Initial bans on burning—by the Spanish in the eighteenth century12 and the incipient state of California in the nineteenth13—were exercises of colonial power against indigenous tribes, tied up with other laws enabling subjugation, forced labor, and family separation.fn1 Although some frontierspeople learned15 from indigenous tribes and continued burning, the budding U.S. Forest Service16 was promoting a program of fire suppression by the early twentieth century. They saw forests as the nation’s storage shed for wood during a time of exploding economic growth. In this view, land became a mute
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