Parks Stewardship Forum

In 1997, Karuk Indigenous Basketweavers and the Orleans Ranger District of Six Rivers National Forest in Northern California established Following the Smoke, a multiple years-long, award-winning, summertime project initiated and led by LaVerne Glaze (Karuk, 1932–2017) and other Karuk Indigenous Basketweavers members. Initially conducted under the aegis of the US Forest Service (USFS) Passport in Time (PIT) program to “engage volunteers” in the USFS heritage program, and later under the aegis of California State University, Humboldt (now California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt), Following the Smoke, which concluded in 2012, has inspired other similar projects on public lands in the state, including Following the Smoke II of the California Indian Basketweavers Association. This article will detail the intent, content, and outcomes of Following the Smoke, which centered on a robust, organizational effort to encourage the appreciation of the need for culturally appropriate stewardship and management of vital ethnobotanical “resources” and the application of cultural burning to achieve those ends. It ends by providing two examples of programs and initiatives through which the convenors and facilitators of and participants in Following the Smoke continue to magnify its teachings, followed by a discussion of contemporaneous collaborative research being conducted by the Karuk Tribe about cultural burning and related topics.