Backfire: the settler-colonial logic and legacy of Smokey Bear

ABSTRACT

Since the 1940s, the United States Forest Service’s (USFS) national fire suppression efforts have been bolstered by a public-facing ad campaign led by the Ad Council, most notably through the iconic rise of Smokey Bear. The consequences of decades of strict fire suppression, promulgated and solidified by this highly successful campaign, have been ecologically disastrous, and especially detrimental for fire-dependent Indigenous communities and ecosystems. Scholars have examined the Smokey campaign’s racialized, nationalist discourse, yet none have grappled with the campaign’s settler colonial logic, itself replete with gendered exclusion and speciesism. In this article, we combine intersectional theoretical frameworks with settler colonial and Indigenous studies to carry out a systematic content analysis of 201 unique campaign documents. We demonstrate how the campaign’s production of the careful citizen – one rooted in mid-to-upper class, settler masculinity – hinges on interlocking narratives of Indigenous erasure, low-class criminality, and the helpless victimhood of women and more-than-human species.

KEYWORDS:

• Smokey Bear
• fire suppression
• settler colonialism
• intersectionality
• Indigenous peoples
• U.S. Forest Service

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Frank Lake and our anonymous reviewers for reading and helping us strengthen our manuscript. In addition we would like to express gratitude to the folks who have directly or indirectly helped shape our thinking on Indigenous stewardship broadly, and cultural burning in particular, including (in alphabetical order) Shay Bourque, Aja Conrad, Leaf Hillman, Lisa Hillman, Michelle Jacob, Meredith Jacobson, Frank Lake, Kathy Lynn, Tony Marks-Block, Deniss Martinez, Peter Nelson, Kari Norgaard, Vikki Preston, Ron Reed, Ryan Reed, Colleen Rossier, Bruno Seraphin, Chief Caleen Sisk, Analisa Tripp, Bill Tripp, Carson Viles, Jerome Viles, and Sara Worl. We also thank Lisa Lombardo for her support in the archives, and Sally Johnson for her assistance searching for and scanning the archival imagery.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).