The power of fire transcends medium and boundary—it’s a force that sculpts science, mythology, artwork, and story, generation after generation. Since the beginning of the new year, however, Angelenos are perhaps more intimately acquainted with fire than most.

The Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, is currently staging an exhibition acknowledging the fire stewardship of the region’s Indigenous communities through its second PST Art exhibition: Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art.

Curated by Daisy Ocampo Diaz (Caxcan), Michael Chavez (Tongva), and Lina Tejeda (Pomo), the exhibition is the product of multiple years of work and collaboration with Indigenous community leaders throughout Southern California. Fire Kinship explores the Tongva, Cahuilla, Luiseño, and Kumeyaay communities through objects, stories, videos, and images, along with commissioned, contemporary artworks.

Though Fire Kinship was announced in November, in response to the subsequent wildfire crisis, the Fowler has expanded its artistic messaging to that of commemoration and community. Fire is generally perceived as an element of creation—the exhibition includes loaned objects from Native communities, for instance, created using natural materials from the land in conjunction with fire. When applied to plant cultivation, fire is used to make baskets, blankets, and capes. Along the way, the exhibition acknowledges fire’s role in the cycle of life and death, its inextricable agency in Planet Earth’s sometimes grievous but inevitable turns.

Prior to the arrival of colonizing forces in the 1700s, Native communities throughout Southern California deployed controlled fire regimes to prevent future wildfires and grow their local ecosystems. Centuries later, the frequency and viciousness of wildfires in California have reached untenable levels of destruction— and also represent the erasure of Indigenous ecological practices of fire stewardship.

Though the human relationship with fire is as profoundly progressive as it is destructive, Fire Kinship focalizes Indigenous wisdom in a more hopeful manner—the flame is reframed as a regenerative force. As Californians continue to face ongoing challenges with wildfires and their catastrophic consequences, Fire Kinship prompts an imperative conversation regarding unification in the face of fire prevention, and perhaps in some instances, the employment of Indigenous methodologies used for generations before the city as we know it ever existed.