| LEECE OLIVER LARUE (Karuk Tribe), Fire Grant Program Manager, Karuk Tribe Department of Natural Resources 

Indigenous People have always been data stewards; we are the original scientists of this land,” (Urban Indian Health Institute). Indigenous data becomes subject to the violence of Western racialized and gendered categorization influenced by emphasis on analytical thought in U.S. scientific paradigms; the ontological structures of Western space, temporality, and history rapidly reduce Karuk knowledge, tended and stewarded since time immemorial, into ahistorical half-translations. Indigenous data, without the cultural and lived underpinnings filling in the cracks and crevices of unknown, get falsely categorized and falsely known via how cultural and culturally-situated data comes into conflict with Western systems of knowing, being, and becoming. This emphasis on conflict and conquer, I argue, still centers a (settler-)colonial theory of assimilation toward Indigenous data and data sovereignty. Coming into relation with Indigenous data and data stewardship means coming into relation with a more complex methodology of Native-positivist knowing, of confirming the world around oneself by letting the unknown, and comfort with such, be an indicator of comprehension and respect toward cultural values and teachings. The question of what should be categorized as Indigenous or Western, cultural or objective data imposes a binary distinction of meaning further confounded by Karuk and Northern Californi/a Native methods and theories of knowledge and epistemology where most everything exists as culturally-situated. This argument seeks to bring shape to the intricate matters of Karuk data transmission/translation of Karuk fire science and fire ecologies, which quandaries and confounds Western (data) categorization. Fire gives us a living, cultural medium through which to ask the questions of what could and should be known, shared, and taught about Karuk cultural fire data.