Olivia Chase

Olivia is an enrolled member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe and Tsnungwe descendant. She is studying Fire Science and Management with a concentration in Ecological Restoration and minoring in Indigenous people in Natural Resources at Cal Poly Humboldt. Olivia is passionate about learning her peoples’ Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) practices and the role of Indigenous peoples in their ecosystems. In her free time, she loves to read, make jewelry and write.

About Olivia’s Project

Wildfires – especially in California and the Pacific Northwest – have been exacerbated by settler-colonial removal of Indigenous peoples, fire suppression, the extractive industry and climate change. Understanding this, Olivia used her platform as a 2024 Brave Heart Fellow to create a Cultural Burn Stockroom filled with fire-grade Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), which is very expensive and often inaccessible to youth.

Her goal is to create an open resource for Native youth to access fire equipment in order to resume stewarding our ancestral homelands with intentional fire, the way our people always have and must continue to do. Equipment from the Stockroom will remain available to the Cultural Fire Club for generational use so that when prescriptive and cultural burn opportunities in the community arise, members will not be turned away for lack of proper PPE. With the support of on-campus fundraising, the club was able to purchase 10 pairs of NFPA-rated boots. Two pairs have already been used at a burn training where Olivia led the burn treatment of California hazel (a basketry plant).

Olivia hopes to continue to grow the stockroom with other PPE, including Nomex shirts and pants, helmets, hand tools, gloves, eye protection, headlamps and backpacks.