{"id":97279,"date":"2026-07-28T21:16:34","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T00:16:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/2026\/07\/28\/ottawa-ignores-indigenous-knowledge-about-forest-fires-denounces-metis-scientist\/"},"modified":"2026-07-28T21:16:34","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T00:16:34","slug":"ottawa-ignores-indigenous-knowledge-about-forest-fires-denounces-metis-scientist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/2026\/07\/28\/ottawa-ignores-indigenous-knowledge-about-forest-fires-denounces-metis-scientist\/","title":{"rendered":"Ottawa ignores indigenous knowledge about forest fires, denounces M\u00e9tis scientist"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As communities are destroyed by flames in western Ontario and hundreds of other wildfires rage from the Northwest Territories to Nova Scotia, Amy Cardinal Christianson says she understands the feeling of helplessness many Indigenous communities feel. \u201cWe have absolutely no control over what happens on the land. For many people, it\u2019s very frustrating to watch this and experience this,\u201d she told APTN National News. She remembers the words of a friend from Alberta when 32,000 hectares around Jasper burned in 2024. Her friend said: \u201cThis would never have happened if we had been allowed to continue practicing our cultural practices there. \u00bb Ms. Cardinal Christianson is a M\u00e9tis scientist specializing in wildfires in Treaty 8 territory. She has a doctorate specializing in Indigenous wildfire management and is the Director of Responsible Fire Management for the Indigenous Leadership Initiative. She also hosts the Good Fire podcast, which focuses on Indigenous fire management and Indigenous traditions. Amy Cardinal Christianson is very familiar with Indigenous fire prevention traditions, but she is quick to point out that this knowledge is widespread. \u201cWhen I go up north to work in communities,\u201d she explained, \u201cin some places, up to 90 percent of men of a certain age have received wilderness firefighting training. It is already an important advantage to be able to count on people who understand fire and its behavior. Many non-Indigenous communities do not have this basic level of knowledge. There is therefore a feeling of frustration and helplessness. \u00bb While she acknowledges that AI and related technologies can be valuable tools in fighting wildfires, she maintains that the greatest source of knowledge about fire is found among indigenous peoples who know their territory. \u201cOur people have been surviving in these lands for millennia, without AI and other such technologies. \u00bb What communities can do now Amy Cardinal Christianson says the best thing Indigenous communities can do to control fires is to start working well in advance to establish partnerships with larger organizations. However, she adds, even communities facing the prospect of fires in the next month or two can benefit from closer ties with local municipalities, fire departments, their provincial wildfire agency and regional representatives. \u201cFaced with fires as large, violent and uncontrollable as those we have seen in northwestern Ontario, communities are unfortunately quite limited in what they can do to control them,\u201d she explained. \u201cThese are firestorms. What is really needed are air tankers, and they are only available through provincial agencies. \u00bb Smoke from the Mooseland Road wildfire, about 100 km northeast of Halifax, is visible in this photo provided Thursday, July 16, 2026. Photo provided \u2013 Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources (credit required) The Canadian Press. But Amy Cardinal Christianson says it’s important for communities to remember that everyone has a role to play. \u201cEven if people don’t have traditional cultural knowledge or aren’t firefighters, everyone can do something to support their community when it’s affected by fire,\u201d she said. \u201cFeed people. Just sitting and listening to people talk. There are all kinds of things we can do to help our communities get through these events. \u00bb \u201cWhen we put our efforts together, I believe that is when we feel strongest as indigenous peoples. When we use our knowledge, when we are on the ground and when we are together, and when we really show the strength of our communities. \u00bb She says that while there is no universal solution to wildfires, many local interventions can make a difference. \u201cOur communities are very diverse and have significant cultural differences, and the geography is so culturally different that each community must determine what is best for them,\u201d said Amy Cardinal Christianson. \u201cNo one should say, ‘You have to do this, you have to do that.’ That being said, there are good practices, and that’s really what we’re trying to do: share the things that certain communities do well and which could be examples for other communities across Canada. \u00bb Protecting your home and your community For Arnold Lazare, interim executive director of the National Aboriginal Fire Safety Council (CNASI), who lives on the Mohawk territory of Kahnawake, one of the ways to protect communities against fires is to follow the guidelines of the FireSmart group, with which the CNASI has established a partnership. FireSmart offers a series of guidelines to help occupants protect their home from fire, including advice on improvements occupants can make to their home, as well as the 10m buffer zone around their home and the 30m zone surrounding it. These recommendations range from replacing shingles and siding with non-combustible materials, to moving combustible objects and vegetation more than 10 m from the house, to pruning branches located less than 2 m from the ground in the area beyond this 10 m buffer zone. Communities and their residents too rarely have the means to implement even these basic fire control measures, Lazare said. \u201cThere is a housing shortage in First Nations. Several families live in these houses,\u201d he told APTN. \u201cSo people don’t have the means to make their homes more fire-resistant \u2014 like replacing asphalt shingles with metal shingles or clapboard with metal siding. Even if it were, in many places the houses themselves are substandard. These are systemic issues that we can change incrementally, but we know what needs to be done. \u00bb Arnold Lazare, from the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, interim executive director of the National Aboriginal Fire Safety Council and career firefighter. Photo: NIFSC\/Facebook Mr. Lazare emphasizes that the security of homes requires that of the community. If a resident wants to install a sprinkler system on their home, they are dependent on the community’s water supply. \u201cWhen the community has a reliable water system, sprinklers can make a real difference,\u201d he said. \u201cOn the other hand, if the water network does not work, it makes the fight against the flames even more complicated. \u00bb This also relates to broader community protection measures, such as establishing firebreaks, which he sees as feasible in medium to large sized communities. \u201cBut a community of 50 homes doesn\u2019t necessarily have a backhoe,\u201d he said. An Indigenous response to forest fires, or just the basics Like Amy Cardinal Christianson, Mr. Lazare believes that Indigenous people are best placed to ensure the protection of their communities against forest fires. \u201c [LE CNASI] is trying to establish a national indigenous wildfire response team, he explained, where we could welcome people from across the country and deploy them at any time. \u00bb He explains that in 2023, the federal government has paid $90 million in plane tickets to bring in foreign firefighters. \u201cAnd that\u2019s just for transportation! \u201c, he exclaimed. \u201cSo we said to ourselves, even if we were given $20 million, we could train at least 200 firefighters, equipment included. \u00bb There is often a significant gap between what the federal government funds and what Indigenous communities actually see in the emergency interventions they benefit from. \u201cI believe Indigenous Services has 44 emergency management staff,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat are all the bureaucrats doing? \u00bb According to Mr. Lazare, one of the most effective ways to use available funds would be to equip all Indigenous communities with the basic tools needed to fight fires. \u201cYou don\u2019t need a full fire department if you have mini-pumps that can be deployed relatively quickly with a decent amount of water,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is how we can prevent many total losses. \u00bb The pump trucks could have helped prevent disasters in Namaygoosisagagun First Nation, also known as Collins First Nation, a small fly-in Ojibway community about 250 km north of Thunder Bay, Ontario. The approximately 30 residents of Namaygoosisagagun were forced to quickly evacuate on July 13, before all homes and public buildings were completely destroyed by Thunder Bay Area Fire No. 36. Images of community 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: \u201cIt was a matter of minutes before members of my community died. All this time there was no help. We had no help. They had no help and had to flee on their own, and they did. \u00bb The Namaygoosisagagun First Nation (Collins) is ravaged by flames. Photo taken by resident Wayne Wastaken as he fled across Collins Lake. Namaygoosisagagun does not have band status, which prevents it from having access to even the support enjoyed by First Nations recognized by the federal government. Linda Debassige, head of the Grand Council of the Anishinabek Nation, accused the provincial and federal governments of \u201cplaying ping-pong\u201d with the Nation. \u201cIndigenous Services Canada recognized this self-evacuation,\u201d Chief Debassige told APTN. \u201cThey write this to limit their liability. But if the community had waited for provincial authorities to initiate the emergency response and order the evacuation, we would be in recovery mode today. We would be recovering the bodies of children, elders, as well as men and women from this community. \u00bb Healthy practices for healthy territories According to Ms. Cardinal Christianson, it is no coincidence that so many communities have stories linked to the Thunderbird, lightning and its effects constituting a common reality that unites them. \u201cFire is one of the ways indigenous people take care of the land,\u201d she said. \u201cWe use it in our ceremonies and for other things, but also to maintain the health of the territories to which our cultures are closely linked. \u00bb Mrs. Cardinal Christianson explains that, however, the relationship between each community and fire is different, determined by different factors ranging from the macroelements of the climate and landscape to the local particularities of hunting and fishing needs. Many different nations have developed specialized cultural traditions that reflect what they understand about the land on which they lived. She exp lique that this diversification is a challenge for non-Indigenous people, due to the desire to standardize responses and apply them the same way everywhere. \u201cWe can\u2019t [normaliser les pratiques de lutte contre les incendies]because they depend so much on each nation,\u201d she explained. \u201cThat’s why, with the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, we are big proponents of guardian programs, where Indigenous people are employed in their community in really long-term sustainable positions where they can use their cultural knowledge in their local territory to not only reduce the risk of fire through these activities, but also to improve the situation everywhere so that we can exist in this territory. \u00bb Amy Cardinal Christianson said governments misunderstand the severity with which indigenous communities face ecological disasters like firestorms of such intensity that they harm the ability of plants to regrow. \u201cOur communities are suffering the effects of these repeated fires,\u201d she said. \u201cIndigenous peoples are the most affected in Canada by out-of-control fires. However, very often we hear \u201cwe need more funds to carry out studies, more funds for research, or more funds for something else\u201d. Instead of taking action, we simply multiply studies. Indigenous people will assert, for example, that “cultural burning helps reduce the risk of fire. Our elders tell us that”, and we will answer them: “No, we should instead conduct a study”. \u00bb \u201cWe have to prove these things with Western science. And one of the most difficult things for indigenous people is that we need to act now. ” According to Amy Cardinal Christianson, the problem began when settlers attempted to import and apply forest management practices designed for the forests of central Europe \u2014 temperate, deciduous and hardwood-dominated \u2014 to Canada’s wildfire-dependent boreal forests, full of softwoods like pine and spruce. \u201cThey then made Indigenous cultural burning illegal, as well as other practices that we knew were essential to maintaining the health of these lands,\u201d she said. “But then people will say, ‘We’ve lost our knowledge of cultural burning.’ But we haven’t lost him. It was literally stolen from us. And there is still knowledge in the communities: some have never stopped using cultural burning. Others, however, had to give it up. \u00bb She also noted that a person can follow a few years of training in forestry and arrive in an indigenous territory in a position of authority. \u201cThere are indigenous wildland firefighters who have 40 years of experience, and the new person tells them what to do,\u201d she explained. \u201cI am constantly told that it is very frustrating. Ultimately, this all amounts to disrespecting indigenous knowledge, or denigrating it. What we are really trying to change is who is recognized as a specialist. \u00bb Wildfire smoke fades into the sunset on the shores of Neskantaga First Nation, Ontario, Saturday, July 18, 2026. The community has been placed under a state of emergency by Chief and Council in response to the threat of wildfires and adverse weather conditions affecting the community. Photo: Chris Young\/The Canadian Press Amy Cardinal Christianson expressed concern about how non-Indigenous science separates the land into constituent parts that it considers independently, and said what distinguishes Indigenous understanding of the land is its big picture. \u201cIndigenous knowledge is really about a whole-systems view,\u201d she explained. \u201cSo, even when we talk about fire, I think of our loved ones. I think of wildlife. I think of water. I am thinking of medicinal plants. We think about all these things. Western science, and even wildfire management practices, is very siloed. She tends to look at one problem at a time. Whereas to be able to control the situation, we must be able to take everything into account. \u00bb Government: partner or adversary? Early in her career working with the federal government in the field of fire prevention, Cardinal Christianson believed that all that was missing for Ottawa to understand the central role of Indigenous knowledge was a little more information. \u201cI thought if we had another study actually showing the effects of cultural burns,\u201d she recalls, \u201chow they reduce fire risk and indigenous knowledge in the area, the government would suddenly change its mind and say, ‘Yeah, let’s do it, we’ll fund you and you can do all this work!’ \u201cI realized how naive I had been. There are very powerful systems of power that influence all of this. And I think most Native people already know that. One of the main problems we face in fire management is this whole concept of who is the real expert. The result, she says, is that governments rely on wildfire agencies and university-trained researchers to find solutions to fires. \u201cIndigenous people have never been treated as if they have expertise in this area,\u201d argued Amy Cardinal Christianson. \u201cIndigenous people can be asked to go and train an organization on cultural burning, firefighting tactics or other topics, but then they are not allowed to participate in firefighting operations because the government does not consider them to be qualified or properly certified specialists. \u00bb While Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak has attributed disasters like the loss of the Namaygoosisagagun First Nation to the infrastructure gap in on-reserve communities, Amy Cardinal Christianson identifies a parallel knowledge gap in which the federal government misunderstands the relationship between First Nations and the territories they occupy. \u201cFor us, as indigenous peoples, to fail to properly care for our territories would essentially be condemning us and our nations to extinction. If you can’t survive on your territory, if it no longer produces what you need to live, it’s practically a death sentence. You can’t just go to the grocery store to get what you need. This is why we have this relationship with the territory and why its health is so important to us. \u00bb Read more: A look at what could be a powerful weapon in the war against wildfires Learning to fight wildfires Although federal and provincial agencies have suggested a growing understanding that indigenous peoples had fire management systems unique to their territories long before European contact, Cardinal Christianson says there has been little concrete institutional change regarding authority to make fire management decisions. fire and the types of programs that receive funding. \u201cWe have seen very little progress in transferring responsibilities to Indigenous people, which is extremely frustrating for communities. How much more do we have to talk about it before we actually take action? When will we finally do something that will actually change the situation for indigenous people? \u00bb Mrs. Cardinal Christianson made a correction: \u201cI should not say \u201cwe\u201d. I’m talking about government, because ultimately it has a fiduciary responsibility to indigenous peoples. It is therefore he who must support them and assume the costs. \u00bb With the collaboration of Mike McDonald and Leanne Sanders. Continue Reading <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As communities are destroyed by flames in western Ontario and hundreds of other wildfires rage from the Northwest Territories to Nova Scotia, Amy Cardinal Christianson says she understands the feeling of helplessness many Indigenous communities feel. \u201cWe have absolutely no control over what happens on the land. For many people, it\u2019s very frustrating to watch […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":97280,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118,1,119],"tags":[116,117],"class_list":["post-97279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-indigenous","category-uncategorized","category-windspeaker","tag-indigenous","tag-windspeaker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97279\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}