This story is co-published with The GroundTruth Project .

MARIPOSA, Calif. Rain falls on the 300-year-old oaks on a cold midwinter morning as a group of nearly 60 gathers here on what was once southern Sierra Miwok land.

Some have returned year after year. Others are here for the first time, eager to learn what Californias oldest residents have long known about land management after the most destructive fire season in the states recorded history.

We are here to make an offering to the land, said Ron Goode, the North Fork Monos tribal chairman, who organized the event. Mother Earth supports us. By putting fire on the ground, we support her.

Rakes, clippers, shovels and chainsaws in hand, the group heads out to assemble the dead vegetation into burn piles. Using drip torches red tin canisters with mixtures of diesel and gasoline they delicately light the piles on fire in slow, deliberate motions, painting the land in strokes of orange and red.

It is the years first cultural burn for the North Fork Mono. For more than 10,000 years, tribes used small, controlled fires to open pasture lands and clear out underbrush, promoting new plant growth and reducing the risk of large, dangerous fires.

But when Western settlers took over Native American lands in the 18th and 19th centuries, they began barring many traditional practices, including cultural burning. In 1850, the U.S. government passed the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, which prohibited intentional burning. After over a century of this strategy left the nations forests choked with dry underbrush, Californias fire officials are now beginning to reimagine fire and land management, drawing upon Native American tradition and perspective.

North Fork Mono tribal members are teaching the group of university students, ecologists, journalists and, notably, officials from the U.S. Forest Service and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) how it might help curb the states fire crisis by clearing out highly flammable vegetation before the dry, hot summer.