To a large degree arguments downgrading Indian burning practices focus on the extent of the Indian's awareness of fire's impacts on local habitats.  The denial of instrumentality, that one would act solely for a "purpose,” is implicit in the arguments of Clar.  While Indian burning practices were instrumental, i.e., set for multiple purposes, this does not exclude other levels of significance from these acts for the aboriginal burners.  Considerations of what the "correct" order of a forest meant to the Karuk probably played a role in unifying their aesthetic, ecological and cultural conceptions as a whole.  As with many ritual activities, Indians burned in part from a sense that, having closely observed fire behavior and considering the role of responsibility to all creatures, “even those that crawl,” assigned to the Karuk by the Creator.  Burning was necessary to the maintenance of the forest in its highest form of variation and productivity. 

 This conceptual richness is in striking contrast to the single level of intentionality that Clar denies the Natives.  Perspectives such as Clar's not only ignore both the multi-purpose land management purposes of traditional burning but also are so disdainful of Indian management as to leave unaddressed the mythical and religious aspects of Indian burning practices.  Within a Native frame of reference the forest may be burned for a series of reasons; however, the intentions involved are by no means limited to immediate purpose and may well include a sense of involvement with the perpetual re-creation of the forest "as it should be," because it is "the right thing to do" when the forest is comprehended as a multi-level entity in which humans have responsibility for all creatures.  In comparison potential aboriginal purpose as understood and denied by Clar is limited to a narrow utilitarianism mirroring the Forest Service conception of the forest as a producer of fir trees.    When seen from the view of competing systems of forest management, Clar’s perspective presents aboriginal burning as the unlikely primitive analog to the current forest management practices of the Forest Service.  While this parallel does in fact exist to some extent, a comedic-tragic level of ethnocentric projection is required to reduce Indian intentionality to this single level of purpose.  Such a reduction arises from a politically motivated bias that defines forest products more or less exclusively in terms of trees. 

 The larger question is, in fact, what is a forest; how do the two conceptions before us differ from one another?    It is of interest to note that the model of intentionality suggested by Clar does not include medicinal plants, open areas, hardwoods or animal protein as a forest "products."  What is offered is a distinctly narrowed, reduced sense of what constitutes a forest and relationships to a forest.  This perspective automatically closes off from consideration the higher levels of cosmology, mythology and the sacred that existed between the aboriginal burners and the forest.  Such a perspective contradicts the  "primitive" sense of the forest as being shot full of human qualities and of human society as permeated by multi-level images of the forest.  For the Indians, the forest could be burned, because in a mythic sense of relationship, it demands burning. 

Part III of this monograph will be published in the next edition of The River Voice.   
 E-mail John Salter at jsalter@shasta.com

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