Bring back the burns

For centuries, Indigenous people kept forests clear of wildfire fuel by lighting regular burns. It’s time to fight fire with fire once again

- Joe Gilchrist

I GREW UP IN SKEETCHESTN, a small riverside community northwest of Kamloops, British Columbia, in a home with no running water and no power. My family used fire for everything: to cook, to heat bathwater and to dry our clothes. Fire also served a ceremonial purpose for my people—in sweat lodges, at funerals and as a spiritual offering. Elders would often tell me stories about how, for centuries, Indigenous people across Canada set fire to the earth, so it would look after us in return. These cultural burns, as we call them, were a tool for land management. In the cool of early spring and late fall, fire keepers would light controlled burns using pitchwood or handfuls of long grass, renewing the soil where berries and other medicines grew and cleansing forests of invasive plant and animal species. Most importantly, these burns would incinerate needles, branches, seeds and other debris dropped on the ground by dead and dying trees—fuel just waiting for a spark.

After settlers arrived out west in the 18th century, British Columbia became the first province to outlaw cultural burning, kicking off a countrywide colonial policy of Smokey Bear–style suppression that has only grown more dangerous over time. By banning a practice proven to remove fuel build-up on a regular basis, governments have made larger areas of the country more susceptible to catastrophic wildfires. I’ve worked as an emergency firefighter with the B.C. Wildfire Service since 1982, and back then, I regularly fought fires that averaged about 100 to 200 hectares in size. By 1994, fires spanning well over 20,000 hectares were burning in the province every year, and in 2017, during a very hot summer, a million hectares went up in flames when three massive blazes converged on the Chilcotin Plateau.