Indian burning in Northern California

       "They stopped burning by Indians. The latest Indian burning in Northern California and Southern Oregon was in the 1940’s. When Henry Lewis did his 1973 study of the patterns of Indian burning in California, there were people living who remembered why they burned. Now their children, who are in their 60’s and 70’s, remember burning, but they don’t remember the control techniques or the objectives. So we may have lost that knowledge...If the elders were to come back now from the spirit world, they would look around and say, “There’s nobody taking care of this place.”

Dennis Martinez from http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/gtr63/gtrwo63g.pdf