CONCOW, Calif. — Until recently, when members of the Konkow Valley Band of Maidu pulled up a map of their ancestral land in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, only about two dozen of their historic sites appeared.

Disease, violence and forced labor had separated California tribe members from their history. Without routine Indigenous fire to clear out the foothills, the landscape — much of it now managed by the U.S. Forest Service — grew dense with conifers, obscuring the signs of their enduring presence.

As a result, archaeologists’ picture of the tribe’s past was spare. No more than 500 people. Going back about 3,000 years — a fraction of the time other tribes are known to have lived in the state.

Then the forests burned.

In less than a decade, wildfires destroyed forests across 95% of the tribe’s homelands. The Forest Service turned to the tribe for help healing the land. As members walked the wide-open moonscape, they found evidence of their vibrant history everywhere.

Now just a few years later, their map shows more than 1,200 sites.

Each one is itself a collection: Arrowheads. Rock art. Milling stations where ancestors used cups carved into rock faces to grind salmon, manzanita berries and bay leaves. The circular pits of winter houses, where they sat around a fire under a cedar roof.

Now, as Tribal Chairperson Matthew Williford Sr. walks these lands, he imagines a much more vibrant past than the one traditionally portrayed by archeologists.

For millennia, upward of 5,000 ancestors living in the basin, many trekking to higher elevation to gather food in the summertime. Husbands venting about domestic life as they shaped their arrowheads on one side of the hill; wives doing the same at the milling stations on the other side.

Matthew Williford Sr., Konkow Valley Band of Maidu tribal chairperson, stands in Plumas National Forest.

(Sara Nevis / For The Times)

Now, to better understand the tribe’s past, the Konkow Valley Band of Maidu is teaming up with a new generation of archaeologists. On a recent day in the Plumas National Forest, Matthew O’Brien, an anthropology professor at Chico State University, worked alongside a handful of students and tribal members.

The team excavated a house pit, carefully carrying artifacts to a rudimentary lab of folding tables and camp chairs, where students weighed them, measured them with calipers and assessed their chemical makeup with an expensive tool called an XRF analyzer. People offered explanations for how their ancestors used the artifacts.

For O’Brien, this form of archeology is worlds apart from the practice of the past. Tribal people are not voiceless historical subjects to study but active collaborators helping to understand and protect the past.

In the 20th century, “the government put archaeologists in charge of stewarding the past. In places like the United States, that leads to some serious ethical issues because what we’re in charge of protecting is not our own culture,” O’Brien said. Now, “it’s our job to help repair that relationship.”

It’s an irony lost on no one that the same policies that disconnected tribal members from their history also enabled the fires that then allowed them to rediscover it.

Even before California gained statehood, Gold Rush lawmakers banned tribes from lighting fire to rejuvenate and thin out forests. That same law also allowed white Californians to force Indigenous adults and children into labor, which separated “at least a generation of children and adults from their families, languages, and cultures,” the state later acknowledged.

Meanwhile, the federal government refused to ratify treaties to establish reservations for tribes whose homelands lay within newly created California, leaving tribes like the Konkow Valley Band of Maidu landless. By the early 1900s, Forest Service officials were working aggressively to squash lingering sentiment among white ranchers that intentional fire was productive. Any fire that started on Forest Service land, the policy became, ought to be contained by 10 a.m. the next morning.

The Konkow Valley Band of Maidu did what they could. Tribal members drove around in a beat-up Buick flinging matches out the window. Eventually those efforts landed one elder in jail for arson.

The open forests of oak, dogwood and a few pines, once routinely thinned and maintained with low-intensity “good” fire, became thick with conifers, to the delight of the Forest Service. Now five to six times denser, the trees formed yet another barrier between the tribe and its history — yet a fragile one. When fire inevitably ignites within so much wood in such a tight space — through lightning or human error — it does not burn gently.

A statue stands in a lot charred by the Camp fire, which tore through Paradise, Calif., in 2018.

(Noah Berger / Associated Press)

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In 2018, the Camp fire ripped through Butte County, burning 150,000 acres and killing 85 people. Three years later, the Dixie fire ravaged nearly a million acres. In its wake, a world covered in ash. Waterways turned into black sludge. A foul smell of sulfur lingered in the air.

“It was sickening,” Williford said. “Just disgusting.”

Material to be burned is piled in an area of Plumas National Forest that the Konkow Valley Band of Maidu helps manage.

(Sara Nevis / For The Times)

“The land used to repay us, or acknowledge us, by giving us what we needed,” Williford said, standing on a dirt road overlooking the valley. “There were Native generations that were disconnected, unplugged. … We feel lucky that it’s our opportunity to reconnect, to let the land know that ‘Hey! We’re still here!’”

Restoration work with the Forest Service — surveying sites, planting trees and bringing back good fire — continues to unearth long-lost artifacts. And the most exciting data from O’Brien’s team is yet to come:

The team plans to carbon-date a piece of charcoal from the house pit it excavated to see just how long ago tribal ancestors sat around its hearth.

It was an ancient fire, not the recent ones, that preserved some dead wood, and with it, a lasting elemental fingerprint saying, “We were here.”

Mayor Karen Bass’ adminstration quietly appointed a new chief heat officer over a month ago, The Times has confirmed.

Daniela Simunovic took on the role May 31 after the administration discreetly fired Marta Segura, the first person to hold the position. Simunovic previously served as Bass’ senior director of climate and sustainability for three years.

The chief heat officer is responsible for overseeing the city’s response to extreme heat, one of the deadliest climate risks facing California. Like her predecessor, Simunovic will also head the city’s Climate Emergency Mobilization Office.

The move comes after Bass proposed eliminating the office entirely when facing a $1-billion budget shortfall. The L.A. City Council rejected the move, and the final budget ultimately moved the office from Public Works to the Emergency Management Department.

Los Angeles created the office in early 2021 to coordinate city efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect Angelenos from climate disasters worsened by global warming. Then-Mayor Eric Garcetti appointed Segura as its director.

The following year, L.A. moved to also name the office’s director as the city’s chief heat officer, making it the third city in the country — after Phoenix and Miami — to create such a position.

On the hottest days, heat-related illness can account for nearly 1 in every 100 emergency department visits in L.A. County. In 2025, the County recorded 10 heat-related deaths, according to a new dashboard.

Segura was paid about $222,0000 in 2025 according to payroll data from the city controller. Simunovic, while in her role as senior director of climate and sustainability, was paid about $161,000 last year.

Before joining L.A. City government, Simunovic was a senior advisor for the California Air Resources Board, which is responsible for protecting the public from air pollution.

The Substack Climate Colored Goggles first reported Simunovic’s appointment Thursday. A spokesperson with Mayor Bass’s office confirmed it in a statement to The Times.

“Many stakeholders and City partners have been working closely with her and are excited to have her lead the office, including during the current Extreme Heat Warning in effect for the City of L.A.,” the statement said.

The Climate Emergency Mobilization Office has been “working with community partners on the development of the City’s Heat Action and Resilience Plan,” it read, “which should be completed by early 2027.”

Despite Bass’ proposal to cut the office last year, the mayor has reaffirmed and advanced several L.A. climate goals, including reaching 100% renewable energy by 2035.

Bass’s Climate Action Plan, released in April, called for doubling local solar power by 2030, reducing the use of fossil fuels in buildings and city buses, and addressing heat risk by planting more trees to increase shade, establishing “cooling centers” to provide relief during hot days and developing the Heat Action and Resilience Plan.

On a sweltering spring day in South Carolina, a worker they call the “Burn Boss” stands by a house, holding a torch. The radio crackles with a countdown, “3, 2, 1!”

And the Burn Boss sets the house on fire.

Within minutes, flames breach the walls and enter the building. They set alight a sofa, a bed, a closet full of clothes and a kitchen stocked with cooking oil and potato chips — all fuels for an accelerating blaze. Moments later, the light and heat roar outward from shattered windows, forcing onlookers to step back.

This is a test.

A nonprofit in South Carolina is in the unusual business of intentionally burning down houses built for this purpose in order to learn how best to protect people and their property against catastrophic wildfires.

As climate change amplifies heat waves and droughts, it is priming wildfires to burn bigger and faster. At the same time, people continue to move into areas more vulnerable to fire. This one-two punch is driving record financial losses as homes and entire communities burn.

Controlled experiments like these are contributing to a growing body of evidence suggesting that losing entire communities to fire is not inevitable, if the right steps are taken when designing homes and neighborhoods. If you can “prevent this house from igniting, you’ve likely prevented the next one from igniting,” said Murray Morrison, the Managing Director of Research at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, or IBHS, the organization running the test.

Disastrous wildfires used to be thought of as relatively isolated events, but there’s been a significant change in their frequency, said Michael J. Gollner, the director of the fire research laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. “We have to start recognizing that our communities are no longer safe,” he said.

Tests like the one in South Carolina are an acknowledgment that climate change is already affecting people’s lives in potentially devastating ways.

After the test house ignites, IBHS employees track the flames as they burrow under the roof, shatter windows and send a torrent of embers toward a second building downwind. While they’re studying the blaze, a wall of industrial turbines fan the flames with gusts up to 50 miles per hour — roughly the same wind speeds that helped to fuel the wildfires in 2018 that destroyed Paradise, Calif., one of the most devastating disasters in recent years.

By the end of the experiment, millions of data points will capture exactly how a fire might spread from house to house. This is precisely the kind of blaze that’s becoming more common as wildfires reach into dense neighborhoods.

Few organizations have the funding and facilities to study fire in this way. In a series of experiments, researchers have burned down 14 “test” homes. They tweak the building materials, wind speeds and other variables to mimic real-world conditions. The video above shows the downwind building, equipped with a half-million dollars of sensors and equipment, as it measured the danger posed by its fiery neighbor under one of these scenarios.

These and other experiments have taught valuable lessons. For example, use building materials and methods designed to withstand embers, heat and flames. Remove flammable things in the yard, particularly within five feet of a building, to lower the chance of fire reaching it at all.

An analysis found that communities combining these strategies were twice as likely to survive a major conflagration.

The insurance industry, which is the primary source of funding for IBHS, is using its research. California requires insurers to offer discounts if homeowners upgrade their properties to be more fire-resistant. Some of the biggest savings come from meeting a collection of standards that qualify for a certification under the IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home program, rather than making individual changes. California’s fifth-largest insurer, CSAA, now guarantees policies to anyone with the certification.

Studies also show that the distance between buildings is important. Ideally, according to IBHS research, homes would have 30 feet or more between them to minimize the chance that one becomes fuel to burn the other.

Of course, the distance between homes is impossible to modify once a neighborhood has been built. But “can we reduce the exposure enough that the hardened materials on the neighbor’s structure actually prevent your home from igniting?” asked Dr. Morrison. “What you’re trying to do is stop the catastrophe, not achieve perfection,” he said.

Even though California has some of the country’s strongest standards for new construction, it has struggled to keep pace with the wildfire threat. After devastating fire seasons in 2017 and 2018, private insurers began rapidly dropping customers, pushing more than 500,000 homeowners onto the state’s costly, bare-bones insurer of last resort. Many people have decided to forgo coverage altogether.

In an effort to lure insurance companies back into the state, California lawmakers have taken steps to require people to reduce their fire risk.

In 2020, the state legislature passed a bill requiring people in particularly fire-prone places to clear flammable materials from the first five feet around their house. However, some local officials and neighborhood organizations objected, and implementation of the plan has been delayed.

Unwilling to wait, the city of Berkeley, Calif., enacted its own local version of the rules. They took effect in January. “This is an area where there is a strong body of research,” said Colin Arnold, the assistant fire chief at Berkeley Fire.

As this map shows, homes in Berkeley with starkly different fire risks can exist on the very same street, depending on construction methods, vegetation nearby and proximity to other houses. By focusing on the blocks closest to the fire-prone hills to the east, Berkeley officials hope to lower the threat posed to the rest of the city.

To ease the transition, fire officials started with voluntary inspections and community groups are helping clear brush for neighbors at no cost. And local landscape architects are helping residents adapt their yards in ways that they still find attractive.

Wildfire isn’t a new threat; it’s been affecting humanity for millennia, said Roy Wright, the president of IBHS. “I don’t want us to ever assert that we can somehow design ourselves out of this risk,” he said. The goal, instead, is to put people in a place where “the risk doesn’t feel catastrophic.”