Reigniting Cultural Burning with Indigenous Women’s Fire Learning Exchanges

Ecological records and oral Indigenous history confirm that fire, sparked by lightning or planned by Native Tribes, played a vital role in shaping healthy ecosystems for thousands of years. Last year, Planet Women offered a grant to the Indigenous Peoples Burning Network (IPBN), which spurred the creation of a new program—the Indigenous Women’s Fire Learning Exchange.

In June 2023, IPBN invited Indigenous women to apply for $5,000 grants to enable them to gather in-person on Native lands in an effort to enrich cultural burning practices across North America. Eight recipients were selected, including women and nonbinary leaders from the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas, the Yurok Tribe (California), the Klamath Tribes (Oregon), the Piscataway-Conoy Tribe (Maryland), the Lumbee Tribe (North Carolina) and the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe (Minnesota).

This fiscal year, the grants were distributed to the leaders selected and the learning exchanges were able to take place. In the video above, you can hear from three of the grantees, Courtney Steed, Risharda Harley and Y Proctor, about their experience.

Risharda and Y work for the Accokeek Foundation, which manages land in the ancestral territory of the Piscataway tribes. They chose to use their funds to participate in a two-day Aspiring Firelighter’s workshop, hosted by the Cultural Fire Management Council in California. The workshop provided a step-by-step introduction to burning for cultural objectives.

Courtney Steed is the founder and director of the Lumbee Cultural Burn Association in North Carolina. Planet Women funds enabled Courtney and her community to host a two-day women’s cultural burning event in October 2024. Women and non-binary people from other tribes in the region were invited, including the Waccamaw Siouan, Eastern Band of Cherokee, Catawba, Coharie and Haliwa-Saponi nations. Participants built relationships through storytelling, preparing traditional foods, crafting with fire-dependent Indigenous materials and sharing plans for the future. 

If you want to read more about the other grantees and how they used their funding for the Indigenous Women’s Fire Exchange, please check out this blog post.

Special thank you to Mary Huffman and Marek Smith at The Nature Conservancy, which hosts and administers funding for IPBN. Their hard work enabled this amazing project to happen.

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