Using a large handsaw, a group of researchers remove a thin slice of red pine stump — called a “cookie” — and pass it around. A strong and pleasant fragrance of pine resin fills the air as Derek Hartline explains what makes this a great stump for sampling.
“Each one of these healed over lesions like you saw in the cookie, is a different fire event; a scar,” Hartline said. “Think of it like a human: When you hurt yourself you’re gonna scab over, you’re scarring. So the rest of the tree rotted off, but this is solid.”
Hartline is a conservation biologist with the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians. He’s part of a group of researchers from tribal communities and Michigan State University Extension that’s searching for stories in old tree stumps, in hopes of returning “good fire” to the landscape in Northern Michigan.
“This is definitely so much more than just research,” said Mae Wright, tribal historic preservation officer with the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians. “This is really an act of healing.”
Wright is part of the collaborative working to construct a fire history in the heart of Odawa homelands. The research project is called “Setting the Straits on Fire,” and the goal is just that: to reintroduce cultural fire in the region. Michigan is no stranger to forest fire, and neither are the indigenous tribes and people whose ancestors lived on and managed this land through fire for hundreds of years.
By cutting round samples from old red pine stumps, researchers can count and record annual growth rings. The samples taken at this field site have dark indentations every six to 10 rings: signs of prescribed fire started by the region’s original inhabitants.
Some of these fires date back to the mid-1600s. When Wright sees those fire scars, she thinks about what was happening around these old trees.
“So when I’m seeing these dates, what I’m seeing is: ‘That’s right, that’s when the first mission came through here. This is when the fort was burned down. This is when we were moving because there were smallpox epidemics coming through the community so many people were getting sick. This is when we had people getting shifted down to Detroit during the Fox Wars and there was so much chaos happening in the community.’”
“Ishkode” meets “dendrochronology”
Even with all that turmoil, upheaval, and adversity through the years, Wright's ancestors were still using fire — or “ishkode” in Anishinaabemowin — as a tool on the landscape.
“Fire is like nothing else in the world,” said Mary Parr, a fire ecologist with the Michigan Natural Features Inventory and member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians.
“It’s something that can breathe, it can move across the landscape, it can transform things and rejuvenate things. There’s just something about that natural disturbance, and that spirit, that is mesmerizing,” Parr said, adding that the rejuvenating nature of fire is reflected in the word for fire in the Anishinaabe language.
“The one we use a lot is ‘ishkode’ or ‘shkode,’ depending on the dialect,” Parr said.
“‘Ish’ means ‘new,’ and ‘ode’ is ‘heart.’ So with that interpretation, it’d be like ‘new heart,’ so like new flourishing, or revitalizing.”
“What I’m seeing is this beautiful, consistent presence. During all these other huge shifts in religion, economics, politics, war, and sickness … we’re still maintaining our connection with ishkode,” Wright said. “That’s so special, because it helps to reaffirm that this is our home.”
Using tree ring records, or “dendrochronology,” these researchers are piecing together a story that ties people to place.
“This is an extremely resilient ecosystem,” said Josh Cohen, senior conservation scientist with the Michigan Natural Features Inventory, which is an arm of MSU Extension. “And at the same time, this is showing the resilience of these people that are going through all this trauma but are still burning this place, and still tending to the land.”
The argument for “good fire”
The project is funded by a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s coastal program, with a focal area defined around the Straits of Mackinac.
“The goal of the project is to work collaboratively, to learn from the stories trees and indigenous communities tell about fire,” Cohen said, “so that we can bring good fire back to these places to create more resilient ecological communities, more resilient communities in terms of places where people can return to expressing their cultural rights, and also places that are more resilient to climate change.”
Climate change is causing drier, hotter summers in the Great Lakes. It’s also extending the fire season and increasing the risk of fires burning out of control. Cohen, who’s originally from California, has seen firsthand how a lack of prescribed fire can lead to high-intensity wildfires that burn out of control.
“And we can have those here in the Great Lakes as well,” Cohen said. “So we can make a decision about intentionally burning the places that we value in a good way, or we can wait for that next wildfire to come where we lose cultural assets, we lose ecological assets. This is a climate adaptation strategy to create more resilient landscapes by getting fire back to prevent the next big wildfire.”
Preventing catastrophic wildfires isn’t the only motivation behind bringing back what Cohen calls “good fire.” There are a multitude of reasons why the Anishinaabe burned here in Northern Michigan, such as maintaining long range visibility, impacting forage for grazers, or managing mobility corridors for moving from sugar bush to ricing camps.
The blueberry plains
Revitalization is especially needed in a place the Odawa have long called “the blueberry plains,” which is today a part of Wilderness State Park. The forest floor is covered in blueberry plants, but there’s too much shade and competition for them to produce fruit. Derek Hartline says fire can change that.
“So say you burn a stand; your first year after burning, your blueberries are going to have production. The second year you’re going to have even better production. The third year is going to be your peak year,” Hartline said. “And then on year four and five, production is going down; It’s time to burn again.”
In preparation for this research project, Hartline and his colleagues held listening sessions with tribal elders, who shared their memories of prescribed fire in the blueberry plains.
“We had a really good turnout,” Hartline said, “and had a very nonchalant, informal conversation about what different elders remembered about burning certain areas, or what their grandmas told them.”
The dominant narrative among most ecologists had been that these types of forests — pine-dominated dry-mesic northern forests — didn’t have much fire in them besides major stand-replacing fires, hundreds of years apart. But stories from the region's original inhabitants and tree ring records from across the region are challenging that narrative.
“It was used a lot more frequently than we thought,” Hartline said. “The tool, fire, was so important to Odawa. It was a part of their lifestyles. They didn’t think twice about lighting fire.”
Prescribed fire is becoming more widely adopted as a tool for state and federal land managers. But the models they use to determine where and when to burn in Northern Michigan make assumptions based on forest type that mostly account for stand-replacing fire events: the kinds that wipe out whole swaths of woods every so often. Those models aren’t accounting for the more-frequent, less-intense fires started by the Odawa and Ojibwe throughout the Straits region.
One of the primary goals of this project is to update those models used by state and federal agencies, and make sure that cultural fires — like the ones here in the blueberry plains — are included in the data.
“It’s about building momentum to be able to demonstrate that we can burn these places safely and they have a real benefit,” said Kurt Kipfmueller, lead dendrochronologist on the project. He’s also a professor of Tribal and Indigenous Natural Resource Management in Michigan State University’s Department of Forestry.
Kipfmueller studies tree rings to help reconstruct past environments. His dendrochronology work has taken him all over the country. He’s been focusing on fire history in the Great Lakes region since 2004. Kipfmueller said this region, specifically, has changed the way he thinks about his work.
“Often you would approach something like this from an ecological problem, or an ecological standpoint,” Kipfmueller said. “But it’s the cultural side of it that I think is so important. That’s something that took me a while: to not remove people from the story.”
Knowledge about using fire as a land tending tool has persisted in tribal communities, passed down through stories as traditional ecological knowledge. But Kipfmueller said dendrochronology helps people see and feel that historical connection.
Why did cultural fire end?
Red pines secrete resin to heal the scars from fire, which causes the wood to harden and solidify, preventing decay. That’s why the stumps the researchers are studying in Northern Michigan are still here, hundreds of years later. The cultural use of fire not only made these woods a great place for gathering blueberries in the past; it also preserved the history that this research team is gathering now.
These resin-filled stumps confirm that cultural fire was once commonplace on this landscape, as similar studies have shown throughout the Great Lakes region. But that changed in the late 1800s, when government agencies responded to major wildfires with an outright ban on burning state or federal land. Doing so would mean hefty fines, and maybe even in jail time. That put a damper on the use of cultural fire, but it didn’t stamp it out entirely.
Mary Parr compared the use of fire to tribal fishing rights, which finally received state and federal recognition after legal battles fought throughout the 1970s and ‘80s.
“They’ve set precedents, as far as fishing rights, that have gone through to the Supreme Court. There’s a lot of cases that affirm those treaty rights,” Parr said.
“Fire hasn’t had that yet. So if we were to burn in this state park using cultural ways, it would be considered arson and we’d be liable to get arrested. We kind of have to utilize the current channels that exist, which are very slow.”
But the slow process of bringing good fire back to the blueberry plains is underway. The Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians is collaborating with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources to draft a new stewardship plan for Wilderness State Park, which will include a burn plan for culturally significant sites.
Mae Wright says those burns would bring back more than just blueberries.
“For me, that hope is that for those future generations, it won’t be a struggle to connect to this history,” Wright said. “It won’t be a struggle to connect to ishkode. It’s going to be something that’s just so natural, they’re going to be able to expect it.”
