24 September 2024
Woman of the Ash
By Mackenna Gleave
She was born into the fire — Motovahe’e, woman of the ash trees.
The name was forseen by her great-grandmother at birth, a gift to Shaye Ewing from her ancestors and spirits. With fire as her birthright, Ewing never imagined she would spend her life fighting those very flames.
She grew up with a passion for sports, but injury after injury left her broken, physically and spiritually. Reaching for a sense of purpose, she found herself following in the footsteps of her grandpa, uncle and late father.
When she was 18, she applied to be a wildland firefighter.
In Ewing’s Indigenous culture, fire has a sacred purpose. “Fires are meant to burn,” Ewing said. “It’s meant for the Earth, there’s a reason that it happens.”
But in the Western world, fire is something to be suppressed, controlled and eliminated.
Ewing is now 20 and a sophomore at the University of Montana. She is learning to reconcile the fractured, contradictory parts of her identity and heritage. She’s currently in her second season as a forestry technician for the United States Forest Service on Engine 411 out of Stevensville, making for a sporadic college education. Her job is to help people, but she sometimes struggles with stopping a natural process sacred to her people.
“We have to go to this land and kind of destroy it to save it,” she said.
Her job also means working for the same government that took land from her ancestors.
“There’s an interesting thing with the federal government, right? Because they are the reason that our people got thrown around in the past,” Ewing said. “But that was a really long time ago and if I’m part of this federal government, then I can help be the change that needs to happen.”
‘Never be weak’
Ewing was born in Missoula and grew up having sleepovers at the Missoula smokejumper base. As a kid, she split her time between her parents and immersed herself in both of their cultures — She’s a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne tribe on her dad’s side and Italian from her mother’s side.
She learned about the history of her Italian family and heard about the house they still owned in a village in northern Italy.
But she was also surrounded by the teachings her dad was receiving to be the tribe’s medicine man. It was a position she could never be in herself, as a woman, but she was given a medicine pouch when she found herself broken and in need of healing, a source of power she has returned to in times of hurt. It still hangs as a centerpiece in her bedroom.
But nothing hurt more than the sudden passing of Ewing’s father when she was 4 years old, she said. She lost not only her father but his teachings, too.
When she was younger, she didn’t understand why she was unable to do things by herself.
“I remember being a child and having some breakdowns because I couldn’t find someone in a grocery store,” Ewing said. “I had an ultimate fear of being left behind.”
As she grew up, she often struggled with anxiety, trying to suppress it with her many sports accolades and good grade point average, instead of recognizing it for what it really was.
When she entered high school, Ewing struggled to embrace either side of her family. She knew she had never looked or felt like her peers. She felt insecure about being one of few kids with darker skin.
She was singled out by the school district as an Indigenous student, with check-ups to make sure her grades were good.
“They’d see I had straight As and they would be like, ‘Oh, you’re fine, okay’ when in fact, I was probably not the most fine,” Ewing said.
Anxiety haunted her constantly.
She distracted herself, leaving little time for herself or a social life. She played five sports in high school, including ice hockey and ski racing for the United States Junior Olympic Team in 2019. She maintained a 4.0 grade point average. From the outside, she was doing everything right.
Ewing’s path was laid out in front of her: graduate from high school, play hockey and ski for her college, go professional and figure the rest out later.
“My whole life, it was ingrained in me that I would never be weak, ever, especially in sports,” she said. “Being the best was the only acceptable thing.”
But in the background, her suppressed anxiety constantly grew stronger. The line she was constantly battling — between her mental health and accomplishments — was starting to break down.
It wasn’t until she tore her ACL in her senior year of high school, an errant tackle in soccer, that she finally buckled. She tried to get back into sports as quickly as possible. She tried to follow her plan, but with all of her attention on rehabilitating her knee, Ewing began having panic attacks that became progressively worse. It was clear that a shift in her thinking was needed, so she decided to start therapy.
“Mental health, when I was in [sports], was not a thing at all,” she said. “And I think that that’s not okay, and I wanted to change that.”
After months of being cooped up to heal, she made the decision to move to Boulder, Colorado, and play for Team Colorado, a women’s AAA hockey team. Just a few months into the season, however, she tore her same ACL again, marking almost exactly a year from the first injury.
Wanting to escape the cycle of physical therapy and darkness during the winters in Missoula, Ewing decided to stay in Boulder and continued traveling with the team. She worked at a local rink and took art classes at Red Rocks Community College. It took six months of crutching around Colorado trying to heal before she was forced to accept she would not have the career she hoped in college hockey and skiing. The life she had so delicately planned and worked so hard for no longer existed.
On the very last day for U.S. Forest Service applications, she submitted her formal application across six different job openings to work as a wildland firefighter.
Clearing the path
Her uncle, grandpa, and both of her parents were wildland firefighters. Her father and uncle went on to be smokejumpers, one of the highest levels of wildland firefighting. The job consists of parachuting into remote regions of fires to help with containment.
“We are a family of wildland firefighters and land stewards,” Ewing’s mother, Elia Ferruzzi, said. “We love to be outside and in the wild places. It is in our souls. I knew she would thrive in this environment, and at this physically demanding job, and would find peace and happiness along with great challenges.”
Ewing is entering her second season as a forestry technician. This year, she is staying beyond the normal seasonal period and working until about October.
Her days now don’t look so different from high school. They are full of physical labor. She’s up at 5 a.m. She often stops for a vanilla oat milk latte at the Florence Coffee Company on the way from Missoula to the station in Stevensville, and then works long, often arduous shifts until about 7:30 p.m. She maintains a two-to-three-hour workout routine. In the evening, she sets aside time to read “Braiding Sweetgrass,” a book about the role of Indigenous knowledge in the Western world, and usually falls asleep in a large, rounded chair in the corner of her room.
Days off are few and far between, especially as it gets deeper into the fire season. She focuses on her physical condition to maintain her abilities in the field.
Overall, women only make up 13% of the wildland firefighting workforce, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Last year, there were only three women on Ewing’s crew. This year, there are six women and 14 men. The gender gap isn’t new for Ewing, though. She played co-ed hockey until eighth grade, competition that she said only made her a stronger and more aggressive athlete.
Despite being in a similar situation of diving too far into her work, she’s found her new path more rewarding as it allows her to keep her mental health a top priority.
“Being outside on top of a mountain or in the woods almost always makes me feel connected and grounded,” she said. “Much to where I’m supposed to be and to where my people are supposed to be.”
‘Be the change’
Ewing’s wildland firefighting crew’s range spans across the greater Missoula area and the Bitterroot Valley, lands formerly inhabited by Salish and Kalispel tribes before it was colonized around 1860, according to the Montana Historical Society.
Her Northern Cheyenne tribe historically inhabited lands from Montana to Texas before the tribe was split into two reservations: one in southeast Montana and the other in Oklahoma.
Part of Ewing’s duties as a forestry technician includes assisting in the containment and cleanup of wildfires, especially when it becomes a threat to nearby structures. She understands her job is helping people, but she sometimes struggles with stopping a sacred process.
Most western U.S. forest ecosystems are dependent on fires for its natural process. Some trees, like the lodgepole pine, which is one of the most abundant species in surrounding forests, cannot release its seeds until the pinecone has reached a temperature only achievable by fire.
Tribes have performed ceremonial burns as a form of fire management and replenishment of the Earth dating back centuries. In Western society, however, historical rules, such as the 10 a.m. policy back in the 1930s, which stated any fire spotted must be suppressed by 10 a.m. the following morning, created fuel-filled forests maintained by the Forest Service.
In the 1970s, the Forest Service revised the policy, letting natural fires burn when appropriate to the area. This policy suffered a setback following the 1988 Yellowstone fires that burned approximately 800,000 acres over the span of one summer due to the change in anticipated fire behavior. It wasn’t until snow came that the fires in the park were finally contained. While fighting these fires, all previous policies were abandoned and focus shifted to putting out any blaze.
Due to the damage done to the ecosystems in the park and surrounding areas, a complicated relationship was formed around fire management, according to Philip Higuera, a fire ecologist at the University of Montana.
Since then, the Forest Service tried to bring balance back to forest ecosystems by involving low levels of fire to prevent regional fire years, such as in 2017 where large portions of Idaho and Montana forests burned.
Ewing’s crew takes part in controlled burns and forest cleanup during the spring and fall as a form of forest management. Her crew also aides in post-fire clean up to help restore an ecosystem after a fire and after the crews working it have moved through. Some of the duties involve chopping and chipping logs, replanting trees and plowing the ground back to a usable state after Forest Service vehicles were removed.
Despite knowing the purpose of her job, Ewing still has her values: knowing land isn’t something you can own, arrowheads found in the field are not for taking and understanding Mother Nature has a greater reason for what she does.
When she’s given a moment in the field, Ewing finds herself wandering off alone to better appreciate the nature around her. Sometimes she takes the time to meditate alone because it’s when she feels most intertwined with the Earth.
“I’m just connecting with the living plants and the living Earth. And that is how I feel connected to my roots, to my people,” Ewing said.
Through fire and her experiences, she has been able to feel closer to her family and heritage.
She often runs to the top of Mount Sentinel, a frequent workout spot for her late father. She takes in the views on a peak in New Mexico, the place where her parents met while on a hotshot crew — Type 1 firefighters tasked with being on the line of a fire with more extensive physical fitness expectations and fire knowledge. She takes the opportunity to educate her coworkers on their sacred surroundings.
Most of all, she has found purpose working toward her ultimate goal of being a smokejumper and following in the footsteps of her family. Slowly, the contradictory parts of her identity are coming together.
“If I’m part of the federal government I can help be the change that needs to happen,” Ewing said. “And make sure that I can bring good to it and what I see as good, and help bring awareness of my people and my practices and what’s important to me.”
A mosaic
At the University, she’s pursuing an art major. Not because she wants a career in art, though, instead she uses it as a way to express herself through various forms.
Her bedroom looks like an art piece itself. Pieces of her art, posters of her favorite artists and movies from past and present, rocks from her travels, pictures she’s taken and pieces of her Indigenous culture fill the room.
Popping off the wall is a red collage she made as a project for class representing how women are portrayed in society and the effect it can have on them. It’s completed by half of a butterfly she drew in the center of the piece, symbolizing that misinterpretation can go both ways and affect men just the same.
“I’m just proof that there’s a wide variety of people in society, and that people should be able to just accept simply who they are,” Ewing said.
Most recently, she has created a series of her own tattoos, each holding a special meaning in her life.
Her first is a red eye on the back of her neck she drew to always have something looking out for her. The initial concepts still hang on her wall. The second is a pine tree on the top of her forearm near the base of her elbow, an impulsive tattoo matching her roommate’s. She likes to imagine it’s an ash tree.
The third was a long time coming, a concept she had been working on and drawing for months. On her forearm are two red-tailed hawks representing her and her father. Ewing said she sees one of those hawks anytime she needs her father, in both good and bad moments. The hawks are facing inward on a sun that better resembles a begonia, her mom’s favorite flower. Pops of red — Ewing’s favorite color — on the flower and tails of the hawks complete the piece.
A few years ago, Ewing visited the Missoula smokejumper facility, the place her dad worked. She thought she could be brave and go back to the place that reminds her so much of her father, but she was wrong. She left the building in tears.
She hasn’t been back since, but that’s where she wants to spend the rest of her life. Because that’s where he spent his.
The only thing holding her back is another tear, the third in the same knee, she got while in the field: this time her ACL and meniscus. If she has to undergo surgery, she’ll have to push off joining a hotshot crew for another year.
But if she can go without, she’ll become a hotshot and be one step closer to her dream.
One step closer to her father.
One step closer to becoming Motovahe’e.
Check out the original version at montanakaimin.com.