After the Fire: Potential Impacts of Fire Exclusion Policies on Historical Cherokee Culture in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, USA

Anthropogenic fire is generally accepted by contemporary foresters as shaping historical landscapes in the southern Appalachian Mountains, the ancestral lands of the Cherokee people. However, the consensus on historical Cherokee cultural burning practices is largely limited to artifactual inferences and colonial documents. While the historical importance of fire for Cherokee people is richly woven into their oral histories, information on historical Cherokee cultural burning in forestry literature is typically presented in the context of contemporary land management practices, themselves rooted in settler colonialism and institutionalized conservation strategies. However, in the broader literature and cultural context it is clear that Cherokee cultural burning likely had deeply rooted symbolic importance and twentieth century fire exclusion policies banning certain burning practices flouted Cherokee rights through direct interference and significant landscape-level change. Our research explores Cherokee fire traditions prior to the exclusion era and assesses the impacts of fire exclusion policies on landscape change as well as Cherokee cultural practices and sovereignty.