Third Text

15 June 2026
 

Aylime Aslı Demir       

‘Good Fire: Tending Native Lands’, the Oakland Museum (OMCA), Oakland, California, 7 November 2025 – 31 May 2026

The world is on fire. From California to the Mediterranean, from the Amazon to Australia, forests, coastlines and habitats are burning. These fires are the result of climate crisis and poor governance; the flames are fanned by property regimes, settler expansion and an extractivist vision of the world that turns life into resource and property.

Our responses, however, often operate within the same narrow framework, even when they appear to be opposed. On the one hand, there is a reflexive response which understands fire as a crisis to be suppressed through control, and technological intervention; on the other, it says ‘do not touch nature, it needs to be protected’, thereby reconstituting nature as a passive entity outside the human: the superior subject doing the deciding and protecting. The former imagines nature as a threat to be managed; the latter as a fragile exterior to be protected. Yet in both cases, humans are not in relation to nature, but an authority governing it from outside. For this reason, the question of how to understand fire and ecological destruction is an epistemological and ontological issue as well as a political one. How fire is named determines the language of intervention: this is where decisions are made about when fire counts as ‘risk’, as ‘disaster’, or as an object of governance; and who has the right to intervene, and which forms of knowledge will be recognised as legitimate.

Margo Robbins of the Cultural Fire Management Council leads firefighters as they light a prescribed burn with bundles of wormwood in ceremony, near Weitchpec, California, photo courtesy Kiliii Yuyan

At this moment when thinking about fire has narrowed to such an extent, the exhibition ‘Good Fire: Tending Native Lands’ at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), which is built on Ohlone land, ^[1] proposed an indigenous, ecological imagination by unsettling the logics of the discipline of art history and institutions such as the museum – both of which have historically organised the boundaries between nature and culture, object and knowledge.

At first glance, the exhibition (probably under the influence of its title) created an impression of affirming fire, that it cannot be identified solely with destruction and disaster. Indeed, against the language of the modern state and dominant environmental management discourses, which construct fire as an absolute threat, a risk that must be suppressed and a disaster identified with the loss of property, it presented an invitation to think of fire as part of care and renewal cycles. Yet the strength of the exhibition did not lie solely in this reversal; its true intensity emerged in making visible not whether fire is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but how fire is defined and by which authority, and how it is constituted by particular historical knowledge regimes.

Within the dominant environmental imaginary, nature is conceived of as an external, pure domain that stands before the human and functions on its own. Human intervention, by contrast, is usually understood as disturbance or destruction. ‘Good Fire’ suspended this distinction at the very outset. Here, nature appeared not as a neutral environment distinct from the human, but as a rhythmic and relational system of which the human is also an organic component, sustained through relations of reciprocity and care. In this way, a viewer was not positioned as a subject looking at nature from the outside, but as already situated within an ecological network. In this network, fire is not seen as a sudden disaster arriving from outside, but as an element which, under certain conditions, transforms and redistributes life.

Harry Fonseca, The Maidu Creation Story, 1999, acrylic on canvas, collection of the Oakland Museum of California, gift of Paul and Laura Escobosa

From Objects to Relations

In curators Ryder Diaz and Dr Brittani R Orona’s approach, the exhibition’s first success became visible by shifting the gaze from objects to relations. The visual and material elements encountered in the exhibition did not invite the viewer to focus on singular forms, represented motifs or merely aesthetic surfaces; on the contrary, they were arranged in such a way that the connections between the elements could be felt. Fire affects the plant; the plant becomes material; the material is linked to a process of production; production carries knowledge; and knowledge becomes entwined with native communities through oral transmission and place. In this way, the customary logic of classical museum spectatorship was quietly disrupted. One no longer stood before a static space of objects, but was instead drawn into a sequence of transformations, into a circulation, a field of simultaneities. This was the exhibition’s first epistemic/topographic intervention: to compel the visible to be read not as an isolated form but as a relational process.

The second major achievement was in the presentation of fire not as a standalone element but as a complex ecological apparatus operating among different modes of life. It constructed fire within a continuity in which soil, seed, light, water, animal movement and human intervention are all intertwined. Thus, a viewer acquired knowledge of fire not through abstract definitions but through highly concrete examples that connect to one another.

The first important plane of this ecological layer is where seeds are germinated into plants. Examples in the exhibition such as the fire poppy, chamise, whispering bells, fireweed and coyote tobacco made fire intelligible as an environmental arrangement that creates the conditions of beginning for certain forms of life, rather than something that brings it to an end. Here, the consequences of fire are not only ashes and charred surfaces but the subsequent sprouting of seeds. This logic is further apparent with pinecones. Resin-sealed cones require high heat to open, so fire is part of the reproductive mechanism of certain species, providing rhythm to the landscape rather than a threat to the ecosystem.

Installation view, ‘Good Fire:Tending Native Lands’, 7 November 2025 – 31 May 2026, Oakland Museum of California, interpretive display on fire-adapted plants, including fire poppy, chamise and fireweed, photo by Aylime Aslı Demir

‘Good Fire’ also challenged preconceptions by re-establishing the relation between fire and water, often imagined as opposites, but the exhibition connected the two within an ecological circulation. Smoke from fire filters sunlight, thus lowering water temperature and cooling rivers and ultimately enabling the salmon migration. Openings created by fire in the forest cover alter the way water seeps into soil. So fire is no longer presented as something that operates only on land; its effects are extended to rivers and migration cycles. Fire ceases to be a phenomenon limited to the immediate area where it burns but becomes an indirect yet powerful ecological force linking different webs of life to one another.

The exhibition related this ecological network with the human on a material plane. The perspective of the Karuk tribe, one of the largest and most organised of the Indigenous groups in California, and the examples of cultural burning in particular, frame human intervention as an action that is not outside of nature but part of an ecological continuity. Here, the human is not the sovereign being who ‘controls’ fire, but an actor who follows its rhythms, watches for particular moments, participates in its movement, and then takes part in processes of gathering, care and production. Fire appears not as a sign of anthropocentric power but as a practice of care operating within reciprocity.

This is why cultural burning cannot simply be translated into the language of controlled or prescribed fire. Prescribed fire is often understood through the technical vocabularies of land management and risk mitigation; cultural fire, by contrast, is interdependency rooted in place. To reduce it to a technique of fire management would be to detach it from the forms of knowledge and access that give it meaning. From the priming of seeds to the filtering of light by smoke, from the cooling of water to the movement of salmon, fire was framed in ‘Good Fire’ as a network of relations that redistributes life instead of a destructive external force.

Installation view, ‘Good Fire:Tending Native Lands’, 7 November 2025 – 31 May 2026, Oakland Museum of California: tools used in setting intentional fires; from left to right: a wormwood torch, a tule torch, elderberry and cedar friction fire starter kit, manzanita pitch stick, grass bundle and the modern drip torch; photo by Kiki King, courtesy of the Oakland Museum of California
 

Fire as Material Intelligence

In ‘Good Fire’, fire was presented as a material force that works directly into matter itself, determining the object’s form, durability, use and sensory quality. This transition is important, because it is precisely here that the world constructed by the exhibition ceases to be an abstract environmental narrative and moves to the level of tangible material processes.

One of the strongest examples was illustrated through the plants used in Indigenous basket weaving. Shoots that grow following a fire are straighter, more flexible and more durable, whereas material obtained without fire is more fragile and difficult to work. Fire is thus at the very centre of production processes. Far from being just technical information, fire is demonstrated to be formative rather than destructive. It does not eliminate the material; it renders it suitable for a particular use. The form of a basket is a product of the hand that makes it, but also of fire and thus the object embodies process.

This material transformation is not limited only to fibres and plants. Animal hides only acquire the necessary flexibility through being treated with fire, while some stones and kernels change colour with fire; bark and other natural materials gain entirely different physical qualities through being exposed to heat. By bringing such examples together, a  clear claim emerges: fire is not an external tool but part of matter’s intrinsic language, a constitutive element that determines the essence of the material. Aesthetics ceases to be the realm of representation or superficial shaping; it becomes directly the result of ecological conditions, material transformations, practices of care and technical knowledge. Form is not an arbitrary order imposed by the human upon matter but an outcome produced through the combined effect of fire and technique.

Such a reading disrupts both Western-read aesthetic categories and the logic of ethnographic display. The tensions, inequalities and coercive articulations between social and natural processes are put on display. The value of the object is not tied to being a collectible, or in its visual attractiveness or its function as ‘cultural representation’; its value arises from the totality of the relations it has lived and carries. By bearing traces of fire, these objects are at once technical, ecological and political beings.
 

Rhythms Interrupted by Colonialism

‘Good Fire’ succeded in materialising time rather than merely representing it. Fire scar traces seen in cross-sections of trees that were on show were the strongest example of this. Not merely natural specimens, they acted as material archives of time, the marks revealing fire as a practice repeated at certain intervals and written into the rhythm of the landscape.

Before a fire, the accumulation of leaves, the deepening of shaded areas and the decline of species diversity make time appear compressed and clogged. After a fire, the emergence of new species, an increase in food sources and the beginning of movement opens up time again. In this way, fire becomes a technique of temporal distribution: it loosens what has been accumulated and frozen; it reactivates flow and plurality. Fire doesn’t just reorganise space, it changes perceptions of time as well. The exhibition demonstrated that burning is an ecological event that has a politics of rhythm.

It is precisely here that a critical rupture emerges: if fire is rhythmic and repetitive, how has this rhythm been interrupted? The disappearance of the regular marks of fire in the tree sections after a certain point sharpens this question. This inevitably throws the focus onto history, or more precisely, to how colonial intervention seized time itself. For the loss of rhythm is not a natural break, but a historical interruption. Colonisation leads to the seizure of land, and fractures rhythm. When the rhythm of fire is interrupted, it is not only the ecological cycle that is disrupted; the intergenerational transmission of practices of care, the relation of communities to place and the conditions of material production are also shaken. This bond between ecological degradation and colonial history was one of the exhibition’s fundamental political axes.

Down timber, Fort Bragg, California, gelatin silver print, date unknown, collection of the Oakland Museum of California, gift of Mrs Mark Carpenter; an inscription on the wall in the ‘Good Fire’ exhibition read: ‘The fires can, then, be very greatly curtailed by the removal of the Indians... Once protected from fires, the forests will increase in extent and value - John Wesley Powell, 1879, Geologist at the US Geological Survey (Director, 1881–1894)’

Disaster as Governance

The rupture described above is visible in how the meaning of fire is reversed by the colonial regime. Whereas for indigenous communities, fire is a means of multiplying habitats and sustaining life, the colonial state and the logic of modern forestry have redefined it in languages of threat, uncontrollability and danger. In a fundamentally epistemic seizure, fire is not merely prohibited; it is renamed, and its field of legitimate use stripped away. Thus, cultural practices such as burning are not seen as community-driven techniques which sustain life and instead are regarded as primitive, dangerous, or even criminal. Far from being a simple misunderstanding, this is a direct mode of establishing sovereignty. To name a practice and determine its meaning and legitimacy is also to determine its existence.

The effects of colonisation are epistemic, enacted through legal and administrative processes as well as ecological/ontological ones. What is at hand, therefore, is a three-tiered occupation. The suppression of fire is the interruption of rhythm and ultimately the interruption of life. The opening of seeds, the renewal of shoots, the continuation of habitat diversity, the shaping of rivers and the possibility of certain cultural productions all depend on these rhythmic burning practices. Therefore, suppressing fire is not merely the prohibition of a technique; it means disrupting  an entire ecological system. The colonial regime has established itself as a ‘protector’, while actually, in fact, destroying forms of reciprocity that sustain life. This is why a significant portion of what is presented today as ‘natural disaster’ or ‘forest fire crisis’ is really the result of the suppression of care regimes maintained in the past. In other words, disaster arises from excess accumulation produced by colonial governance.

The fact that the state turns the forest and fire regimes (‘management’) into a matter of technical expertise, while declaring community-based knowledge unauthorised, unscientific or risky, is also part of this colonial apparatus. The suppression of fire is not merely the management of nature; it is a sovereign practice concerning what counts as knowledge, who has the right to intervene, and which ways of living are recognised as legitimate. Embedded in this is knowledge that presents itself as neutral and objective, while being deeply woven into relations of power.

‘Good Fire’ did not present colonial intervention as an event that occurred in the past but as continuing to determine the present. The current violence of fires, the present fragility of habitats and the marginalisation of care knowledge all point to continuing colonisation processes. The past is not archived in a museum; it leaks into the present as a living relation of power. The exhibition was not a show of nostalgia, romanticising a lost harmony. The issue is not to commemorate the past, but to think through the conditions under which suppressed regimes of care and forms of knowledge might regain legitimacy in the present.

Colonial intervention affects all the layers mentioned above. Ecological rhythm is disrupted because the cyclical repetition of fire is interrupted. Material transformation is disrupted, because basket fibres, hides, seeds and other materials do not acquire their proper qualities. Temporality is disrupted, because repetition and care are replaced by accumulation, blockage and crisis. Oral knowledge is disrupted, because knowledge is separated from the context in which it lives. Community is disrupted, because practices of care are detached from common life. Colonial intervention is thus directed not only at land and rights but at the entirety of a network of relations that constitute life itself.
 

Knowledge That Defies Extraction

‘Good Fire’ did not present knowledge as abstract, stored and objectified content, as most modern museums and academic institutions tend to do. Instead, it exists within speech, practice, bodies, ceremonial repetition, and intergenerational transmission. Oral transmission is the primary form of epistemic life itself, and not incomplete and secondary to written knowledge. Knowledge lives together with place, community and the recurring practices of care. Thus, oral knowledge ceases to be folkloric; it becomes a living ground on which truth is produced, preserved and transmitted.

This approach made the exhibition’s anti-extractivist dimension visible. When knowledge is constituted as a lived and relational practice, it ceases to be a resource that can be easily extracted or appropriated by institutional authority. Indigenous voices are not plainly quoted by a singular curatorial voice. Instead, the narratives and situated experiences that carry knowledge are visible. The archive is no longer reducible to written documents. As a result, the exhibition revealed less the representation of knowledge than the conditions under which knowledge lives and the relations within which it acquires meaning.

Saif Azzuz’s (Yurok/Libyan) painting practice often begins from the back of the canvas: colours and pigments are poured from behind, then worked through on the front surface; he connects this process to the unseen labour, care and community knowledge that shape the landscapes his work engages. Here he shares his materials at a presentation held at the Oakland Museum of California on 12 March 2026: red ochre, charcoal from burns, gathered elderberry, shellac and pigment samples point to the material processes and relationships that inform the paintings, ones tied to land, fire, plants and traditional knowledge.

What Art History Misses

In art history, the artwork has often been treated as form standing on its own, an analysable example of style or a relatively autonomous aesthetic object. In these cases, the ecological, ceremonial, material and communal relations of the object become less visible. Yet nothing in ‘Good Fire’ could be grasped with such autonomy. The basket, regalia, fibre, stone, sound or burn mark appears not as a self-enclosed form but as a condensation of relations between fire, season, care, access, technical knowledge, community memory and ceremonial continuity. In this way, the object ceases to be a static surface of representation; it becomes a node that carries process, rhythm and reciprocity.

The exhibition disrupted which objects art history chooses to examine, and how the discipline looks at them. It did not attempt any deciphering of an object’s formal properties, its iconographic references, or the aesthetic tradition to which it might belong. What matters is how an object emerges from particular ecological conditions and fire regimes, how it acquires meaning through bodily and ceremonial practices, and which have been ultimately made fragile by colonialism. Against the gaze that dehistoricises aesthetic form and fixes the object within its own material/abstract existence, the exhibition reconnected form directly to processes of life. The foundational distinctions of art history begin to dissolve: nature and culture, material and form, use and aesthetic, craft and art, object and context can no longer be clearly demarcated.

A basket can no longer be looked at merely as ‘form’; it is important to see from which shoot, from which aftermath of fire, through what technical knowledge and under what conditions of access it was produced. Nor can a burn mark be seen merely as a natural stain; that mark has become a historical record, an ecological rhythm and a material witness to suppressed knowledge of care. The exhibition disrupted the art historical gaze, which separates the object from its context, and moved aesthetic experience towards relationality, process and material memory.

Against the Classificatory Museum

Another frame this exhibition broke is the classificatory logic of traditional museology. The modern museum often makes objects readable by distributing them into separate fields of knowledge, such as ‘artwork’, ‘ethnographic object’, ‘natural specimen’ or ‘archival material’, thereby fixing them within its own classificatory regime. Yet in this exhibition, no element could be placed within a singular category. The basket is the result of a fire regime, the bearer of ecological knowledge and the material form of ceremonial continuity; the burn marks in the tree cross-sections not merely natural traces or scientific data, but records of rhythmic care. The museum’s logic of dividing objects into manageable kinds of knowledge by separating them from one another is disrupted. The boundaries established among ‘nature’, ‘culture’, ‘history’, ‘ritual’ and ‘art’ are removed and instead knotted together within a single lifeworld. With ‘Good Fire’, OMCA ceases to be the institutional authority that puts objects in their proper place; it becomes a fragile threshold that reveals the inadequacy of its own classificatory regime.

Life as Relational Continuity

‘Good Fire’ did not offer ‘an alternative view’ of fire. It went deeper to show that the very right to define and render fire visible is a field of political and epistemological struggle. On one side stands the colonial-state reasoning that codes fire as risk, threat, loss of property and an object of governance; on the other is Indigenous knowledge, which understands fire as part of care, reciprocity, ecological continuity and communal life. Yet these two approaches were not presented side by side in a neutral way, and the modern museum, art history and curatorial authority were revealed as extensions of colonial-state reasoning. ‘Good Fire’ burned away the extractivist epistemology that divides objects into categories, removing knowledge from its context, turning land into resource, fire into disaster and Indigenous knowledge into content to be represented. What it leaves behind is not an answer but the possibility of another way of seeing – one that compels us to think of life not as an object of governance but as a relational continuity.

^[1]    The Ohlone are the original native population of Oakland, and although casually deployed ‘land acknowledgments’ have become vacuous performances, the OMCA is attempting to go further by giving ‘land back’ through the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust.

Aylime Aslı Demir is a writer and curator based in Oakland, California