ast fall, more than a century after his Miwok ancestors were driven off their land in central California, Don Hankins set fire to a forest there.

Hankins, a graduate student at the University of California-Davis, is experimenting with new ways of reintroducing traditional Native American burning as a conservation tool. Native Americans in the West have always seen fire as an essential way of keeping the land healthy. During the long decades since native management ended, fire suppression has contributed to some devastating changes in California's landscape.

In the remnants of streamside forest that have survived a blitz of urban and agricultural development, willows are gnarled with galls caused by heavy parasite infestations. Higher on the hillsides, oaks are dying, shaded out by conifers and hit by diseases that thrive in the absence of fire. To California Native American people who have studied their traditional culture, these are signs that the woods need a good burn.

"Too many researchers put native people in the past tense," says Hankins. "Even though Indian people have not been able to burn the landscape for a hundred years, there's a valuable body of indigenous knowledge, passed on through oral tradition, that Western science has neglected."

Modern conditions demand changes in the old ways of using fire, however. The long-standing policy of fire suppression has led to heavy accumulations of fuel that can burn dangerously hot. So Hankins and other volunteers had to clear out decades' worth of dead wood before they could create the kind of low-intensity fire that native people set routinely in the days before white settlement.

Though Hankins's experimental fires have been small -- only about two acres in size -- he's already seen some dramatic results. The willows in his burned areas are thriving, free of the parasites that cause galls and stunt the growth of willows in unburned control areas. The scorched willows grow back tall and straight, producing stems that can be used to make traditional baskets. Native Californians struggle to continue tribal arts like basketry, which require materials from fire-dependent plants including beargrass and willow.

On a recent visit to Kakadu National Park in Australia, Hankins spent time with Aboriginal people who were burning their land. "Like native people here, the Aborigines say they burn to clean up the country, to renew the landscape," he says. "They lit cool, slow-moving burns -- you could watch the fire front for half an hour before it moved out of sight. To see indigenous people burn on a landscape scale was amazing, like looking back at how fire was done here in California 150 years ago."