top of page
Search

Indigenous Fire Practices Among the Tribes of Coastal Southern California

Before the arrival of European colonizers to coastal Southern California, the Chumash, Tongva, Luiseño, and Kumeyaay Tribes used fire to alter the landscape. By burning the coastal plains, they cleared the dense chaparral and created a patchwork of grassland ecosystems, making the land more suitable for harvesting. Removing the dense shrubs with fire also made it easier for them to travel and hunt (Anderson & Keeley, 2018). The inland mountains were burned more infrequently by the local Indigenous peoples, meaning they largely stayed blanketed in shrublands (California Chaparral Institute). The fire exclusion practices imposed by the Spanish in 1793 and maintained by the United States eliminated tribes’ ability to practice cultural burning. A Chumash burn in 2023 and Luiseño and Kumeyaay burns in 2024 have brought cultural burning back to coastal Southern California, and as these tribes continue to acquire more land, cultural burning will surely spread (Tasoff, 2023).


Tribes in Coastal Southern California

Coastal Southern California has contained a multitude of tribes and bands of Indigenous people, largely categorized into four main tribal groups. The Kumeyaay Tribe, which has inhabited an area roughly covered by modern-day San Diego County and Tijuana Municipality, had an estimated pre-colonial population of around 60,000 people (Huntington 2024). The Luiseño Tribe, from the modern-day Orange County area, had 5,000 people before the Mission Period (Haas 2011). The Tongva Tribe’s traditional territory is the Greater Los Angeles Basin, where they inhabited nearly 100 villages before the arrival of the Spanish (Claremont Heritage). The Chumash tribe, who call home California’s central coast in what is modern-day Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo counties, consisted of 25,000 people who lived in 150 towns and villages before the arrival of the Spanish (​​Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History). These tribes have inhabited coastal Southern California for thousands of years and had vast, interconnected trade networks that stretched north to the San Joaquin Valley and east to the Colorado River (Claremont Heritage). There was significant autonomy between the different villages in each of these tribes, and cultural customs and language dialects varied slightly from village to village (Haas 2011).


Background on Indigenous Fire in Southern California

The tribes of coastal Southern California frequently used fire to convert chaparral in the coastal plains to grasslands. Without human intervention, chaparral has a fire return interval of between 30 and 150 years, and when it burns, its fires are hot and intense. This infrequently burned old-growth chaparral shrubland is incredibly dense and hard to navigate. The Tribes in these areas used frequent, low-intensity burns to convert the coastal plains of shrublands into grasslands (California Chaparral Institute). These grasslands formed important travel, trade, and hunting corridors, and the regular burns made the land more suitable for harvesting seeds and herbs such as redmaids, chia, edible bulbs, and insects, as well as small mammals, which supplemented the seafood in their diets (Connolly). These fires also spurred the growth of woody stems, which were useful for constructing nets and baskets (County of Santa Barbara). These frequent low-intensity burns created a “mosaic of open grassland and recently burned, young and mature stands of chaparral with different combinations of species and densities” (Anderson & Keeley, 2018). The inland hills and mountains were burned much less frequently than the coastal plains, meaning they largely retained the dense coverage of chaparral and the infrequent, high-intensity fires that are characteristic of that biome (California Chaparral Institute).


Significance of cultural burning

Fire has been important to tribal life in coastal Southern California for thousands of years. These tribe’s cultural burns were foundational to their reciprocal relationship with the environment. They used fire to manage the land in a way that maximized food output and ease of trade while spurring nutrient recycling and the creation of wetlands (Connolly). Additionally, cultural burns were an important community-building practice. They played “an integral part in traditional ceremonies and tribal life” (Trujillo 2024). Unfortunately, as part of its colonial subjugation of the Indigenous peoples of California, the Spanish Empire outlawed cultural burning in 1793, and the United States did the same in 1850 (Kucher 2025). The initial growth of the conservation movement in the United States reinforced these fire exclusion practices, as governmental conservation agencies aimed to put out fires as quickly as possible. “In 1935, the Forest Service established the so-called 10 a.m. policy, which decreed that every fire should be suppressed by 10 a.m. the day following its initial report” (Forest History Society). Since fire has such a strong cultural importance to the local Tribes, these fire exclusion practices continued colonial oppression to the modern day. 


Background on the environment of coastal Southern California

The chaparral ecosystem home to these tribes runs in the north-south direction along the coastal hills and mountains. This biome is never more than 100 miles wide in Southern California and is bordered to the west by the ocean and to the east by the desert. This thin strip of relative habitability is still not an easy place to live. The coastal plains, where most of the Indigenous people of the region have historically lived, only receive around 10 inches of rain per year (San Diego County Water Authority). The low amount of rainfall meant that many Indigenous crops, such as corn, beans, and squash, did not have the summer rainfall or extensive water sources for irrigation necessary to grow successfully, meaning burning grasslands to facilitate the growth of calorie-dense seeds and herbs was a more efficient use of the land (Tasoff, 2023). These environmental challenges also meant that the Indigenous peoples formed comprehensive trade networks and became expert seafarers and fishermen. In fact, Chumash and Tongva settlements in the Channel Islands of California date back thousands of years (National Park Service). As explained by Jan Timbrook, curator emeritus of ethnography at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, “Although they practiced a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, the Chumash were far from nomadic” (Tasoff, 2023).


The Return of Cultural Burning

Much of the coastal plain that the Chumash, Tongva, Luiseño, and Kumeyaay Tribes have burned is now developed. That being said, there are still areas that were traditionally burned that can be burned once again. In 2023, UC Santa Barbara partnered with the Chumash tribe to conduct a cultural burn on the North Campus Open Space. This burn was an important step towards restoring Indigenous land practices and healing historical trauma. Robyne Redwater, a Chumash tribal member, explained, “We're active in cultural revitalization, language revitalization, and doing this burn is one of those missing puzzle pieces” (Tasoff, 2023). Other tribes are conducting cultural burns as well. In May 2024, the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians conducted a cultural burn at the Tribe's campground. “By doing the cultural burn we aim to challenge the fear of fire and promote sustainable land management practices” (Trujillo 2024). In December of 2024, the Barona Band of Mission Indians, a tribe of Kumeyaay Indians, conducted a 160-acre cultural burn on a grassland on their reservation (Kucher, 2025). Tribal land management is an important step towards repairing Southern California’s relationship with fire. It allows tribes to practice their cultural burns and return land to a fire-healthy state. For example, the Tongva Tribe acquired an acre of land in LA and restored the area by removing highly flammable non-native plants. When the Eaton fire burned through the area in January 2025, the Tongva-managed land was much less damaged by the fire than nearby areas (Plevin 2025). Furthermore, the inclusion of tribes in the management of federally protected areas in Southern California, such as national forests, could be an important aspect of halting exurban sprawl and backcountry development in Southern California from eliminating yet more natural areas. Incorporating tribal voices and land management practices in the stewardship of chaparral areas could simultaneously help restore cultural burning practices and ensure that these ecosystems are conserved in a healthy way.


Research Difficulties

The main difficulty I had in compiling this is that there is not a lot of information on historical cultural burning practices from the tribes themselves. Because of this, it's hard to paint a completely accurate picture of pre-colonial cultural burning in the area. Additionally, there's not a lot of information available about the chaparral biome in general. My goal in giving this disclaimer isn't to call into question the reputability of any of these sources. Rather, I hope to show that we still have so much to learn about chaparral, and our understandings of this biome will change as we learn more about it. I tried to write the most accurate account of this topic that I could with the information that I had, but there may be some errors.


Note: This is an adaptation of a paper I submitted for a class.


References

Anderson, M., & Keeley, J. (2018). Native peoples’ relationship to the California chaparral. In

J. Keeley, M. Molinari, H. Safford, & E. Underwood (Eds.), Valuing chaparral: Ecological, socio-economic, and management perspectives (pp. 79-121). https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-68303-4_4

Chumash Life. Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.

Connolly, M. Kumeyaay - Precontact Culture. Kumeyaay.com.

Cultural Burn at UCSB’s North Campus Open Space. County of Santa Barbara Executive

Gabrielino/Tongva Native California Peoples. Claremont Heritage.

Haas, L. (2011). Pablo Tac, Indigenous Scholar. University of California Press.

Huntington, S. (2024). Kumeyaay: Analysis of the Past and

Kucher, K. (2025). Cal Fire seeks to help tribes bring ‘good fire’ to local reservations. San

Native Californian Fire Use. California Chaparral Institute.

Native Inhabitants. National Park Service.

Plevin, R. (2025). The Tongva’s land burned in Eaton fire. But leaders say traditional practices

Rainfall. San Diego County Water Authority.

https://www.sdcwa.org/your-water/reservoirs-rainfall/rainfall/

Tasoff, H. (2023). A Chumash cultural burn reignites ancient practice for wildland

Trujillo, N. (2024). Restoring the Lands: La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians Host Cultural

U.S. Forest Service Fire Suppression. Forest History Society.

 
 
 

©2020 by Jack 4 the Planet.

bottom of page