Warren Mirko: Wildfires shouldn’t be used as a reconciliation morality play

Amid another brutal stretch of hot, dry weather across Canada, the so-called cultural burning practices of North America’s Indigenous peoples are in vogue. In fact, they’re being inflated to the point of being celebrated as an ethnically exclusive competency, supposedly distinct from western science.

Parks Canada’s online resources say cultural burning must be Indigenous-led, “so as not to misappropriate cultural practices,” while claiming that prescribed fire — the deliberate use of fire for land management — is a “colonial adaptation of cultural burning practised by many different Indigenous groups in Canada.”

In British Columbia, a video embedded in the government’s “Cultural and prescribed fire” website describes the preservation of Indigenous cultural burning as “sacred,” placing it beyond ordinary scrutiny, skepticism or criticism.

As the interior of British Columbia burns and the province is placed under an official state of emergency, more than 20,000 people have been evacuated. The Bald Range inferno in the Okanagan has exceeded 24,000 hectares and has led to at least one death. On the other side of the country, Ontario is reporting over 100 active fires in the province.

Without a doubt, these fires are out of control. They reflect failures of land management, administration and logistics, and governments must bear a large share of the blame. Fires don’t need to be transformed into yet another morality play tied to reconciliation. That will not stamp out a single ember any more than invoking Poseidon will bring rain and restore blue skies.

We know that Indigenous communities have historically used low-intensity fires to maintain grasslands for grazing, corridors for travel and forests, among other purposes. The evidence of this is substantial and not in question, nor is the effectiveness of those methods in their particular contexts. But that is not uniquely Indigenous knowledge. It is a basic principle of fire management that’s understood and applied around the world.

Neither Indigenous nor western systems require traditional knowledge keepers or elders to understand that fires are driven by a combination of combustion, wind and fuel. Ancestry has no bearing on understanding how fires work, nor does any group have an exclusive claim over how to combat it.

Jennifer Grenz, an academic within the University of British Columbia’s department of forest resources management, recently argued that settlers brought colonial forestry practices that suppressed cultural fire, calling “the historic suppression of Indigenous stewardship and cultural burning practices” a “root cause” of today’s crisis. The argument falls apart as prescribed burning has continued all along, and was never uniquely Indigenous to begin with.

In truth, many cultures with no contact with each other until the last millennium developed very similar methods and technologies. Early European, Mesoamerican and Japanese societies practised controlled burning to prevent destructive fires and reinvigorate the land long ago, despite having no knowledge of one another. Calling the same physical process “cultural burning” when it’s led by First Nations rather than Japanese farmers does nothing to make the knowledge behind it exclusive or inaccessible to non-Indigenous people.

In B.C., the government says it has a “responsibility to address some of the barriers to cultural burning.” The obvious question is: what barriers? Regulations for burning are blind to ancestry, although under the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, B.C. must now “co-develop a policy and program framework for cultural and prescribed fire” that aligns with the United Nations declaration.

While many confuse cultural burning with firefighting, the former is an act of preventive land management, while the latter requires detection, centralized command and specialized aircraft. Canada has a long history of dealing with wildfires, as remote as that capacity may seem today.

It should go without saying that pre-contact societies had no helicopters, air tankers, infrared scanning or modern incident command systems, as followed by Canada. Those capabilities were developed through engineering, science and experience, not ethnicity. Canada has built considerable expertise in this field, including Canadian-designed firefighting aircraft now purchased for use around the world.

For years, B.C. has measured the effectiveness of its initial attack crews by the proportion of wildfires contained, regularly achieving rates above 90 per cent. That record was built through a military-style command structure that co-ordinated aerial reconnaissance, tactical fuel removal, water-bomber drops and the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System. This made large escapes uncommon under ordinary summer conditions. All of that is an example of technical capacity, not romantic pseudo-folklore.

There were problems with that system, but those problems do not invalidate its successes. A Senate report on wildfire management released earlier this year called for a federal co-ordinating office, along with a fleet of dedicated aircraft, drones and national hazard mapping. That is a better start than deferring to ancient claims. There are lessons to be learned from Indigenous land management, but the notion that “colonial” practices are therefore invalid is nonsense.

Knowledge is validated by outcomes, not by someone’s personal background.

National Post

Warren Mirko is executive director of the Public Land Use Society.