In October 2007, 25 miles outside the Santa Ysabel reservation in rural San Diego County, violent Santa Ana winds, gusting at 110 miles per hour, downed a power line. Sparks ignited a fire that rapidly grew to become an inferno. Flames towered 100 feet high. For two weeks, the Witch Creek Fire burned 200,000 acres, forcing the evacuation of 1 million people — including the family of Theresa Gregor, then a PhD student in English at USC Dornsife.

At the time, Gregor, who is a descendant of the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel (Kumeyaay) and of the Yoeme (Yaqui) tribe, was working as a part-time administrator for the Santa Ysabel reservation.

Gregor, who earned her PhD in 2010, was no stranger to fire. Like many California tribes, the Iipay Nation historically removed vegetation and performed controlled burns to reduce the buildup of fuel around their homes and in the forest, a practice that has deep cultural significance. Prescribed burns, however, had been outlawed for most of California’s statehood. That blanket fire-suppression policy was leading to more devastating fires, and by the time she went to college, Gregor, who is now associate professor of American Indian studies at California State University, Long Beach, noticed that fires in San Diego County were becoming increasingly severe.

The Witch Creek Fire, which caused more than $1 billion worth of damage, remains the seventh most destructive in California’s history. As the embers were cooling, the tribe’s chairperson asked Gregor if she could help with the recovery operation. Gregor went to the tribe’s office and reached up for a binder labeled “Emergency Operations Plan.” It was empty.

“That was pretty scary,” she says. “The reservation had no power, and without power, there’s no water. At that moment, I understood the extent to which wildfire can result in a cascade of dangerous consequences.”

Fighting Fire with Fire

The Witch Creek Fire made it painfully clear that California’s history of sidelining traditional ecological practices had created vulnerabilities that modern systems were not prepared to handle. It wasn’t just a question of fighting fires — it was about understanding how traditional knowledge could help prevent them in the first place.

Realizing that something needed to be done to strengthen the resilience — not only of her tribe but of those across the state — Gregor was asked by a consortium of tribal leaders to help them form the Inter-Tribal Long Term Recovery Foundation to support disaster preparedness and recovery efforts on tribal lands in Southern California. The nonprofit foundation, which helps communities write disaster relief plans and shares information between tribes, also harnesses traditional ecological knowledge to increase resilience.

In conversations with tribal members across Southern California, Gregor uncovered a wealth of historical knowledge. Information about areas most likely to flood had been passed down through generations. In meetings with tribal fire chiefs, Gregor learned where fires were likely to spread. This knowledge, passed down through the generations over hundreds, if not thousands, of years, was crucial for knowing where to remove debris or where to light a controlled burn.

“I was learning the practice of using fire to fight fire,” she says.

At a time of environmental crisis, many Californians hope to learn lessons from communities that have long been forced to adapt to the region’s unpredictable climate. Drawing upon this store of historical knowledge from before California became California can help communities protect themselves from increasingly severe threats. However, incorporating traditional ecological knowledge into state and federal policies is not without its challenges, despite growing awareness of the benefits. Nevertheless, USC scholars and graduates are at the forefront, collaborating with tribal communities and harnessing traditional ecological knowledge to help shape the future of the state.

“We know there are tools from the past that have helped Native people survive for millennia,” says Gregor. “So why not use them?”

A Volatile Paradox

From its earliest beginnings, the land we now call California has been trapped in a paradox. On the one hand, it has long been a comfortable place to live. Its gentle Mediterranean climate made it bountiful. Vast oak savannas produced millions of tons of nutritious acorns. And gigantic kelp forests fringed the coast that was home to an abundance of sea life. At the same time, it’s always been a volatile and unruly region.

“I call it a perilous paradise,” says Philip Ethington, professor of history, political science and spatial sciences. Cyclical climatic and ocean patterns, such as the La Niña and El Niño cycles, create wild oscillations year to year, from droughts and wildfires to violent floods.

These climatic swings aren’t just abstract events — they directly impact people’s lives, from the risk of losing homes to wildfires to enduring water restrictions during prolonged droughts. Today, Californians must constantly adapt to this unpredictability, underscoring the importance of Indigenous practices that once enabled communities to thrive.

Just as plants and animals evolved to deal with these erratic swings, people had to actively adapt as well. For around 15,000 years, hundreds of Indigenous tribes in what is now California developed sophisticated strategies that allowed them to not just survive, but to thrive in an unpredictable environment. These strategies remain valuable today.

“Historians used to think that the preconquest period was a static, unchanging world of hunters and gatherers who didn’t change the world they existed in,” says William Deverell, divisional dean of social sciences and professor of history, spatial sciences and environmental studies.

A common misconception is that Indigenous Californians lived among untouched wilderness, notes Deverell, founding director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW).

“In fact, Native peoples shaped their environment in ways that were every bit as complicated as the human ecological management that we see today,” he says.

Native peoples accumulated a rich store of ecological knowledge, which they used to tend to their environments. Controlled burns, many tribes discovered, reduced the risk of catastrophic wildfires, encouraged the growth of native grasses and enriched the soil with nutrients. Indigenous Californians created a complex, actively managed historical ecology that scholars, including Ethington and Deverell, are now working to reconstruct.

“For thousands of years, the seasonal fire management of many tribes, including the Chumash and the Tataviam, kept the prairies and the plains open,” says Ethington, who is the principal investigator on “Los Angeles Landscape History,” a multi-institutional collaborative study to map the region’s landscape over time. “It was not a wilderness.”

Lessons From History

However, the ways in which modern Californians have shaped the land have often served to make people more vulnerable to threats, not less. Over the past century of rapid growth, adaptation has taken a back seat to development. Buildings were constructed in flood zones and fire corridors, and fire suppression policies have led to powder kegs of fuel in forests. For instance, the 2021 Dixie Fire, which grew to nearly a million acres and destroyed much of the Northern California town of Greenville, was fueled by overgrown forests — a direct result of decades of fire suppression. It was a stark reminder that ignoring ecological knowledge has real, devastating consequences.

“There’s been an abuse of the landscape,” says Ethington, who is now writing a three-volume book of Californian history from the Pleistocene to the present. “And it has worsened what was already a dangerous situation.”

It’s set to get even worse. Climate change is already intensifying the volatile swings between drought and flood, and by the end of this century, Southern California is predicted to see the frequency of very wet years double or triple, with the frequency of extremely dry years increasing by 200%.

Which is even more reason, Deverell says, to draw lessons from California’s precolonial history. As part of The West on Fire initiative, which Deverell helps to run, the ICW is partnering with the tribal-led Sierra-Sequoia Burn Cooperative on a project to support prescribed and cultural burns on hundreds of acres in the southern Sierra.

This work supports the movement away from fire suppression, and it is gaining traction at the state level, too. Last year, California set a goal to expand prescribed burns to 400,000 acres annually by 2025. “I think we have started on a path toward recognition of the critical role of prescribed burns,” Deverell says. “Our tribal partners will tell us that if you start a prescribed burn in the right spot, you can stop a wildfire in its tracks.”

Overlapping Origins

The growth of prescribed burns is just one example of how Californians of many stripes, from forest-management officials to historians, are increasingly rethinking the origin story of the Golden State.

The history of the region is usually divided into neat periods. The Indigenous period ended in 1769 with Spanish colonization. The Spanish period gave way in 1821 to the period of Mexican rule. The Mexican-American War, which ended in 1848, led to California’s statehood. Or so the story goes. It’s a tale, Deverell argues, that’s far too simplistic.

“California history over the last 250 years has been characterized by the sheer velocity of change,” he says.  There were people alive in 1850, when California became a state, he points out, who could remember the American Revolution. But this rapid transformation makes it all too easy to overlook the profound continuities that persisted across those periods. California’s origins are more complex than the strict classifications might imply.

These periods may blur together for non-Natives but, as Gregor notes, for California’s First Peoples, life exists in a continuum of relational and reciprocal experiences and struggles.

“With each wave of colonial assault, the state’s First Peoples weathered the storm, preserved their knowledge and culture, and persisted,” she says. “Today, the threats may be different, human-caused versus direct human impositions, but the need to prepare and be ready remains the same.”

Resilience is a powerful theme. When the Spanish arrived, the region’s Indigenous peoples spoke more than a hundred distinct languages. Despite the diseases unleashed by Europeans, the exploitation of the Mission period, and the genocide in the 19th century, in which the U.S. government and private citizens killed thousands of Indigenous people in California, the state’s tribal nations — 109 of which are federally recognized today — are still very much present. In some cases, tribes are growing.

“The Indigenous period continues today,” says Deverell. “It didn’t end in 1769.”

Nor did Mexican independence put a stop to Spanish influence. The missions, which were used by the Spanish to control Indigenous people, were inherited by Mexico, which used native labor in its ranchos.

“Each conquering regime stepped into the shoes of the previous one,” Ethington says. “And then the Americans adopted similar practices.”

And Mexican influence lingered long after California’s integration into the union. Mexican culture — and white people’s reaction to it — continued to shape the state. Los Angeles came of age in the period of American statehood, but it was built predominantly by Mexican laborers.

Complex and multilayered stories like these form the foundation of what is, today, the most diverse state in the country. The hope is that rediscovering the region’s distant ancestral past will provide actionable lessons for Californians facing an increasingly volatile future. By integrating traditional practices, such as prescribed burns and sustainable land management, into modern policy, California can build resistance against future disasters.

As one Indigenous leader, Mark Romero, former chairperson of the Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians, wisely said, “The further we are from our last disaster, the closer we are to the next” — a reminder that learning from the past is essential if we are to protect the future.