Abstract
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This chapter elucidates how gender is entwined in the spatial and temporal knowledge trajectories
through which indigenous fire knowledge is retained and revived using a case study of eastern
Australia and California, USA. Fire extends its roots far into the past of indigenous cultures
worldwide, extending beyond basic domestic needs to responsible environmental stewardship.
Fire has played a key role in the land stewardship practices of Aboriginal Australian and Native
American women and men for millennia (Stewart et al. 2002; Gammage 2011). This includes
cultural and gendered landscapes, such as indigenous sacred and ceremonial sites off-limits to
women or men. However, a ‘disconnect’ between the past, present and future of both ecological
and cultural aspects of fire underpins a tendency among many researchers, policymakers and
practitioners to dismiss or ignore fire knowledge that is alive today among indigenous elders
and cultural land stewards. This may be attributed to assumptions based on historic events, a
lack of current burning and relatively low indigenous populations. Instead guidance is sought
from archaeological, anthropological and ethnographic records from the past or from scientific
models that project the future. An attitude also prevails that depicts historic use of fire by
indigenous people as non-applicable in current-day environments due to environmental and
demographic changes (White 2004). Yet, it is important to recognise that culture and knowledge
are as dynamic as the environment is. From an applied standpoint, indigenous fire knowledge
is fluid (for example, changing with past climatic events or gender-targeted genocide), and the
ability to read the landscape to know how, when, why and what to burn comes with proper
training. The concept of ‘proper training’, however, arguably plays out differently today from
traditional indigenous fire knowledge trajectories of the past due to the impact of history and
politics. It is this marginalised political, technological and institutional position of indigenous
peoples’ knowledge in many ‘developed’ countries that makes this chapter relevant to a
handbook of gender and development.