Historical Human Causes and Uses of Fire in Alaska

Although wildfire has been central to the ecological dynamics of interior Alaska for 5000 years, the role of humans in this dynamic is not well known. As a multidisciplinary research team, together with Native community partners, we analyzed patterns of human-fire interaction in two contiguous areas of Interior Alaska occupied by different Athabaskan groups. The Koyukon Athabascans in the western Interior considered fire a destructive force and had no oral history or stories suggesting use of fire for landscape management. Low lightning strike density and moist climate constrained occurrence of lightning fires, and a subsistence dependence on a predictable resource (salmon) resulted in a relatively sedentary settlement pattern. In this environment wildfire near communities might have negatively impacted hunting opportunities. In contrast, the Gwich’in Athabascans of the eastern Interior actively used fires to manage the landscape. Lightning fires occurred more frequently here because of greater lightning strike density and warmer summer temperatures. The Gwich’in showed greater mobility in hunting their less spatially predictable subsistence base (moose and caribou), which enabled them to move when wildfires altered local habitat. These striking contrasts between two neighboring Athabaskan groups sharing a contiguous boundary indicated different use and views of fire that were consistent with cultural adaptation to local biophysical and ecological settings. This contrasts with the commonly held view that Native peoples of North America pervasively modified landscapes through use of fire