By Emily Bernard
Boulder Weekly
James Calabaza carried an empty chair into the circle and set it among the participants.
Not for a guest. Not for a late arrival.
The seat was reserved for fire itself.
Calabaza, a member of the Santo Domingo Pueblo in New Mexico and Indigenous Lands Program Director for Trees, Water & People, had helped organize the Front Range gathering. Around him, more than 40 people settled into their seats: firefighters, foresters, conservation advocates, land managers and tribal representatives. Most arrived expecting conversations about mitigation, fuels and forest health.
Instead, they were asked to make room for fire.
As the Tall Bulls spoke about Indigenous relationships with fire, the empty chair took on a quiet gravity. Bill Tallbull and his nephew Lewis are descendants of Chief Tall Bull; the Cheyenne leader killed at the Battle of Summit Springs in 1869. Their family's history is entwined with these landscapes and the responsibility of caring for them.
The chair offered a different way of thinking about fire. Not as a problem to solve, a hazard to contain or a line item in a management plan, but as a participant. A force with its own role in the life of the land and a voice worth hearing.
"It brought fire into the conversation in a way a little more directly," recalled Rob Addington of The Nature Conservancy. "Fire sort of had a position at the table."
For communities across Colorado still carrying memories of the Marshall Fire and years of smoke-filled summers, that framing can feel unfamiliar. Throughout the Northern Colorado Fireshed Collaborative's first cultural burning workshop, participants repeatedly returned to the same idea: listening before leading.
Few people at the workshop embodied that relationship more directly than Bill Tallbull. Fire, he said, has always been part of his life, though only recently has he begun to understand how deeply that connection runs.
"I believe fire helps heal the land," he said. "It is part of the ecological magic that happens post fire."
Not long after the workshop ended, Tallbull invited participants to the Tall Bull Memorial Grounds south of Denver to continue the discussion in a place where history, stewardship and identity intersect. He brought in Alice Lincoln Cook, a Karuk Tribal member from Northern California whose experience with cultural fire spans decades. Together, they began exploring what restoring cultural burning in the Rocky Mountain region could look like.
The effort comes with enormous challenges. Fire has been systematically suppressed across much of Colorado for more than a century. At the same time, many Indigenous communities were removed from the lands they had stewarded for generations.
Organizers with the Northern Colorado Fireshed Collaborative said they recognized tribal perspectives were largely absent from conversations about wildfire resilience. In response, the collaborative partnered with TWP and TNC to convene its first cultural burning workshop, bringing together tribal representatives, land managers and conservation organizations around Tribal Ecological Knowledge.
For Calabaza, the workshop represented more than information sharing.
"It's been a long overdue moment to bring this conversation to the landscape," he said.
Calabaza has spent years working alongside Indigenous communities throughout North and Central America. Though traditions, languages and ecological knowledge systems vary among Nations, he said one lesson emerges again and again: fire is a relationship.
For generations, Indigenous peoples used fire to care for forests, grasslands and wildlife habitat. The practice shaped ecosystems, but it also reinforced responsibilities between people and place. That broader understanding, Calabaza said, is often lost when fire is discussed only in terms of risk or fuel reduction.
"Cultural fire is not just one tool in the toolbox," Calabaza said. "It's a major tool that plays an important role in stewarding an entire landscape."
Workshop attendees noted Tribal Nations are often brought into land management discussions only after key decisions have been made. Their knowledge becomes feedback rather than a foundation.
"[Indigenous peoples] need to be respected and valued not as a stakeholder, but as a rights holder," he said.
Tallbull understands that distinction through the history of his own people.
"The land was stolen because of the Sand Creek Massacre," he said. "So we don't have any more say in how lands are managed anymore around here."
Renée Millard-Chacon, a Diné and Mexica organizer, Commerce City councilwoman and co-founder of Womxn from the Mountain, an Indigenous-led organization focused on environmental justice, advocacy and community organizing, said the workshop's lessons extend well beyond fire.
"What we now call environmental justice has kind of been compartmentalized because it's really understanding a living biosphere and how to live and steward with it, not own and dominate it," Millard-Chacon said.
She continued, "When I say land back, it's giving land to itself."
Millard-Chacon argues institutions seeking Indigenous knowledge must also build genuine relationships with Indigenous communities.
"Don't just hijack Indigenous communities' knowledge about it," she said. "Have a free, prior and informed consent with those tribal communities so that you can continue a collaboration with them."
Many Indigenous communities protected knowledge through generations of displacement and forced assimilation.
"We've already had our libraries burned down," Millard-Chacon said. "We've hidden a lot of knowledge so that we could pass it down to the next seven generations for their survival."
At the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, where he observes wildlife responses to prescribed burns, Tallbull has become increasingly absorbed by what decades of fire suppression have done to ecosystems that evolved with fire.
"I know the animals, insects, plants and ecology have all been affected by suppression of fire," he said.
The work has reinforced his belief that many people inherit an incomplete understanding of wildfire. Public conversations often focus on destruction, loss and fear. Those realities are undeniable, but they tell only part of the story.
In an email following the workshop, Tallbull wrote that he hopes sharing Indigenous perspectives can strengthen mitigation efforts and broaden public understanding of fire's ecological role.
No one at the workshop suggested a single gathering could remove the barriers standing between Colorado and wider use of cultural burning. Liability concerns, permitting requirements and a legal framework that does not formally distinguish cultural burning from prescribed fire remain significant challenges.
What emerged from the gathering was a network of new relationships.
According to Calabaza, four Tribal Nations participated. New conversations emerged among Indigenous leaders, conservation organizations and local governments. Boulder County, he said, has begun exploring stronger collaboration with the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribe of Oklahoma, whose representatives attended the workshop. Organizers also immediately began planning future workshops and opportunities for on-the-ground projects.
For Calabaza, those connections are where lasting change begins.
"We cannot accomplish the restoration, preservation and protection of these lands, waters and resources by ourselves," he said.
Success, he believes, will not be measured solely in acres treated or projects completed. It will look like Tribal Nations helping guide stewardship decisions on ancestral landscapes. It will look like Indigenous youth entering land management professions. It will look like communities bringing Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Western science together rather than treating them as competing systems.
Tallbull imagines cultural fire once again becoming a familiar presence across Rocky Mountain landscapes. Millard-Chacon envisions communities learning to see themselves as participants within ecosystems rather than managers standing above them. Those changes will take years, perhaps generations. But for two days, a different conversation took place.
The chair remained empty throughout the workshop.
No one sat in it. No one was meant to.
Its purpose was not to be filled.
As the scars left by the Marshall Fire slowly fade across Boulder County, Calabaza, the Tall Bulls, Millard-Chacon and others are working to create another path. One where fire is not viewed solely as an enemy to defeat, but as a force to understand. One where communities learn to listen before they lead.
The chair served as a reminder that fire had never left these landscapes. It had remained at the edge of the conversation, waiting for people to make room for it once again.
