Courtney Locklear Steed

• Founder & Director
• Cultural Burn Association

Courtney Locklear Steed, Lumbee, founder of the Cultural Burn Association and SETA Fire, lives on her ancestral farm in Prospect, a Native American community in Robeson County, NC. As the CBA Director, Courtney advocates for Indigenous sovereignty within the realm of Native land stewardship. She was inspired by the tutelage of her maternal grandfather, Ezra Locklear, and the traditional relationships between Lumbee people and their land that depends on the use of fire as a stewardship tool.

The Cultural Burn Association’s mission is “healing our ancestral lands and honoring our cultural traditions through fire focused ecology.” The organization aims to restore pre-colonial landscapes within the tribal community using traditional burning practices. Courtney and her tribal community focus their cultural burning efforts on the ancestral lands of the Lumbee people, including the Longleaf Pine ecosystem and the unique Lumbee Variant of the Wet Pine Flatwoods.