knowledge—knowledge about science, knowledge about their own people and their own communities. And then knowledge how their own communities can gauge science to the benefit and life quality of that community.
So really, I believe what we have to do is begin to train now. We're going to have to train, we're going to have to create our own cadre of Native American professionals. To me, the fundamental issue there is that we have to provide resources to hire high school kids and high school graduates to do this kind of work, to work with us, to train. We've had some preliminary excellent success with some of the young people on the Paiute Reservation who are young people, and we've had them work with us on a woodlands inventory. We paid them, and we're going to train them a bit, "Now you're a field technician, and I'm going to pay you for doing this work on your own reservation." And they did one of the best jobs I've ever seen, as far as going out and collecting data in a quality way. And what I'm—I guess I'll put in a plug if anyone's listening to this and they like that idea, then what it requires is resources so that we can do some work-study or some cooperative education programs with Native American young people so they can work for a living, and some of them seem kind of—I'm sure that everyone does—families and young families starting, and it's hard for them to just pick up and go to university for four years. So hopefully we can set up some programs—we're doing now, working to set up a pipeline to capture the attention of these young people in high school, or earlier if possible—get them interested to get them gainfully employed doing this work, proving to them that if they want to be a biologist or an ecologist or an environmental person, there is a job for them. And it's not volunteer work, it's very rewarding and challenging.
So I think with the Kaibab Paiute, they have a 120,000-acre reservation. Most of the other Southern Paiutes do not have anywhere near that size—they have these little postage stamp places. And so, for example, what we're actually working with in Kaibab Paiute is to set up programs that they can draw in other Southern Paiute young people into some recreation, some summer camps, take them out in the woods, camping. People think, "Oh, well, you're an Indian. You know everything about the woods and how to camp and how to live in nature and all that stuff." Well, these kids grew up in a city in a mainstream school just like most people, and sometimes have the same fears about nature and being "alone in the wilderness" kind of thing. And so we're looking at training and talking to people and getting another perspective. I've used wilderness a couple of times, and it kind of reminds us of a quote from one of the elders of a long time ago: "Before the Europeans arrived, there were no wilderness areas in North America. And it was only with abuse of those resources, that those animals and plants started to be afraid of people." And I believe that that's something important, and we have to get back to it: How do we take care of the animals and the plants the way our ancestors did—our human ancestors—whether they're Cherokee or Swiss or in Africa they're burning, and they're burning all over the world, historically, for these kind of reasons.
Garcia Hunt: Myself, coming from New Mexico and a Pueblo Indian, growing up on the reservation, I also look at when you're looking for recruits or anything like that, we're talking about traditional land areas also. Does that come into involvement with the research center also?
Alcoze: Uh-huh.
Garcia Hunt: 'Cause they might want to do the work, but the family is restricting them from going into that part of the forest or that part of the territory because they're restricted from that area. Do you find that?
Alcoze: Well, not directly with the Kaibab Paiute, but it's something that we're recognizing. For whatever reason, the community has reasoned you should not be in places. I believe that their primary obligation is to respect their community, and if necessary, to teach their own young people how to respect the elders and not going to learn just because they can, or just because it's a good scientific study or a good thing like that. And I think that's one of the things that is important and critical with working with any community—and there are those issues. And it takes some time. We've been with the Paiutes now for four years, working directly with them. And just recently, in this last twelve-month period [we've] received some start-up funding—working on a shoestring before that. I mean, it's important to bring them, involve that community in the process, and have them involved with talking about ecological restoration. The Ecological Restoration Institute is what I'm working under. And the whole effort there has been to involve communities in restoration. So it requires.... I mean, it's one thing to say "involve the community in restoration." I think it's important that as people, as we move in the communities more and more, recognize that there's some very fundamental protocols, and I guess polite things we have to do when working with the community. And part of it is simply going out and being there long enough to just pick up some information, instead of walking in and saying, "Hi, I'm Thom, I want some information. I've got half an hour. Could you please tell me all your sacred knowledge, and I'll pop it in a little recorder?"
Here's an example. On the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, snakes present people with problems, from traditional knowledge, from cultural beliefs about what snakes represent and what they do. The Paiute have quite a different look at snakes, for example. They see them in a much more positive way. If there's a rattlesnake crossing our path while we were doing some of our field work, [and we] went to the elder [and asked], "What does that mean? Should we...." "Well, we just leave them alone. It means it's transition, we're going to transition time." It's changing times, is what it means to the Paiute. If you go to Australia, oh gosh! I think it's eight or nine of the most poisonous snakes in the world. The aboriginal people there really respect snakes, and snakes are in their images, in the designs on petroglyphs, and all the art work. You don't see them in Navajo art work, you don't see a Navajo artist making snakes. An aboriginal person might be making snakes, and it has no....
Alcoze: And that may or not be the case with another first nations group. I think it's important that we not just assume that all the Indians are the same. I think that's a very important statement. There's some commonalities that native nations have—the idea that Earth is a mother and we have to take care of her.
Let me finish this off and say one final thing. I'll use a quote from Australia. They say that the use of the land is a responsibility, it's not a right. And to be worthy of the responsibility to take care of land there's three things you have to do. I think those three things fit North American belief systems as well. First, you have to hunt it, you have to harvest it, you have to use the resources that the land provides for you. So you have to hunt it. And you have to do ceremony. You have to say thanks as a way of giving thanks to the world, to nature or Mother Earth, or however it's related to. In this case in Australia, it's finding ways to give thanks just to the earth for feeding us. And the third thing is that you have to burn it, you have to keep it clean. Aboriginal people there talk about the reason they burn is to keep the forest clean. And if you go into the forest that's burning now around Flagstaff, you find that.... To me it's possible to look at that and say, "Oh, so that's what it means." An unclean forest is all built-up and gnarly and wood and all kinds of fuel buildup, and all kinds of ready to catch on fire and burn the trees down, which you don't want.
So those three things, I think, are very important for us to recognize, or maybe even look at as to how can we then take that traditional knowledge statement of harvesting and being thankful and burning, which is keeping it clean—how can we apply that in America? I believe there are ways that we can do that, and that we should. It would be good beneficial outcomes. Of course that's where people who are afraid of fire [say], "Oh! that's a terrible thing to do!" But we'll see. We know that the fuel loads are not going to disappear. They're not going to disappear into thin air, they're going to burn. And it's up to us as a people who are now responsible for these environments. How do we want to do that? Do we want to let it burn down, or are we going to burn it gently? And I think that's kind of what we need to look at. And burning it gently, I believe, is the way the plateau was managed historically, and if we can get back to that management practice again, I think we'll be all the good for it.
Garcia Hunt: And for a last question: You as a Native American ecologist here working at the research center, are there internships for other natives? Since this will go out on the web, and it will go out as an exhibit here at the Cline Library, to give some information out there to other Native Americans, or non-natives that want to work with resources here at NAU. Can you give us some information?
Alcoze: Well, I think the first place, if people are interested in ecological restoration, which is my primary effort and work, they can call me, Thom Alcoze, and ask about the Native American Ecological Restoration. We don't have a lot of assistantships, but there are a few. It's a relatively new program. This is 2001 right now, about halfway through, but we expect to have, oh, three or four undergraduate assistantships available for native students to apply for and work on the reservation—preferably their own, if that's available—and do some restoration projects and ecology work with their own reservation. And so the Ecological Restoration Institute is probably—it is the best way to reach this particular area if you want to work in environmental work. There's also a professor named Ron Trosper, who is a Native American forestry director, and he can also give people ideas about what they might want to do. And it's, again, designed specifically to encourage and support Native American students in the area of forestry and environmental work somehow.
I also want to say that restoration, the way we're established here by the Ecological Restoration Institute, the ERI, is very inclusive, so that people don't have to consider themselves a great animal biologist to work there. We had a journalist student come through a couple of years ago who was wanting to look at restoration. And of course how does journalism fit restoration? And our answer was, "Well, if people don't know about restoration by the newspapers and magazines they read, they're not going to ever know about it. So we need to train people who are going to write for magazines and journals and newspapers. Or "I want to be a teacher. That doesn't sound like ecological restoration to me." Well, I guess I would say, "wait a minute! if we don't teach our young people about the ecology of the world and the environment and nature, if we don't teach them how we're restoring the damage we created—people caused this damage, we damaged the system, damaged the ecology, and we're trying to fix it. So if teachers know that, they can teach kids that. So come on as a teacher.
Somebody says, "Well, I'm an artist. I'm not an environmental tree-hugger at all. I just do sculptures," or "I do paintings." You can take an artist and say, "Look, if I'm going to communicate knowledge about restoration, it has to have a visual component. And since I don't consider myself an artist, well, maybe we need an artist to come in and learn about plants and animals like a scientist." And so they have the knowledge of these animals and plants, and they're really a scientist/biologist themselves, or ecologists, and now they can draw it or sculpt it or use creative—be creative in other ways as a specific artist. I think what I'm doing is creative. I think what we do in this whole area is very creative in that it's, we have to create and re-establish connection with your environment.
So if kids can call the School of Forestry, and we'll talk about what they're looking for, they'll get directed to me or Ron Trosper or someone else maybe. And there's a program called Applied Indigenous Studies that they can also check out.
Garcia Hunt: Okay. I'm sure that we'll be in more contact with you, wanting to know about your research and your development there. Thank you, Thom.
Alcoze: Thanks, Robert. Thank you, Jennifer. I appreciate it.
[END OF INTERVIEW]