This article is about the benefits of fire in the context of traditional land management, the devastating effects a zero-tolerance fire policy has had on ecosystems, and what happens when fire is sensitively returned to the land. Hannibal discusses research into how the cultural burning practices of the Plains Miwok people in California have historically affected tribal livelihoods. The article also suggests how returning fire to the land could affect California Indian communities and cultures in the present and into the future. In addition to looking at the traditional uses of fire by the Plains Miwok, the article considers the experience of the Martu in Australia, and the attempt to restore the landscape at Quiroste by the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band in Año Nueva State Park.

The author, who is chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, considers the diversity of beliefs and cultural practices of Native Californians. What all tribes share is a tie to a specific landscape and a brutal European colonization that worked to break that tie. Sarris discusses ways that native Californians have found ways to once again strengthen those ties, such as the Bole Maru, or Dream Dance. The religion contains elements of older beliefs and ceremonies, but increasingly puts more stress on the afterlife.

Non-Californians rarely refer to the Golden State as a sacred place or religious landscape. Yet, California fascinates, in part, due to its religious extravagance–think Jim Jones, Heavens Gate, the Crystal Cathedral, Harold Camping’s predicted end of the world, the Grateful Dead. Everything is here, and then some. This essay looks at California as an epicenter of religious expression and a global microcosm for hybrid religions, new religions, and experimental religious practices. The essay analyzes migration, the California/Mexico border, genders/sexualities, race/ethnicity, commercialization, embodiment/disembodiment, and the natural world as lenses on California’s religious landscape.

Boom editor Jon Christensen interviews Malcolm Margolin, who is celebrating forty years of publishing books with Heyday. Margolin discusses Heyday's origins and how the local publishing scene has changed in the intervening decades, the roundhouse model of publishing—which sees each book published as an opportunity for people to come together and build community—the stories that Californians have to tell, and the concept of “deep hanging out.” The interview is illustrated with images from recent Heyday publications.

This essay applies the idea of the witness tree to the Golden State. Reflexively, Californians turn their historical attention to giant sequoias, and wonder what these trees would say about the ancient past if trees could speak. The author argues that hang trees—sites of lynching in the settlement period—are better witnesses of California’s past. Lynching was common in frontier California, and native trees, mainly oaks and sycamores, were used by vigilance committees for extrajudicial executions. Once the Gold Rush was distant enough for commemoration, hang trees became objects of folklore, fakelore, and heritage. As sites of violence and collective memory, California’s trees speak truths and lies.

This essay documents and examines the remains of military bunkers along the California coast. These structures, monuments to the grim anticipation of war, appear to be intrusions upon the beauty of the landscape, but we might also view them as witnesses to the nation’s particular imagination of danger during the 20th Century, and more specifically, to California’s ever deepening relationship with the defense industry.

This is a review essay covering three recent books related to Native Californian agroecological practices: M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Ira Jacknis, Food in California Indian Culture (Berkeley: Phoebe Hearst Museum Press, 2004); and Kent G. Lightfoot and Otis Parrish, California Indians and Their Environment: An Introduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).