In late June, as firefighters battled sixteen major fires across more than 800,000 acres in the West, Frank Kanawha Lake led a group of eight students on a field trip into Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest to talk about, among other things, the benefits of fire.

He wasn’t talking about the headline-grabbing megafires on which the U.S. Forest Service wages war every summer. Amid the finger-pointing about the causes of this year’s catastrophic fires, Kanawha Lake is one of the bearers of a message about a solution, one that’s not new but seems to be creeping into the news coverage. The message is that fire, with the right conditions, is good and healthy for certain forests and can help prevent the bigger, hotter, frenzied fires that threaten landscapes. That much, though it feels counterintuitive, appears to be slowly gaining acceptance. What often gets overlooked is something Kanawha Lake believes could help the Forest Service with its fire policy—that fire has been used to manage forests long before there were governmental land managers.

Before Gifford Pinchot and Aldo Leopold, American Indians used fire to take care of forests and enhance their productivity. Fire was, at its simplest, a tool used in a reciprocal relationship between people and an ecosystem. Native people like the Karuk of Northern California needed an abundance of fire-dependent plants for survival, and they believed that by burning, they were also keeping the forest healthy. The fires, sometimes called “cool” burnings, were small patches done in sync with the weather and the season. The burnings lowered the risk of wildfire, wiped out pests and parasites and stimulated plants important for food, medicine, tools and basketry. The forest was, Kanawha Lake said on the Siskiyou that day, “our pharmacy, our hardware store, our supermarket.”

Kanawha Lake, a Ph.D. student in the environmental science program at Oregon State University and a longtime student of traditional ecological knowledge, has studied and written about the traditional use of fire by indigenous peoples.

He knows the forest in two languages. There is the language he learned from his father and grandfather, who was Karuk (Kanawha Lake’s father is part Karuk, part Seneca and part Cherokee; his mother is Mexican American). There is also the jargon he learned working as a fisheries biologist for the Forest Service, which helped him articulate what he knew from listening to his elders but didn’t always have words for. Though the two languages have been at odds with each other at times, Kanawha Lake’s familiarity with both makes him a knowledgeable steward of the forest and an informed lecturer and storyteller.

On that day in June, one of three sponsored by the Siskiyou Field Institute, a program dedicated to teaching people about the natural history of the Klamath-Siskiyou bioregion, Kanawha Lake pointed out dozens of plants that have suffered from a lack of fire. Fiber from long and slender wild iris leaves was traditionally used for sewing, fishnets and regalia. Now, choked by fir trees, the plants aren’t plentiful enough to be useful. It’s the same story with the traditional basket-making plants hazel and beargrass and the medicinal plants angelica and yarrow.

Kanawha Lake rattled off plants’ scientific names, common names, American Indian names and traditional uses and stories. The students, among them a horticulturist for the Ashland (Oregon) Parks and Recreation Department, a former elementary school teacher and a volunteer from a local forest restoration group, walked in single file with Kanawha Lake in the middle. He stopped frequently to identify plants and share traditional stories about fire or yellow jackets or the red-breasted robin. He couldn’t go more than ten paces or so without finding another example of a plant that would be more abundant or healthier if fire hadn’t been suppressed.

When he went to college at the University of California, Davis, Kanawha Lake didn’t know what he would do with the knowledge he had gained growing up around his elders and participating in traditions. At Davis, he designed his own major in integrated ecology and culture, but at home in northwestern California, his elders were passing away. He wondered if he was wasting his time in school. He learned how to use some of his knowledge when he took a class on oral traditions. He knew he had a responsibility to continue gathering these stories and to live close to them.

Stories, Kanawha Lake said, define relationships. If you pay close attention to the natural world, you’ll notice when a relationship changes. “Observe what the bluebird is doing,” Kanawha Lake said. “Then you might recognize an omen.” That’s why he says it’s important for the people who manage the land to know it well.

Kanawha Lake hopes the Forest Service will acknowledge American Indians’ use of fire. He believes the agency spends too much time and too many resources suppressing fires but not enough time studying them. If he ran the Forest Service, there would be more fire ecologists. And American Indian burning practices would be used as a model. That may never happen, but Kanawha Lake sees beauty in public education, in talking with people at field schools and fire conferences. These people might go on to lobby their members of Congress or pass the message on to their children.