By Ben Rappaport
Thick white smoke billowed into the Robeson County sky on a crisp December day. Flames lapped the bottoms of the longleaf pine trees.
While the sight may sound hazardous, it was met with whooping and hollering of joy from about two dozen people who gathered to watch the fire at the Lumbee Tribe Cultural Center in Maxton late last year.
The Lumbee Cultural Burn Association, which hosted the inaugural event, wants to bring healing to ancestral lands, honor cultural traditions through fire-focused ecology and protect the area from wildfires.
“Our people have been using fire as a land management tool for our entire history,” said Courtney Steed, founder and executive director of the association. “We really aim to honor that intact wisdom that’s been passed down from our ancestors.”
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Steed, 40, still lives on the ancestral lands of her grandfather in Pembroke and grew up regularly burning to keep it in balance. On his deathbed, he made Steed promise to “keep the ditches burned” — his way of showing how vital fire was to the ground that raised him.
Controlled burning has major benefits to forest ecosystems, especially the longleaf pine. The trees once grew in abundance across the sandhills of North Carolina but have diminished to less than 3 percent of their original 92 million acre range due to overdevelopment, logging and fire suppression.
By burning the land, nutrients are added to the soil while leaf litter and other dead materials are removed from the forest floor. That way, wildfires aren’t as catastrophic because they’re deprived of fuel to keep burning.
The practice is becoming more important in a changing climate as droughts worsen and the conditions for wildfires become more common. Experts say much more prescribed fire is needed to help limit the effects of wildfires on the region.
Fires used to burn in the longleaf pine ecosystem every one to three years, said Jennifer Fawcett, wildland fire associate with the N.C. State Extension. “When we’re not letting fire burn at that regular frequency,” she said, “then it turns into other ecosystems and destroys what was there.”
Burn, baby, burn
Robeson County is consistently at high risk of wildfires, with 117 so far this year, the most of any county in the state, according to the North Carolina Forest Service.
The practice of burning the land has been in the Lumbee tribe since before written records existed, but U.S. land policy has pushed for fire suppression since the early 20th century. A wildly successful advertising campaign introduced the country to Smokey Bear.
“There was an era for over 100 years where everybody thought that putting fires out was the right thing to do,” Fawcett said.
While Smokey has changed his tune to be slightly more supportive of burning (and added a bobwhite quail sidekick named Burner Bob), his cultural impact still looms large and has deprived local ecosystems of the fire needed to be healthy.
The longleaf ecosystem in the North Carolina sandhills was once one of the most diverse in the world with more than 40 plant species per square meter — second only to the tropical rainforest, according to the N.C. Forest Service.
“Every animal and plant that we have in the sandhills here is a result of fire,” said Jesse Wimberley, founder of the Sandhills Prescribed Burn Association, which covers eight counties. It’s the largest burn association in the southeastern United States with more than 600 landowners.
Fire is key to maintaining that biodiversity and reducing the chance of large wildfires, Wimberley said.
Wimberley, whose family has been burning their land for more than 150 years, still lives in the cabin built of longleaf pine fatwood at the headwaters of the Lumber River in Moore County. His family is not of Lumbee descent, but tribal members taught his ancestors the value of fire four generations ago. Like Steed, he aims to pass on that tradition through environmental education and community organizing.
“Either we burn them, or they burn themselves,” he said of the woods. “The discussion isn’t whether we should burn or not. The discussion is, how do we accomplish the burning in a way that’s not catastrophic, and releasing way too much particulate matter?”
Nature’s return
Organizations targeted at helping landowners engage in controlled burns exist all over the country. More than 130 prescribed burn associations are in 22 states across the U.S., including seven in North Carolina covering 52 counties, according to the N.C. State Extension.
Both the Lumbee Cultural Burn Association and the Sandhills Prescribed Burn Association have had to rely on private landowners to burn their property. That has proven challenging because landowners can be held liable if a larger fire breaks out.
As of 2021, about 82% of land in North Carolina is privately owned, according to the N.C. Forest Service. That includes most of the state’s 18 million acres of forest.
Steed served on the Sandhills Prescribed Burn Association before forming her own group a year ago with the goal of tying in Indigenous culture. The Lumbee Cultural Burn Association provides landowners with the resources and support they need to burn effectively and safely. The process can include sacred burning rituals and elders’ oral histories about fire.
“Fire suppression, to us, is a form of cultural suppression,” Steed said. “It breaks a key link in our identity.”
Bringing fire back to the land has already yielded results. In the seven months since the CBA’s first burn, Steed said her organization has seen a reduction in pests like mosquitoes and chiggers, and the return of game. Bobwhite quail, deer and turkey often return after a fire because it aids the regrowth of native grasses they depend on for nesting and foraging.
Several plant species that haven’t been seen for generations came back to the Lumbee Tribe Cultural Center following the burn, according to Steed.
“Burning has immediate ecological effects,” Fawcett said. “You can go and burn a place, and then that same day, have the wildlife begin to use it.”
Beyond being an ecological driver, fire is also a great unifier, Wimberley said. He views the work of burning as an act of community building because it reintroduces dependence on one another in a way that often feels lost in our culture today.
“Fire seems to be one of those magical things that suspends all the silos that people find themselves in,” Wimberley said. “It’s in our bones. We have been with fire from the beginning of time.”
The Cultural Burn Association intends to expand to other tribes, including the Catawba, Kohari and Waccamaw Siouan. The long-term goal, Steed says, is to create a full-time staff to help fill the resource gap in rural North Carolina through landowner outreach and events.
“If we’re going to accomplish these great goals to fight things like climate change,” Steed said, “then we’re going to have to come together and acknowledge that Indigenous people have something different to offer. We need to get the fire on the ground.”
