Ottawa ignores Indigenous knowledge about wildfires: Métis fire scientist

As communities are destroyed by fire in western Ontario, and hundreds of other wildfires are burning from the Northwest Territories to Nova Scotia, Amy Cardinal Christianson said she understands the helplessness many Indigenous communities feel. “It’s been totally out of our control what’s happened on the land. For many people, it’s been very frustrating to have to watch and go through this,” she told APTN News. She recalled the words of a friend from Alberta when 32,000 hectares around Jasper burned in 2024. Her friend said, “This never would have happened if we would have been allowed to continue our cultural practices there.” Cardinal Christianson is a Métis fire scientist from Treaty 8 territory with a PhD specializing in Indigenous wildfire management and director of fire stewardship for the Indigenous Leadership Initiative. She also hosts the podcast Good Fire, discussing Indigenous fire management and traditions. Cardinal Christianson knows a lot about Indigenous traditions in fire prevention, but she’s quick to point out that this knowledge is widespread. “When I go up north and work in communities,” she explained, “in some places up to 90 per cent of the men that are of a certain age were trained as wildland firefighters. So already that is a distinct advantage, having people that understand fire and how fire works. A lot of non-Indigenous communities don’t have that base level of knowledge. So there’s that feeling of frustration and powerlessness.” Though she acknowledges that AI and related technology may offer useful tools for fighting wildfires, she said the largest body of firefighting knowledge comes from Indigenous peoples familiar with their own territories. “Our people have survived on these lands for millennia, just not with AI and things like that.” What communities can do right now The best thing Indigenous communities can do for fire control, Cardinal Christianson said, is to begin working well beforehand to build partnerships with larger organizations. However, she added, even communities facing the prospect of fires in the next month or two can benefit by deepening ties with local municipalities, with fire departments, with their provincial wildfire agency and with regional officials. “These huge, severe out-of-control fires like what we’ve seen in northwestern Ontario, there’s unfortunately not a ton that communities can do to stop that,” she said. “They’re firestorms. So what you really need then is air tankers, and that’s only available through provincial agencies.” Smoke from the Mooseland Road wildfire, about 100km northeast of Halifax, is shown in this handout photo on Thursday, July 16, 2026. Handout – N.S. Department of Natural Resources (Mandatory Credit) The Canadian Press But Cardinal Christianson said it’s important for communities to remember that everyone has a role to play. “Even if people don’t hold cultural knowledge or aren’t firefighters, there’s things that everybody can do to support your community that’s going through fire,” she said. “Feeding people. Just sitting there and listening to people talk. There’s all sorts of things that we can do to help our communities get through these events. “When we come together, that’s when I think we feel the strongest as Indigenous people. When we’re using our knowledge, being out and being together and really showing that strength of community.” There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to wildfires, she said, but there are many local interventions that can make a difference. “Our communities are so diverse and so different culturally, and the landscapes are so diverse culturally,  that every community has to come up with what’s best for them,” Cardinal Christianson explained. “No one should be prescribing ‘You need to do this, you need to do that.’ But that said, there are best practices, and that’s really what we try to do: share things that some communities are doing well that can maybe be examples for other communities across Canada.” Protecting home and community For Arnold Lazare, interim CEO of the National Indigenous Fire Safety Council (NIFSC) who’s based in Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, one route to protecting communities against fire is to follow the guidelines of the FireSmart group, with whom the IFSC has partnered. FireSmart offers a series of guidelines for occupants of homes to defend against fires, including suggestions for changes occupants can make to the buildings they live in, as well as in the 10 m area buffering their homes, and in the 30 m zone around the home generally. These suggestions range from replacing shingles and siding with non-combustible materials, moving combustible items and vegetation more than 10 m away from the home, and cutting branches lower than 2 m from the ground in the area beyond that 10 m buffer. The problem Lazare sees is that communities and their residents too often lack the resources to carry out even these basic fire-control measures. “There’s a housing shortage in First Nations. There’s multiple families living in these homes,” he told APTN. “So they don’t have the ability to make their homes fire retardant — like if they have metal shingles instead of asphalt, or if they have metal siding instead of clapboard. Even if they did, in many places the houses themselves are substandard. So these are systemic things that we can change slowly, but we know what has to be done.” Arnold Lazare of Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, interim CEO of the National Indigenous Fire Safety Council and a lifelong firefighter. Photo: NIFSC/Facebook Homes are only as safe as the community itself, Lazare noted. If a resident wishes to put a sprinkler system on their home, they’re reliant on the community’s water. “If the community has a decent water system, then the sprinklers can help,” he said, “but if their water system is not working, then you add another level of complications to combating the fire.” This extends to wider efforts to protect communities, such as digging fire-breaks, which he says is a feasible undertaking in a medium or large size community. “But a community of 50 homes may not have a backhoe,” he said. An Indigenous wildfire response, or just the basics Like Cardinal Christianson, Lazare sees Indigenous people themselves as the vanguard of fire-protection for Indigenous communities. “[NIFSC] is attempting to stand up a national Indigenous wildfire response team,” he explained, “where we would take people from across the country and be able to deploy them at a moment’s notice.” He said that in 2023, the federal government spent $90-million on airfare to fly in foreign firefighters. “That’s just in transportation!” he marveled. “So we wonder, even if they gave us 20 million, we are confident we would be able to train at a minimum 200 firefighters — with equipment.” Lazare argued there’s often a noticeable gap between what the federal government pays for and what Indigenous communities see in the emergency responses they receive. “I think Indigenous Services has 44 employees in Emergency Management,” he said. “What are all the bureaucrats doing?” One strong return on investment, Lazare suggested, could come from equipping all Indigenous communities with firefighting basics. “You don’t need a full-blown fire department if you get mini-pumpers that can be deployed relatively quickly with a decent amount of water,” he said. “Then you’re going to go far in preventing total loss.” Mini-pumper firetrucks might have helped prevent disaster in Namaygoosisagagun First Nation, also known as Collins First Nation, a small fly-in Ojibway community some 250 km north of Thunder Bay in Ontario. The roughly 30 residents of Namaygoosisagagun were forced to evacuate quickly on July 13, before all homes and public buildings were completely destroyed by the Thunder Bay 36 Fire. Images of members in boats on Collins Lake fleeing a wall of smoke and flames in their community have since gone viral. Chief Helen Paavola told APTN, “It was just a matter of minutes before my members would have died. And during that whole time, there was no help. We had no help. They had no help, and they had to do it on their own — and they did.” Namaygoosisagagun (Collins) First Nation is consumed by fire. Photo by resident Wayne Wastaken, taken as he was fleeing across Collins Lake. Namaygoosisagagun does not have Band status, leaving it without even the support available to those Nations recognized by the federal government. Anishinabek Nation Grand Council Chief Linda Debassige accused the provincial and federal governments of playing jurisdictional “ping pong” with the Nation. “Indigenous Services Canada acknowledged the ‘self-evacuation,’” Debassige told APTN. “They write that to limit their liability. But had the community waited for the actual provincial responsibility of activating the emergency response and mandating evacuations, this would have been a recovery mission. We would have been recovering the bodies of children, of elders, the men and women of that community,” she said. Healthy land needs healthy practices It’s no accident, Cardinal Christianson said, that so many communities have Thunderbird stories, which speaks to the unifying effect of lightning and its consequences. “Fire has been one of those things that Indigenous people have used on the land,” she said. “We use fire for our ceremonies and other things, but we also use it to improve the health of our territories that we relied on culturally.” Yet every community’s relationship to fire is different, determined by a variety of factors ranging from macro elements of climate and landscape to the local particulars of hunting and fishing needs, according to Cardinal Christianson. Many different Nations developed specialised cultural-burn traditions that reflected what they understood about the land they lived on. She said this diversification is a challenge for non-Indigenous people, because of the desire to standardize responses and apply them the same way everywhere. “You can’t [standardize fire practices], because it’s so dependent on our unique Nations,” she explained. “That’s why with the Indigenous Leadership Initiative we’re really big proponents of guardian programs, where Indigenous people are employed in their community in really sustainable long-term jobs where they can use their cultural knowledge in their local territories to not only reduce fire risk through these activities they’re doing, but also just make things better all around for us to be able to exist in that territory.” Cardinal Christianson said that governments misunderstand the gravity with which Indigenous communities face ecological disasters like firestorms that burn so hot they affect the ability of plants to grow back. “Our communities are being repeatedly impacted by these fires,” she said. “Indigenous people are the most impacted by out-of-control fire events in Canada. But a lot of times it’s, ‘We just need more money for studies, or more money to research this, or more money for that.’ Instead of [taking] action, you’re just doing more studying. Indigenous people will come forward and say, for example, ‘Cultural burning helps reduce fire risk. Our Elders tell us this,’ and it’s ‘No, well, we should do a study.’ “We need to prove these things through Western science. And one thing that’s been really hard for Indigenous people is that we need action now.” The problem, Cardinal Christianson said, began with settlers attempting to import and apply forest-management practices designed for central-European woodlands — temperate, deciduous and dominated by hardwoods — to the fire-dependent Boreal forests of Canada, full of softwoods like pine and spruce. “Then they made it illegal for Indigenous people to do cultural burning and other things that we knew were vital to sustaining the health of that landscape,” she explained. “So people will say, ‘We’ve lost our knowledge about cultural burning.’ But we didn’t lose it. It was literally stolen from us. And there is still knowledge that exists in communities: some communities never stopped burning. But some communities have.” Meanwhile, she noted that a person can spend a few years in forestry school and appear in an Indigenous territory as the boss. “You’ve got Indigenous wildland firefighters who’ve been there 40 years, and the new person is giving them orders,” she said. “I hear all the time that it’s a massive frustration. But that’s that whole thing around not respecting — really devaluing — Indigenous knowledge. And what we’re really trying to change is who’s recognized as those experts.” Smoke from wildfires is seen as it settles in the sunset on the shores of Neskantaga First Nation, Ont., Saturday, July 18, 2026. The community of Neskantaga has been put under a state of emergency by the Chief and Council in response to the threat of wildfires and weather conditions impacting the community. Photo: Chris Young/The Canadian Press Cardinal Christianson expressed uneasiness about the way non-Indigenous science breaks the land apart into constituent elements that it considers independently, and said what differentiates Indigenous understanding of the land is its wide view. “Indigenous knowledge really looks at systems holistically,” she said. “So even when we’re talking about fire I’m thinking about our relatives. Wildlife. I’m thinking about water. I’m thinking about medicinal plants. You’re thinking about all of these things. Western science or even wildfire management is so siloed, and they only seem to be able to think about one problem at a time — when to really be able to get a handle on this, we need to be able to address everything.” Government as partner — or opponent At the beginning of her career working with the federal government on fire prevention, Cardinal Christianson presumed all that was missing for Ottawa to understand the centrality of Indigenous knowledge was a little more information. “I thought if we had one more study really showing the impacts of cultural burning,” she recalled, “how it reduced fire risk and the knowledge Indigenous people had, that suddenly government would change their mind and just say ‘Yes, you guys, let’s fund you, and you can do all this work!’ “I’ve learned that I was very naive, and there’s these huge systems of power at play. And I think most Indigenous people know that. One of the biggest issues that we face in fire is this whole concept of who’s the actual expert.” The consequence, she said, is that governments rely on wildfire agencies and university-trained research scientists to come up with fire solutions. “Indigenous people have never been treated like we have expertise in this space,” Cardinal Christianson argued. “Indigenous folks can be asked to go and teach an agency about cultural burning, or about firefighting tactics or other things, but then they’re not actually allowed to go out and do the firefighting, because they’re not deemed a qualified or certified expert by the government.” Read more:  Chiefs in Ontario call for public inquiry into province’s wildfire response AFN chiefs approve emergency resolution calling for support on northern Ontario fires While AFN National Chief Cindy Woodhouse-Nepinak has spoken about how the infrastructure gap for communities on reserve leads to disasters like the loss of Namaygoosisagagun First Nation, Cardinal Christianson identified a parallel knowledge gap in which the federal government lacks a clear picture of the relationship between First Peoples and the territories they’ve always occupied. “For us as Indigenous people, not stewarding our territories properly would basically mean death for us and our nations. If you couldn’t survive off your land base, if it wasn’t producing what you needed, it was almost a death sentence. You can’t just go to a grocery store to get what you need. That’s why there’s that relationship that we have with the land and why the health of the land is so important to us as people.” Even as federal and provincial agencies have signaled increasing understanding that Indigenous peoples had fire-management systems specific to their territories long predating contact, Cardinal Christianson said there’s been little formal change in who has the authority to make decisions about fire management and what kind of programs get funded. “We’ve seen very limited movement to Indigenous peoples, which has been very frustrating for communities because how much more do we have to talk about this before we actually do something? When are we actually going to do something that makes a difference for Indigenous people?” Cardinal Christianson corrected herself: “I shouldn’t say ‘we.’ The government is what I mean, because in the end, they have a fiduciary responsibility to Indigenous people, so ultimately they’re the ones who need to be supporting and paying for this.” With files from Mike McDonald and Leanne Sanders. Tags: Amy Cardinal Christianson, Arnold Lazare, Collins First Nation, decolonizing science, Fire, fire departments, fire management, Firefighting, Indigenous Leadership Initiative, Namaygoosisagagun First Nation, National Indigenous Fire Safety Council, wildfire Continue Reading