- [Jason] The artifacts
we find on the ground,
pottery shards, arrowheads,
and even landscapes
like hills and rivers and mountains,
they're part of this living landscape
and all of these things are alive.
And the way they're alive is that they
contribute to who we are.
Our identity comes from
all of these things.
So, when we preserve and
protect these artifacts,
we preserve and protect the
people that associate with it.
People like me, people whose
religion is about these things.
Part of what I do as a fire archeologist,
and as a native person,
is I try to convey that importance
to fire management teams.
I try to work with fire crews on the line
on why these places are important,
and we try to come together
and plan strategically
on how best to utilize fire,
manage fire, and also put the fire out.
A lot of us natives,
we're still in the process
of understanding our connection
to these ancestral people.
So, a lot of people will
ask me like how do I
do what I do as a native person?
There's a great story
that's told here that
could be obliterated if
a dozer hit it wrong.
It could be obliterated
if we decided to build
a helipad here.
There's so much at stake here,
all of these stories and all
of these parts of our identity,
and that's why a lot of us,
we're out here doing our jobs
and we've realized that
it's an important job
and there's a great benefit to
our cultural heritage by being here.
- [Jeanne] On the
Coconino National Forest,
we try and be extremely proactive about
fire and working with fire,
since it is such an important
part of the landscape.
- I believe we have a
very good relationship
with the archeologists that's
been built over the years.
It's just really important
that we communicate,
that we understand that
they have resources
that need protection from fire,
and we have a duty, a
responsibility to protect them
when able and feasible.
- A lot of our approach in working with
the fire organization
is to try and integrate
as much as possible.
There are three or four
archeologists in our district
who work in fire regularly.
We feel like it's important
to become Red Carded,
to be able to function in the fire world,
to participate in briefings,
to go down and really build relationships
in the fire organization.
- You can impart a lot
more wisdom face-to-face
with a lot of people than
you can by trying to put
a few words on paper for
someone else to read.
It becomes more difficult when
an incident management team
may come to your district or your forest,
where you may not know the
people you'll be working with.
It's still extremely
important that you engage
whether you're an archeologist,
a wildlife biologist,
a soil scientist, it doesn't matter.
If you have a resource
that needs protected,
you're gonna have to go
and build that relationship
with the team.
- [Jeanne] Where we're
standing today is at the site
of an old logging camp from the 19 teens,
and this site is actually listed on the
National Register of Historic Places.
We are in the middle of what was
the Boundary Fire from 2017.
We had worked pretty hard
to protect this site.
It did burn over.
We're standing actually on dozer line
that was put in around this site.
We knew where all the
features were at this site,
The old tent platforms
and artifact scatters.
I gave a talk on the
significance of this logging camp
at a morning briefing.
- When the fire personnel call me,
I go into GIS and I make maps for them
and then I export the map into Avenza,
and they can actually see
the locations of our sites
and that actually helps us
and them protect the sites,
especially when they're doing dozer lines.
This is a site that I was
able to pinpoint them to
and actually flag them for them,
and they knew about this
location even before I got here.
Our catalog is another cool
app that's coming in to
the forest service.
And that's really neat
because we're actually able to
share information with forest
service personnel right away.
So if we're walking somewhere
or surveying somewhere
and we find a site,
we're actually able to put it into the app
and they can get the location right away.
- And even those
precautions weren't enough
in this instance but
everybody did what they can
and we worked collaboratively.
- We did what we could
from the fire standpoint
to keep the fire out of here
and we were not successful.
Yet, we have still a good relationship
so we can move forward and learn from it
so maybe we can do better the next time.
- Where I'm standing today,
this is a site that burned over
in a recent wild land fire we had.
When the fire started and was
burning through this area,
firefighters identified this feature
and within minutes of identification
I received a text with photographs
and a call from the incident
commander asking about this,
wondering if it was a resource of concern.
It was a site that was not in
our system, in our database.
We didn't know about it,
and now it is in our system
and has been evaluated
for the National Register.
That management action
in the field resulted in
better land management overall
and a contribution to
our heritage program.
- We as line archeologists,
we're actually not decision makers.
And firefighters on the line,
they're not decision makers either.
So, it goes up to the line
officer, a district ranger,
or a forest supervisor to
make that determination
of what's the important
value in that circumstance.
On a wild fire, when you
get a line archeologist
and a crew boss and
they start talking about
you have to protect
this archeological site,
oh I have to put a line here.
That's when conflict happens.
We can work through that if
everybody takes a step back
and really asks how can we benefit both
and how can we work
with the people above us
to get a better understanding
of what's important
in that location, in that area?
We really do need to work
towards more trainings
and getting firefighters
working with archeologists,
both in surveys and understanding
what archeological sites
look like and how they can
be protected by getting
the archeologists to work
with firefighters on fires,
on prescribed burns, so they
know what firefighters do.
- So, we're here at a historic
logging railroad trestle
deep in the Kaibab National Forest on the
Williams Ranger District.
We're taking a look at
this hundred year old
logging railroad trestle
making sure everything is okay
ahead of a planned prescribed fire
known as The Hardy Project.
Fuels crews and timber crews
have done a lot of treatments
in this area to protect
this over the years,
and when we come in here
with the prescribed fire
and the controlled fire
we're hoping that we're gonna
enhance the long-term
protection of this against a
wildfire in the future.
A lot of different folks,
whether it's been timber crews,
youth conservation corp
students, and often fire crews,
they've all taken a stewardship
of protecting places
such as the trestle here.
- My name's Johnson Curry
and I'm on Engine 314
out here on the Kaibab.
And ever since I was a kid
I used to come here to these
historic
railroad trestles and
it's a pretty cool moment that we get to
protect these in the prescribed fire.
