MIDDLETOWN, Calif. — The Middletown Art Center will host a panel discussion this weekend on traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK, and fire management.

The event will take place via Zoom from 4 to 6 p.m. Saturday, March 5.

The panel discussion will feature Meyo Marrufo, Ali Meders-Knight and Jessica Brown and be facilitated by Corine Pearce, lead artist of the Weaving Project. All are TEK practitioners, cultural educators, cultural artists and basket weavers.

In their work on the land, they have tended gathering sites and helped people restore native plants and ecological balance to areas impacted by wildfires. There is much to learn and put to practice from TEK, to live more sustainably in a region where fire is part of life.

“People have to understand that we'll never win. Fire will always win. And so what we have to do is work in accordance with the fire to be able to defend our space, doing what we need to do before we get to catastrophic fires,” said Brown, a Southeastern Pomo land steward who has been working in ecorestoration and fire ecology in Lake County and on a food sovereignty project for the Elem Tribe.

TEK is based on 20,000 years of place-based Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems and watersheds.

“It is the ancestral knowledge that our people have practiced over time,” said Maruffo. “It's a new word but not a new theory.”

Marrufo, an Eastern Pomo from the Clear Lake Basin, also works to restore and protect environmental and cultural landscapes and tribal ways of life as the environmental director for Guidiville Rancheria in Mendocino County and is the California Representative for the EPA National Tribal Caucus.

“My people managed this land collectively to achieve peace, prosperity and health for all who lived here. This is why it’s important now to educate the whole community on how to manage the land, as it sustains our economy,” explained Meders-Knight, Mechoopda tribal member in the Chico area and advocate for community resilience and shared prosperity through community land management.

Register for Zoom access to this invaluable discussion at www.bit.ly/TEKlake. Preregistration is required so that the Zoom room can accommodate all virtual attendees. Fees are sliding scale and support the project and project documentation. No one turned away for lack of funds.

This event was previously scheduled for Feb. 26 and due to unforeseen circumstances has been rescheduled for March 5 from 4 to 6 p.m. If you have already registered, the same Zoom link will work.

For more information visit www.middletownartcenter.org.​