In July, multiple members of the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation were displaced by the Oak fire, which destroyed more than 100 homes in Mariposa County. The Mountain Maidu saw their Greenville Rancheria office and health facilities destroyed and the landscape severely damaged when the Dixie fire tore through the heart of their homelands the following year. Members of the Karuk Tribe lost homes when the Slater fire burned hundreds of properties in Siskiyou County in 2020. Indigenous residents are over three times more concentrated in California census tracts that see fires most frequently and where the most acreage burns, according to a study by UC Irvine researchers published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. And, in a cruel irony, Native Americans are among those most affected, they say. Now, many experts say the lack of regular, low-intensity fire in some California ecosystems has contributed to an overgrowth of vegetation that has made wildfires grow larger and more severe. Cultural burning - the practice of using controlled fires to tend the landscape - was once widespread among many Indigenous groups, but ended with the arrival of European settlers.
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