Tony Marks-Block

Background

About Tony Marks-Block

I am interested in how small-scale and Indigenous communities maintain and create distinct ecological communities to sustain cultural, spiritual, and subsistence practices. Specifically, I focus on the socio-ecological effects of prescribed fire in California. For my dissertation I worked in collaboration with the Yurok and Karuk Tribes in the Klamath river watershed of northwest California. These indigenous communities actively use fire to increase the density of plant-based basketry materials, to reduce pest infestations of acorns, and to maintain grassland and savanna communities for deer and elk. In addition, they use fire to reduce understory growth and fuel loads, to increase access to resources and inhibit the spread of wildfire. However, these communities are confronted by major changes in land tenure and forest management brought on by colonialism and the timber industry. Consequently, fire exclusion and suppression have altered the landscape and land dispossession has reduced access and control over fire management and the harvesting of fire-dependent species. Despite these challenges, Yurok and Karuk people continue to burn the land, and are organizing to increase the scale of burning within their territories. These "cultural fires," as they are known colloquially, are important events to document as they are attempts to both restore Indigenous culture and ecology. As California and the American West are confronted with changes in wildfire behavior and scale, efforts to restore prescribed fire based in Indigenous scientific knowledge are learning opportunities that can influence fire policy and Indigenous land sovereignty.