The second session focuses on two short films: Oshkigin: Spirit of Fire by Dovetail Partners and Into the Black by Southern Exposure.

For thousands of years in the Great Lakes Region, Native Americans used fire intentionally to manage the ecosystems they lived in. This short film, Oshkigin: Spirit of Fire (2021) highlights this deep, reciprocal relationship with the land and the role fire plays in that relationship. This story is told by Ojibwe Wildland firefighters, Fond du Lac elder Vern Northrup and Damon Panek, and features Cloquet Forestry Center researcher Lane Johnson.

Into the Black (2019) highlights the necessity of fire on the landscape in the southeastern United States. Many of the ecosystems in Alabama and throughout the southeast evolved with fire. Human ignited “prescribed fire”, also known as controlled burns, are an essential technique to mimic this natural process to maintain and restore critical habitats. With an ever growing population and extensive efforts to restore large areas of native habitats such as longleaf pine, partnerships are critical to provide the capacity necessary to implement fire on the scale needed to accomplish these objectives.

Lane Johnson is a Research Forester at the University of Minnesota Cloquet Forestry Center. His research focuses on the fire ecology of red pine forests in the Great Lakes region where he uses tree-rings and other historical records to better understand the ecological and cultural history of fire-dependent plant communities, and apply this information to contemporary forest policy and management.

Dylan Bizhikiins Jennings is a member of the marten clan and a University of Wisconsin-Madison HEAL doctoral fellow. Bizhikiins has served as a tribal council member for the Bad River Tribe and as the director of public information for the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission. This winter he is teaching courses in Ojibwe language and American environmental history at Northland College.