Native American & Indigenous Studies at PennThursday, November 13, 2025 - 6:30pm to Friday, November 14, 2025 - 6:00pm
Kleinman Energy Forum, Fisher Fine Arts Library 4th Floor.
6:00 PM on Thursday Novemeber 13 Keynote Lecture by Elizabeth Azzuz
Director of Traditional Fire, Cultural Fire Management Council
Cultural burning by Indigenous peoples has been central to the stewardship of North America’s forest landscapes for millennia, prior to the banning of the practice by colonial, state, and federal governments. The ensuing absence of fire has contributed to forests’ deviation from historical fire regimes and increased their vulnerability to catastrophic wildfire. The Cultural Fire Management Council has been working to bring fire back to the landscape of the Yurok Reservation and Ancestral lands.
NAIS is proud to sponsor the participation of Elizabeth Azzus,
Symposium 10:30-6 Friday November 14.
Designing for Fire: Novel Wildfire and Forest Landscapes is an interdisciplinary symposium exploring the challenge of preparing landscapes for wildfire across Western North America, in the face of high and growing vulnerability. Forests are deeply emotional and culturally important landscapes, and stewarding them successfully through the coming decades in the face of a growing climate threat will involve changes to policy, infrastructure, forest management, development patterns, fire prevention, and cultural perception. What is the role of design within this challenge, which lies at the intersection of all these disparate conversations?
Organized by Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture Nicholas Pevzner, and co-hosted by the Department of Landscape Architecture and the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology, this symposium brings together speakers from the worlds of wildfire science, fire management, forest management, and landscape design to explore the interlinked challenges of designing and managing landscapes for fire resilience in the face of a changing climate.
Full program is available https://www.design.upenn.edu/events/designing-fire
Interested members of the public can register using this link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/designing-for-fire-tickets-1716903537699?aff=ebdsshcopyurl&utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&utm-medium=discovery&utm-term=listing&utm-source=cp