WATCH: Haaland on how Indigenous knowledge helps reduce wildfire risks

As wildfires burn in the Los Angeles area, conversations have turned to how to better prepare for those risks in the future, including the use of controlled and prescribed burns. Indigenous communities have long called this practice cultural burning, used for thousands of years as a way to care for the land.

Outgoing Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said that managing public lands is the No. 1 mission of her department, and responding to climate change “absolutely includes Indigenous knowledge.”

Haaland, the country’s first Native American Cabinet member, lauded the hundreds of co-stewardship agreements the Biden administration launched with tribes across the country.

“These are tribes who for millennia have cared for, have been stewards of these lands,” and the partnerships enable them to share their knowledge to ensure the government is doing the “best job possible” to protect public land, Haaland said in an interview with PBS News' Amna Nawaz.

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