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Surrounded by people outfitted in flame resistant gear, Sebastian Castillo began to light a fire.

He rubbed his hands around a stick, drilling into a cedar board. The specialist in fire and ethnobotany was using friction to make an ember.

As he sped up, his arms gradually wearing out, others stepped in, taking turns to build up the heat. A small piece of soaproot eventually caught, was gingerly blown on and used to light a pile of sticks.

As the pile crackled, he led a prayer.

Young people, some learning how to work with fire in this way for the first time, then took sticks to the flame, dipped them and carried their torch to the burn area.

This demonstration, part of last week’s Blue Lake Rancheria/Yurok Tribe/CalFire Cultural Fire Symposium, comes during a renaissance in the practice. [DISCLOSURE: The Blue Lake Rancheria is a minority owner of the Outpost’s parent company, Lost Coast Communications, Inc.]

It was on a patch of forest where fire hadn’t burned for 150 years, until it was transferred to the Blue Lake Rancheria last year. This prescribed-burning effort is part of a larger push to bring “good fire” back in force.

Practitioners there said it’s more important than ever to support beneficial fire, as wildfires in California have become larger, hotter and more destructive.

Blaine McKinnon, training officer of the Yurok Fire Department, said a century of fire suppression has created a “tinder box” across the state.

A treatment for the tinder box is controlled, lower-intensity burns that take out dry vegetation, reducing the chance of a larger, scarier fires.

Fire like this has been used by Indigenous people across California and the world for thousands of years.

“A cultural burn or cultural fire practice may feel much more connected to the land, a more passionate, stronger feeling of dedication, spirituality with the place,” he said.

People typically use more traditional tools and methods. The fire often aims to cultivate important materials, like foods and medicines that grow back strong after the undergrowth is burned.

The most glaring benefit of wider adoption of controlled fire is the potential to mitigate the chance of high-severity wildfires, protecting homes and important resources from devastating blazes.

But proponents say it’s also useful to widen meadows, provide habitat to wildlife, encourage fire-adapted seeds to sprout and stimulate the growth of useful plants.

“Redwood ecosystems are pyro-dependent, meaning the ecosystem depends on fire as part of its natural process of regeneration and health,” said Karley Abi’hu’laro Rojas, Blue Lake Rancheria’s ethnobotany and cultural stewardship manager.

They said since the 240-acre Leavey Ranch hasn’t burned in such a long time, and has been impacted by more than a century of cattle grazing, the tribe’s environmental department will be monitoring to see what plants come back after the fire.

But the goal is to cultivate a gathering space for the tribal community. 

“That would include berry plants, such as elderberry, native blackberry, huckleberry [and] salmonberry, but also some of the medicinals and material plants, such as hazel or ginger,” said Rojas.

Participants took measures to avoid a hazel grove, which Rojas suspects are part of pre-colonization foliage.

The tribe started a program to take on burns like this in 2025, they said, estimating participants deliberately burned about three acres last year and expect to burn that much again this year. Blue Lake Rancheria is set to dramatically increase the footprint of burns, with a CalFire grant and newly acquired lands.

The landscape across California has adapted with flame, typically started by people or lightning strikes. But it’s been suppressed for a long time. In 1850, the state of California outlawed cultural burning. The federal government banned it in the early 1900s as part of strict fire suppression policies.

Despite the real threat of landing in jail, North Coast Indigenous groups such as the Yurok, Hoopa and Karuk continued the practice, teaching the skill over generations, said Rod Mendes, fire chief of the Yurok Tribe and Blue Lake Rancheria.

Burning is simply a way of life, he said.

“Fifteen years ago, what we’re doing in Yurok [territory] today, you went to jail for it. It’s not like that anymore; things change,” said Mendes.

McKinnon started burning on the Yurok reservation as a youth with his whole family. He called for more people to get involved, more programs to train practitioners and for loosening up laws to allow for that.

“My belief is that cultural people have it in their blood, and they just need to bring that out of it. Some of them know it, some don’t know it, but I think it’s in their blood, and it’s something that they’re drawn to,” he said.

An array of legislative changes in California over the past decade have allowed more Indigenous burning activities and more recently created pathways for tribes and cultural practitioners to legally conduct burns themselves.

CalFire, the agency responsible for state-designated wildlands, co-sponsors the symposium. Government agencies will often send representatives to learn from practitioners. 

Len Nielson, CalFire staff chief of prescribed fire and environmental protection, said he learns something new at every cultural burn he attends.

He said the burning is in line with the mission of CalFire, which is reducing catastrophic wildfires.

“We know that it amplifies the work that we are doing at CalFire to increase the pace and scale of beneficial fire,” said Nielson.

It’s happening all over the state; tribes are doing it, and doing it well, he said.

At the ranch, the fire burned low to the ground. 

People pulled duff from the base of redwood trees with McLeod tools, lit up piles of sticks using firing tools and scurried up hills with hoses when fire wandered up the trunks of trees.

The operation was like an organism, directed by experts in the practice, who gave safety tips and called out for adjustments as conditions changed on the forested hill.

The effort was aimed at teaching techniques, particularly to other tribal people; many, during a debrief after the burn, spoke about how they wanted to take what they learned home.

Alyssa Ledesma Araiza, a Cal Poly Humboldt graduate student and citizen of the Gabrielino/Tongva Nation, said her tribe doesn’t have any land to burn, and this was her first time at a cultural burn. She hopes to bring the practice back to her tribe.

Another participant, Jaime Lara, who works for the Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab at the university, liked learning how to use traditional tools and western tools alike.

“This practice is going to continue. It’s happened for millennia. It will continue healing, for humans and plants and wildlife,” he said.

Fire practitioners interviewed agreed there’s not enough “good fire” happening across the state.

“We’ve had over 100 years to mess this up, and you can’t fix it in a decade. It’s going to take probably equally as much time to clean it up,” said Mendes.

But he said the trend is on the rise, with more people burning. What he sees as necessary, from here, is teaching non-Indigenous people to use fire on their lands.

“What we’re doing is teaching people to utilize fire, utilizing Indigenous methods to manage their land,” he said.

Part of the goal is to change the way people think about fire.

People have been taught to call 911 if they see smoke, noted Nielson from CalFire. Such training doesn’t go away easily.

The U.S. Forest Service’s Smokey Bear campaign has hammered complete fire prevention into the minds of the American public for the past 80 years. People are understandingly afraid of massive wildfires, which have leveled out entire towns in recent years.

“The biggest fear, of course, whenever we’re conducting a controlled burn or beneficial fire, is the fear that it becomes a wildfire,” said Nielson.

But he added that if you look at the statistics, less than one percent of prescribed fires get out of containment lines, and fewer still cause any damage. The federal government has reported over 99% of federal prescribed burns are successful, meaning they didn’t escape, a trend that’s likewise reflected in analyses of non-federal fires.

And with devastating wildfires becoming all too common, some view the traditional practices of native peoples as key to addressing the problem.

“If we want to see good fire on the land, that really means having money and resources and tools and land go back to native communities so that these practices can be rebuilt,” said Rojas.