How Indigenous Knowledge Reconnects Us All to Fire
By Jazmin “Sunny” Murphy
YES! Magazine
September 20, 2022
By elevating Traditional Ecological Knowledge, a forestry center in Minnesota works to restore ecosystems and Indigenous sovereignty.
“Our human relationship with fire goes back thousands and thousands of years,” says Damon Panek, wildland fires operations specialist for the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and enrolled member of the Mississippi Band of White Earth Ojibwe. The Ojibwe people of Lake Superior Chippewa alone have more than 700 life-sustaining uses for fire, and Oshgikin, the spirit of fire, is defined as “the thing or mechanism that makes things new.”