I recently visited the northern territories in Australia and the Aboriginal peoples of those areas (such as Arnheim land and litchfield national park) use fire as a method to reduce wildfires. These are the techniques they have used for the thousands of years they have inhabited the land and it seems to work fairly well. So I was curious if native american tribes ever did something similar and if they did, does modern wildfire prevention in America still use these methods?
Extensive use of fire has been documented in both native oral history and physical evidence. In the area of the Carr Fire, Wintu oral history describes burning, and physical investigations have shown a history of frequent fires dropping off around the time of the gold rush.
There is an ongoing movement to bring back controlled burns and re-adopt native practices, but it has not been systematically applied. The need for fuel reduction has been recognized, but methods such as mechanical brush cutting have been introduced in addition to prescribed burning.
Any effort to bring back the practice is complicated by fuel buildup and problems such as erosion that may reappear if vegetation is not removed carefully. For instance, clearcut logging in the 20th century caused hillside collapse and sedimentation of the Trinity River which destroyed the salmon run, so fuel reduction is a double-edged sword.
https://www.nps.gov/whis/learn/nature/upload/Nugget-2008-Old-Growth-Article.pdf
https://books.google.com/books?id=m4xaDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA393&ots=3JQ-249niy&pg=PA381#v=onepage&q&f=false