Saving Time

by Jenny Odell

Indigenous practices, as much as any other, can speed and suspend—both on the minute level of individual plants and on the scale of entire landscapes and communities. Up until colonization, native tribes in many places used fire to maintain forests and prairies in a certain proportion and condition. In many parts of what is now California, the years after a burn8 would bring increased seed production, tall shoots attracting deer and elk, and plants in a bushy state ideal for basketry, rope, and traps. The flames from periodic burns under oak trees attracted and killed parasitic moths, who lived in the trees’ canopy and jeopardized the food the trees provided. People, plants, animals, fire, land, and culture existed in a shifting co-evolutionary pattern that varied across California and many other places in the world.