Fall Queer Burn Training

The Fall Queer Burn Training is a 4-day immersive campout at fancyland, a community-minded queer land project on Whilkut land, situated a half hour inland from Arcata, CA.

Fancyland will serve as a demonstration site and place where treatments and techniques can be practiced, observed, and learned from year after year. This is an opportunity to learn together while working on different aspects of beneficial burning: site preparation, pre- and post-fire monitoring for cultural and ecological resources, and, if weather conditions permit, live fire training.

The focus of this training is working with fire as a tool and partner in overtopped oak woodland management, with an emphasis on being in right relationship to the land’s ecological and cultural history in order to deepen our connection to place. It is an opportunity to learn about and with fire together with other 2SLGBTQIA+ people. Inspired by WTREX training exchanges centering women fire workers, there will be opportunities for people marginalized in the fire workforce to build skills and work toward certifications. However, unlike TREX fire trainings, you do not need to have a Fire Fighter 2 certification to participate.

Our overarching goal is to explore what queer fire is and can be, as a mixed group of Indigenous, BPOC, and settler queer-identified people. To do this, we will supplement hands-on training with opportunities for reflection, discussion, creative documentation, and affinity spaces for Indigenous, BPOC, disabled / chronically ill, youth, and elder participants. Some questions that will guide these discussions are:

• What is not queer about mainstream fire work?
• What practices increase marginalized people’s access to fire training and land stewardship?
• How can the intersection of queerness and good fire support our larger commitments to collective liberation?
• What can queer knowledge and lived experience contribute to policy and management efforts to promote cultural burning and wildfire resilience?

Both weekends will feature training, discussion, reflection, and queer good times. If you want to contribute ideas or collaborate in facilitating skillsharing sessions you can sign up using the Discussion and activity co-leader sign up sheet.

We will begin reviewing applications on 8/8, and continue on a rolling basis as space permits until 9/4. We will be reserving spaces for BIPOC participants and balancing experience levels. The registration fee ($50-600 sliding scale) contributes to food costs and honoraria for cultural practitioners, and will be collected in a follow-up survey beginning 8/12. We have stipends to compensate local tribal members as burn leaders and cultural advisors, and a travel and scholarship fund to offset costs and increase access.

Apply by August 30: https://surveys.ucanr.edu/survey.cfm?surveynumber=43310

*PLEASE NOTE*: We hope to burn, but may not get to actually light fire. We can only burn during burn “windows” – weather conditions that allow us to burn gently and contain our fire, and it’s impossible to predict more than 10 days in advance if we will get a good window. We will take advantage of any burn windows to burn the four burn units that we have prepped at fancyland. It’s possible that we could burn all four during the first weekend, or that we could not be able to burn until the second weekend, or that the weather won’t cooperate and we won’t be able to burn at all. For more information on our burn window, scroll down in the general info document.