Nine-year-old John Smithers cradles a tiny burrowing owl in his hands, preparing to release it into the grasslands of Upper Nicola Band territory.

Like other young syilx people, he’s grown up hearing stories about the small birds of prey that have nearly disappeared from his Thompson-Okanagan homelands in the last century or so.

The owls – known in syilx culture as guardians, guides or messengers – were “once a common element” in landscapes stretching from the southern Interior of B.C. all the way to Manitoba, according to Canada’s Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife. 

Now, burrowing owl sightings are rare. In 2003, the Government of Canada listed the burrowing owl as endangered under the federal Species At Risk Act. According to the Burrowing Owl Alliance, the bird’s population in the country has declined by over 96 per cent since 1987. Experts link the bird’s decline to the gradual loss of its grassland habitats over the last century. 

“Lots of animals can come and get them,” Smithers said about the lack of protective habitat for the burrowing owl. 

Aware of the owls’ importance and decline, earlier this year Smithers became N’kwala School’s annual student ambassador to a regional burrowing owl recovery program that’s being led by the First Nation. 

As ambassador, he was invited to be the first person of the year to release a captive-born burrowing owl into the wild on April 22, in his home community of spax̌mn (Douglas Lake) in B.C.’s Nicola Valley.

The release, which coincided with Earth Day, marked 10 years since Upper Nicola Band began releasing captive-born burrowing owls onto their homelands.

In return, those captive-raised owls have produced 125 “wild-born” baby owls — or fledglings — since being released from the community’s restoration site.  

Despite high winds and the risk of ticks, dozens of excited people from all age groups turned out in high spirits for the release. 

Students, nature enthusiasts and Elders alike shared laughs and smiles at the sight of the precious birds, with their round heads, short stature and long legs.

Framed by grassy hills, Smithers released the owl under the warm sunshine with the help of Dawn Brodie, one of the main field technicians who has been involved in the program since its inception.

The nervous bird nearly escaped from his grasp and into the open air. But thanks to the quick reflexes of the adults around him, helping hands connect the captive-born owl back to the land and down an artificial nesting burrow that had been prepared by the Upper Nicola Band stewardship department.

“Soft” is the word Smithers used to describe the feeling of holding the owl. 

Soon after, several guests in attendance – from program partners to youth and Elders – were invited by the field technicians to release an owl down different burrows that were created by the recovery program and its partners.

Some of the owls wore amusingly bewildered expressions as they waited in the gentle grasp of human hands before being placed into a burrow.

In total, 11 captive-born owls — six males and five females — were released into five of the site’s 35 artificial burrows that day. They are all just under one year old.

“The program has exceeded all our expectations,” Loretta Holmes, an Upper Nicola Band member and senior resource technician with the band’s stewardship department, said.

“The owls, which we call sq̓əq̓axʷ, have responded better than we dared to hope ten years ago. And community interest and involvement has been strong since the start.”

Owls released into artificial burrows filled with frozen mice

The tiny burrows are connected through a network of underground tunnels hidden under the grassland hills above spax̌mn. 

Each artificial burrow consists of a small, corrugated tube in the ground that serves as its entrance, which feeds into the larger network of tunnels. The entry points are camouflaged in the field by grass and large rocks. 

Before any captive-raised owls are released, handfuls of frozen mice are inserted into the burrows and tunnels.

“That helps them not have to go as far to hunt as often. It encourages them to lay more eggs, and helps them rear their young ones when they’re hatched,” Holmes said.

Once released, the burrow entrances are closed off for a few days, explained Chris Gill, a project biologist with the band’s Species-At-Risk program.

“It’s to let them acclimatize and calm down, basically. And potentially bond with the mate that’s in there,” Gill said.

Breeding gets underway as soon as two owls choose each other as mates, and Gill said that eggs are laid in June.

The burrow tunnels, which protect the owls from predators, are connected to a nest box. The nest box has an opening at ground level, allowing technicians to observe how many eggs have been laid and monitor activity. 

Technicians also attach leg bands to the newly-hatched birds here, to track future migration.

Mice are also delivered to the burrows two to three times a week. Holmes said that this type of care results in nests that carry nine to 10 eggs — more than the average of six to eight laid by burrowing owls in the wild.

The mice are “giving them a big head start and maximizing the chances of producing healthy fledglings, and healthy parents as well,” Gill said.

The owls stay in the site’s burrow network anywhere from four days to up to a week, depending on weather conditions, and are then free to fly around in the open air.

“They mostly stick at the site, even after you release them out of the burrow, because they’re now used to the site,” Gill said.

“They may have paired up, or they may choose another mate from the site.”

By July, fledglings will start to emerge from the burrows, and the owls usually start to migrate south in September and October. They’ll return to the breeding sites next April.

Tracked migration data from burrowing owls who left the site in previous years revealed that the birds travel as far as San Jose, California.

“It’s just so amazing that they went all the way somewhere, wintered in those conditions and came back,” Holmes said. 

“It’s wonderful.”

Owl recovery “one piece of a larger puzzle” in restoring ecosystem health

In the last decade, more than 100 burrowing owls have been raised in captivity at the Kamloops Wildlife Park by the Burrowing Owl Conservation Society, before being released at spax̌mn. There’s a site in Oliver that supports the program as well.

The captive-raised owls all come with identification tags on their legs, which are documented by field technicians before they are released into the burrows.

Many of the 120-plus wild-born owls have left the Upper Nicola Band site and returned, including four who came back this spring; two males and two females, three of which were born at the site last year.

While the conservation efforts are helping to re-populate the burrowing owl species in this part of the country, Upper Nicola Band views this work as only one piece of the larger puzzle of how to protect the community’s rare and sensitive grassland ecosystem habitats. 

By stewarding these ecosystems — and restoring and supporting the biodiversity that has been depleted — it’s also an act by the band to protect their cultural identity and fulfill generational responsibilities around caring for the land and for all living things.

“Conserving a species at risk, like a burrowing owl, it’s about far more than a single bird or species. It’s about upholding relationships, responsibilities and balance with the living world,” Holmes said.

Animals like the burrowing owl are part of an interconnected system that has sustained Indigenous Peoples for generations, she said.

“If one species declines, it signals that the relationship between people and the land is out of balance. Conservation becomes an act of restoring harmony and respect in that system,” she said.

“Protecting species at risk aligns with Indigenous laws that emphasize caretaking. Conservation efforts honour the principle that decisions made today must ensure the healthy lands and wildlife for our relatives yet to come.”

It’s just one of many projects under the community’s stewardship department’s larger Species-At-Risk program, which is designed to protect and restore endangered species populations on their lands.

The program also looks at restoration efforts for species including the American badger, Lewis’s woodpecker and Great Basin spadefoot — all of which have been federally recognized as threatened or at-risk. 

Penticton Indian Band — a fellow syilx community that’s under the Okanagan Nation Alliance (ONA) along with Upper Nicola Band — also released burrowing owls through their own similar program that same week.

“In British Columbia, burrowing owls are extirpated. That means that they’re not actually existing on the landscape without reintroduction programs, like the Upper Nicola Band’s,” Gill said. 

But Traditional Ecological Knowledge gathered from Elders and advisors confirmed that burrowing owls historically existed on the spax̌mn landscape.

In 2015, a year before the burrowing owl recovery program launched, the Species-At-Risk team conducted surveys on reserve lands to determine a suitable habitat for the birds. 

They settled on the grasslands above the Upper Nicola Band community as the reintroduction program’s site.

“We found suitable habitat for burrowing owls — but no burrowing owls present,” said Gill.

The birds traditionally nested in the underground burrows that were dug and abandoned by different animals, from badgers to marmots and coyotes, he said.

But because of a lack of badgers, there weren’t any natural burrows out on the land.

“That’s why the Upper Nicola Band put in these artificial burrows,” he said.

“There are actually badgers on that reserve, but there are very few — and far in-between — so we can’t rely on a burrowing owl finding a badger burrow.”

According to the province, “several small” burrowing owl nesting sites were identified in the Okanagan and Thompson valleys from 1900 to 1928. 

Historical nesting areas include Osoyoos, Oliver, Penticton, White Lake, Lower Similkameen Valley, Vernon, Kamloops and Douglas Lake.

But between 1928 and 1980, only four nesting sites were recorded.

The federal government attributed the “conversion of grassland to cropland” as the “ultimate factor responsible for the decline in burrowing owls.” It estimates that the species experienced a 90 per cent population decline from 1990 to 2000.

Also contributing to the owl’s population decline is the “gauntlet” of issues they face on their migration route, Holmes said.

This includes fatalities occurring from collisions with wind turbine farms and motor vehicles. Pesticides targeting insects and rodents that the birds feed upon indirectly poison them as well. 

In 2004, the estimated population of burrowing owls in Canada was recorded at 795 mature individuals. In 2015, it had plunged to approximately 270. 

Burrowing owl populations are “in a nose dive,” Gill said.

He called the burrowing owl “a canary in a coal mine” in measuring the state of ecosystem health.

“A badger, a burrowing owl — those species are the indicator species. If they’re not doing well, then that’s a sign of something bigger that’s not doing well,” he said.

Upper Nicola Band’s grassland ecosystem is “incredibly resilient,” but grasslands across Canada are critically endangered 

Along with Holmes and Brodie, Gill helped initiate the burrowing owl reintroduction program 10 years ago. He called the two women “the work horses” of the program.

“We monitor the owls, and write really good data collection on it,” said Brodie, a veterinary technician who supports the program as a burrowing owl consultant.

The program has been a success, Gill said, not just because of the region’s “great grasslands.”

“But it’s also the stewardship that’s going on with these owls,” he said.

“It’s one of the most productive sites in B.C. for releasing our fledging owls.”

In the wild, burrowing owls can live anywhere from four to six years, according to Lauren Meads, the executive director of the Burrowing Owl Conservation Society of BC. 

Meads, who was joined at the release event by the society’s 11-year-old educational burrowing owl, Pluto, added that in captivity they can live up to 15 years.

According to the Government of B.C., grasslands made up less than one percent of the province’s land area in 2004, adding that “only a small percentage of our grasslands are protected.”

But grasslands surrounding the Upper Nicola landscape are “some of the most intact and incredibly resilient grasslands” Gill has observed, he said.

“Grasslands are one of the most endangered ecosystems in Canada. … They’re very, very rare. It looks like we have a lot, but this is one little spot,” he said.

Holmes added that protecting grasslands also protects the burrowing owls. 

“That’s their home. It works hand-in-hand,” she said.

Owl conservation, protection is a cultural responsibility 

Holmes said that the burrowing owl’s population decline and status as an endangered species is not just an ecological matter, but a cultural issue as well. 

sq̓əq̓axʷ are a “symbol of our cultural identity,” she said.

“Owls can be messengers, teachers or indicators in an Indigenous knowledge system. They’re often associated with observation, protections and indicators of change.”

The loss of burrowing owls “erodes the stories, the teachings and our ways of understanding the land that has been passed down through generations,” she added.

Upper Nicola Chief Dan Manuel said in a statement that burrowing owls are deeply woven into syilx culture.

“For our people, the cultural, spiritual and environmental importance of sq̓əq̓axʷ are one,” Manuel said.

“Our culture is rooted in co-existence with the world around us. We have a responsibility to care for the land and the beings on it. We must help rebuild what has been lost, and it will continue to support us.”

Holmes said that having a dedicated conservation program fulfills those duties that are owed to the land and to all living beings. 

“It treats our relatives with respect,” she said.

“The land, the animals, the plants — everything that’s there — provides us with sustenance. So it’s our responsibility to take care of them as well. We see all those things as our relatives.”

She emphasized that Indigenous Peoples have inherent responsibilities as stewards of their territories — responsibilities that originate in syilx laws, teachings and oral traditions, also known as captikʷł. 

“That predates colonial conservation frameworks,” she said.

Upper Nicola Band Elder Casey Holmes thanked all the staff and volunteers involved in the community’s stewardship program, especially for their work in supporting the restoration of the burrowing owl population.

“People are making a difference. Even if it doesn’t look like a difference, they made a difference today, to make this a success – to make this a part of history that we’re not losing,” said Casey.

When the community loses a tmixʷ (all living things) relative, Casey said that “we lose a part of history.”

“Bringing back this, is regaining back that history,” he said.

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Summary

• In 2024, an extreme cold event caused many B.C. wineries to lose most of their grapes. In response, the province allowed wineries to join a program allowing the import of U.S. grapes, a practice usually reserved for larger commercial labels. 
• The full rules about how sales of wine made with U.S. grapes would be taxed were released months after wineries had already bought foreign fruit. Each winery got a sales tax exemption on a specific quantity of wine — after that, taxes could reach as high as 89 per cent. 
• These taxes apply to all sales for as long as wineries sell any wine made with U.S. fruit, even if the actual bottle in question is made with 100 per cent B.C. grapes. The result, winemakers say, is losing out on years of profits and, possibly, going out of business.

The program offered a lifeline when the forecast was unequivocally dire. In January 2024, temperatures dropped below -25 C in B.C.’s Okanagan, Thompson and Similkameen Valleys — the province’s agricultural breadbasket. 

The cold snap in the Interior came right after unseasonable daytime highs of 10 to 13 C. The weather whiplash hit the area’s fruit trees hardest: acres of peaches, pears, plums, apples and nectarines were damaged, with the plants’ buds dead come spring. The ripe, juicy produce tourists flock to the Okanagan for in summer and fall never arrived.

The deep freeze also crushed one of B.C.’s most prized commodities: wine grapes. More than 90 per cent of the Interior’s annual harvest was lost, which meant nearly 90 per cent of the province’s total vineyard acreage. Suddenly, a $3.75-billion industry was in crisis. 

“There were zero grapes,” Paul Sawler, vice-president and general manager of Dirty Laundry Winery, a mid-sized winery in Summerland, B.C., recalls. The winery’s 100 acres of vineyards produced almost no fruit.

“Where we would normally see 300 to 400 tonnes [of grapes], we got less than half a tonne from all the vineyards combined,” Sawler says.

The solution seemed clear at the time: “There was no way to survive except to buy Washington State grapes.” 

In British Columbia, alcohol is regulated by the BC Liquor Distribution Branch, a government body long assigned to the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General. In July 2025, it was transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture and Food — a nod to the realities of producing a weather-dependent consumer good in an increasingly volatile 21st-century climate. For winemakers and grape growers, who had seen several difficult years of damage to their vineyards from extreme weather, it was a welcome move.

Under the liquor branch’s policy, certain wineries — mostly larger operations that hold a commercial winery designation — are allowed to import foreign grapes to complement their B.C. fruit. Often acquired from the U.S., these grapes produce wines that the liquor branch taxes at high sales mark-ups — the dollar amount the branch charges a winery when it sells its wines directly to consumers, restaurants or other distributors.

Regulations normally prevent most small and mid-sized B.C. wineries from purchasing foreign grapes. This is part of the liquor branch’s complex policy, which involves different regulatory and taxation systems not just for different types of wineries, but also for direct-to-consumer sales versus sales through the liquor branch. The short version is that independent, “land-based” wineries are required to use exclusively B.C. fruit, in exchange for which a good chunk of their sales are tax-exempt. 

After the 2024 freeze, the liquor branch relaxed these rules, allowing a wider range of wineries to import grapes to salvage their businesses. But bringing in foreign grapes meant signing on to a program that limited each winery’s tax-exempt sales. 

“We really had no choice,” Sawler says of his decision at Dirty Laundry. Though most Okanagan wineries were committed to making B.C. wines with B.C.-grown grapes, the weather had decided for them. 

“If we didn’t buy the grapes, we would have had to lay off half our staff,” Sawler says. “We probably would have had wine to sell at the winery, but we would have lost our whole outside market — a market that we spent the last 20 years building.”

So, Dirty Laundry and 91 other wineries in the area rolled the dice and brought in foreign grapes to make their 2024 wines. 

“I don’t regret buying them,” Sawler reflects. “The quality was good; the pricing was good. It worked out well.” 

But the decision has come with a latent — and significant — unanticipated cost. The limit on wineries’ tax-exempt sales was based on a complicated calculation many did not understand at the outset. In fact, some didn’t understand they’d be subject to mark-ups at all. Now that the program is in its second year, some wineries have wine they can’t sell without a significant financial hit.

“A program that was basically designed to help wineries, in some cases may actually kill some wineries,” Sawler tells The Narwhal. “Those are extreme cases … but it is happening”

“We know how devastating the 2024 freeze event was for grape growers and wineries in the Okanagan and we’ve worked together with the B.C. wine industry to help them recover,” Minister of Food and Agriculture Lana Popham told The Narwhal in an emailed statement. 

“The Liquor Distribution Branch will continue to work closely with wineries and Wine Growers BC.”

A program that brought wine flowing back into B.C. has soured

The vintage replacement program, or just “the program,” as many in the industry refer to it, was first announced in July 2024 and laid out in fine print in a liquor branch memorandum that October. Importantly, this was after most wineries had already purchased U.S. and foreign grapes. 

For the 2024 vintage, the BC Liquor Distribution Branch would permit wineries that opted in to the program to purchase foreign grapes or a partially fermented product known as unfinished juice, and would treat any wine produced from those products the same as B.C.-grape wine. That meant the liquor branch would offer the tax exemption usually reserved for certain types of 100 per cent B.C. wine to all B.C. wineries using foreign grapes.

This main component of the program was a success. Wineries like Dirty Laundry and many smaller, newer wineries kept their staff, juiced their grapes and made wines they were proud of. The wider industry, which supports a substantial economy of restaurants, hotels, hospitality workers, supply companies, migrant agricultural workers and small family businesses remained afloat.

But the details were a shock to many.

The exemption wasn’t a blanket exemption. Each winery had what was known as a “support cap,” or a limit on tax-free exemptions. Wineries’ individual caps were based on an “Olympic average” of five years of previous mark-up exemption totals — for land-based wineries, of their B.C.-grape wines; for commercial wineries, of B.C.-grape wines certified by the BC Wine Authority’s Vintner’s Quality Alliance, or BCVQA. This was a dollar value calculated by taking the mark-up exemption on sales numbers from the past five years, dropping the highest and lowest numbers, and averaging the three remaining years. 

Sales over that limit were taxed at the liquor branch’s standard rates for foreign-grape wines — as high as 89 per cent on the first $11.75 of the wine’s per-litre value, and 27 per cent after that. 

The calculation didn’t pose a problem for many commercial wineries used to importing foreign grapes — and selling huge volumes. It was also doable for many established wineries that had relatively steady sales over the period in question and dedicated accounting departments. It did pose an issue for many newer, growing independent wineries, though. 

Another surprise was how long a program meant to help with one bad year was going to last. The ability for wineries to buy foreign grapes for tax-exempt wine was extended for the 2025 vintage, to account for any lingering cold snap effects on the province’s vineyards. Additionally, once participating wineries brought in foreign grapes, they were tied to the vintage replacement program until they’d sold every last bottle of wine containing U.S. grapes.

This all means the support cap will remain in effect until March 2028, to account for the added year of foreign grapes, and sales of wines that take longer to produce, like reds or sparklings. 

All that, and the mark-up exemption limit each participating winery received was not exclusive to its U.S.-grape wines. Post-limit taxes would be applied to all the wine a participating winery sold. 

Let’s say a winery had 5,000 cases of U.S.-grape wine — “replacement” wine — left to sell, starting this year. That newer stuff would likely share shelf space with bottles of carefully cellared, 100 per cent B.C.-grape wine from years past, too. Signing onto the program meant this B.C.-grape wine would count toward the winery’s annual mark-up exemption limit. Which means that once the winery hit the annual limit set by its Olympic average, this 100 per cent B.C.-grown-and-produced wine would be taxed the same way as malbec from Argentina: at up to 89 per cent. 

In an emailed statement on behalf of the liquor branch, the Ministry of Agriculture said that “to ensure revenue neutrality and fairness across the sector, the annual support cap … includes all wines sold within the fiscal year, including vintage replacement wines, BCVQA and 100 per cent B.C. grape wines.” 

The ministry added that a support cap based on historical sales data was recommended by Wine Growers BC.

“From the outset, there were very clear guidelines communicated to the wine industry about eligibility and annual support caps, and it was intended to help the industry keep the lights on during a very serious agricultural emergency,” Minister Popham told The Narwhal.

“It is in everyone’s interest to return to producing 100 per cent B.C. wine production.,” the liquor branch-attributed statement concluded.

Small, new B.C. wineries suffering the most under program’s limits

Paul Sawler’s neighbour in Summerland, Ron Kubek, started Lightning Rock, a small, family-owned business just up the road from Dirty Laundry, in 2017. It’s grown steadily ever since. 

“I think the problem in the wine business is that too many people in ownership or in the tasting room want to show how smart they are,” he says. His greatest pride is his winery’s consistent five-star ratings on Google, which show that everyday people appreciate Lightning Rock’s approach.

“Wine is supposed to be something that’s enjoyed among friends and family. Some of my favourite reviews are, ‘It was my first time in the tasting room and they didn’t make me feel dumb.’ We can talk about the technical stuff, but we’d rather just have fun.”

Kubek hasn’t shied away from sharing his views on the program, which his winery also opted into after losing its 2024 harvest. 

“We’re still small, but we’ve experienced tremendous growth, from just a few bottles in 2018 and 2019 to [when] the pandemic hit and wine sales went through the roof,” he tells The Narwhal. 

But that initially promising upward trajectory is now proving an impetus to further growth. The program calculated Lightning Rock’s mark-up limit using the low sales volumes of its early years, and now the winery isn’t eligible to sell much tax-exempt wine.

Kubek says his situation is “not because we brought in too many grapes from the U.S. — we brought in about 60 per cent of what we would normally do in a year after the catastrophic [harvest] loss — but because … [the liquor distribution branch] took what was a simple program and misapplied the Olympic average to help jack up revenues and get their bonuses.” 

Lightning Rock’s speciality is single-varietal wines, a large portion of which are reds and sparklings that take several years to age. That means Kubek will likely have to remain in the program until 2028. As a result, he has to carefully calculate the amount of wines from previous B.C. vintages he can sell each year without losing too much profit.

“The problem is that my previously B.C. [tax-]exempt wines are now being taxed or in danger of being taxed,” he says. “So I’m trying to grow, but I have a limitation, because if I do grow, I’m suddenly hit with an 89 per cent tax.” 

So Kubek, like many Okanagan winery owners, was holding back sales in March when he spoke with The Narwhal — waiting anxiously for the liquor branch’s fiscal-year turnover of April 1 to reset his mark-up limit. For a small winery with hard-won personal relationships with restaurants and other distributors, the cost is significant. 

“I’m having to tell my sales agents, ‘Hey slow down on sales,’ because I’m very, very close to going over my Olympic average and then suddenly I’m going to be paying 89 per cent tax on a bottle of wine.”

Kubek says he would have been able to sell an additional 1,000 cases of wine in the last fiscal year if it weren’t for his mark-up cap.

In response to The Narwhal’s questions about these limitations, the agriculture ministry noted, “While some wineries accessing the temporary supports have exceeded their annual cap and are facing payment obligations, many other wineries planned their operations around the annual support cap or chose not to access the temporary supports. Any changes to the policy directives or requirements mid-stream would not be fair to these businesses.”

Kubek feels frustrated. “I lost all my fruit. I had to pay for fruit to come in and now the government’s penalizing me if I try to grow.” 

He believes the program has hurt wineries like his the most. 

The support cap clause in the vintage replacement program was meant to prevent some of the Okanagan’s biggest wineries from bringing in more cheap foreign grapes than they normally would while paying below-normal sales taxes, Kubek says. It was supposed to prevent these grapes from flooding the B.C. market, which could have changed the industry’s local fingerprint and provided an unfair advantage to some. 

But what the government feared never happened, and the little guys are the ones now being hurt, Kubek says. He pointed to two wineries under the same ownership — Kelowna’s Mt. Boucherie Estate winery and Rust Wine Co., a smaller winery in Oliver — which confirmed they have had to lay staff off as a result of tax bills currently exceeding $500,000.

The agriculture ministry told The Narwhal, “In recognition of the payment obligations for those that exceeded their cap last fiscal, the [BC Liquor Distribution Branch] will continue to work with wineries to explore flexible payment arrangements within reasonable timelines.”

B.C. wine industry is pushing for solutions to a complex situation

Jeff Guignard is the CEO of Wine Growers BC, the primary industry marketing and lobbying organization for B.C. wines. He has heard his fair share of complaints about the vintage replacement program, including from Kubek, who he speaks to nearly daily. He also speaks with the provincial government every week, trying to find a solution for wineries who say the taxation approach has pushed them to the financial brink.

“This program was an essential lifeline to industry in a moment of generational crisis,” Guignard says. “It literally saved people’s businesses. There are wineries in B.C. that would not be in operation without this program. So we’re immensely grateful to government for that.” 

But, he adds, “It’s now clear — because things were rushed, and though everyone was doing their best — that the program has had some unintended consequences.” 

Guignard says the constraints built into the program for good reason are now injuring the very people and businesses the program was designed to support. 

“The constraint is acting as a limit on sales,” he says. “You could be selling, right now, a 100 per cent made-and-bottled-and-grown-in-B.C. wine, that was bottled years ago, prior to the freeze, and prior to the program being developed. But it counts against your business as though it were part of the program.” 

Guignard says the problem with the program is its one-size-fits-all approach, when the province’s wine industry ranges from huge, established players like Arterra Wines Canada or Andrew Peller Ltd., which both own multiple wineries, to medium-sized operations like Dirty Laundry and smaller newcomers like Lightning Rock. 

He says he knows of over a dozen wineries that have gone over their support cap and received invoices from the provincial government — businesses being treated “as though they were importing foreign wine into the province.”

“The program was designed to help you not have to do that,” he says, adding that one person told him, “ ‘I wish I hadn’t brought any fruit in. I would have had no wine, and I would have had to lay off all my staff, but my business would actually be in a better place, financially.’ ”

Adding to the challenge is the fact that the 2025 grape harvest in the Okanagan and Similkameen was — to everyone’s surprise — highly productive. Many of the vines that had survived the cold freeze produced abundant fruit, but grape growers unattached to specific wineries were left without customers. Businesses trapped in the “golden handcuffs” of the program, as Guignard terms it, weren’t buying, because they weren’t looking to make new wines they couldn’t turn a profit on. 

With growers, too, facing financial hardship, the program has in some ways simply deferred the crisis it was trying to prevent. The crucial support the program offered when the industry seemed on the brink of collapse has turned into an albatross hanging over some winemakers’ necks. 

“From a Dirty Laundry perspective, I’ve taken the position that if I had 1,000 cases of imported wine left over at the end of March next year, I’d dump it before I’d stay in the program another year,” Sawler says. “That’s the amount of impact it’ll make on our winery. We’d be better off to throw the wine away or to sell it for nothing … to make it go away.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Summary

• Indigenous women in B.C. are leading projects and organizations committed to mitigating wildfire risk and restoring traditional practices. 
• Cultural burns are making a comeback in the province, thanks to years of advocacy from Indigenous firekeepers.
• First Nations women in the province’s Interior are decolonizing fire management through their work.

In 2017 Jaci Gilbert was 12 years old when she was evacuated from Tsq’escen’ First Nation because of a wildfire. Four years later, more wildfires impacted her community, located in B.C.’s central interior, prompting some Elders to be evacuated to the Lower Mainland.

Gilbert, who is Secwépemc and Tsilhqot’in, volunteered both at the emergency operations centre during the partial evacuation in 2021, and as a fire camp logistics assistant near 100 Mile House during those fires.

“After being involved in the emergency operations centre I caught the bug of wanting to do emergency and wildfire management,” Gilbert told The Narwhal.

Gilbert works for First Nations Emergency Services Society as a cultural and prescribed fire specialist. She is part of a cohort of First Nations women in B.C. who are leading the way in wildfire management in their communities — demonstrating leadership and stewardship as blazes continue each year.

Being a young person, and a woman, Gilbert struggled to get into the field of emergency management, but reaching out to organizations and women in the field is a good place to start, she said.

“Youth have been managing emergencies in their personal lives for a long time, especially Indigenous youth, so using these skills I developed on reserve I’m able to handle [emergencies] well, whereas with a typical office or customer service job I don’t handle [those] very well,” Gilbert said.

“We’re seeing a shift in dynamics. I’m noticing a lot more Indigenous women in fire research and in the fire community.”

Indigenous firefighters bring cultural knowledge to their work

Sheresa Brown, a Nlaka’pamux woman from Lytton First Nation, has been involved with fire since firefighting in high school. Brown works as a field technician and archaeological monitor with Nlaka’pamux Nation Tribal Council, specializing in protecting cultural heritage values.

After her hometown Lytton, B.C., was devastated by fire in 2021, Brown evacuated to Merritt and was looking for a job when she called her former boss from the BC Wildfire Service. 

Back on the frontlines, Brown noticed a crew member cut down a culturally modified tree in Vernon, commonly referred to as a CMT, to clear a pathway for a hose. 

“[First Nations] make that [symbol on the tree] so they can come back to harvest the sap, they can use it to make different types of medicines. And it was a very utilized tree that just got cut down,” Brown told The Narwhal.

She recommended scanning for culturally modified trees before clearing to her crew lead, who received it well. A year later Brown was deployed on another fire near Lytton, teaching BC Wildfire Service crews about the land’s cultural values.

She said she’s willing to take people on the land if they are willing to learn and be respectful, noting that sometimes people do not know they are in a culturally significant area, especially when firefighters are deployed from another province or country. 

“I know if a man can do it, I can do it too, and probably even better,” Brown said, reflecting on her experience being a First Nations woman in the fire industry.

Bringing back cultural burns

Brown and Gilbert are carrying the torch lit by trailblazers in the field like Leona Antoine, who has 30 years of experience. Antoine is a Nlaka’pamux woman who is no stranger to cultural burning or firefighting. 

She practices traditional burning, is a registered forest technologist, a Type 1 (or first-response) firefighter with the BC Wildfire Service, and is a board director and chair of the Salish Fire Keepers Society. 

When Antoine’s firefighting journey with the BC Wildfire Service began in the early 2000s, she was one of few women on a 20-person unit crew. 

“Because there were no women on the crews before, they didn’t know how to have a woman around,” Antoine told The Narwhal.  

“It took probably about a month for the crew to get used to women being on the crew. You know, putting all the women’s posters and magazines away,” she said. 

Although men on the crew were initially uncomfortable around women, and had to be taught boundaries, “I broke those barriers,” she said. 

Another barrier at the time was getting the province and general public to see the value of cultural burning. B.C. was the first province in Canada to ban the practice in 1874.

After a year of devastating fire in 2017, and following the release of a report Addressing the New Normal: 21st Century Disaster Management in British Columbia in 2018, cultural burns started being taken more seriously by the province, with official amendments to the Wildfire Act in B.C. to support the practice taking effect in 2024.

This is work that the Salish Fire Keepers Society has been advocating for since its inception in 2016. The non-profit is made up of Interior Salish nations who experience some of Canada’s hottest wildfires, and promotes the restoration of cultural burning practices.

Gilbert contributed to a cultural burning guide, Workbook to Create a Cultural Burn Pathway, made in partnership with the Indigenous Leadership Initiative. 

“As I’ve become more involved with emergency and wildfire management, cultural burning comes up a lot, especially as an Indigenous person that’s interested in Indigenous solutions to modern problems,” she said. 

First Nations Emergency Services Society is an emergency management non-profit organization in B.C. “We were initially created as a result of a lot of Indigenous deaths related to structural fires,” Gilbert said during her presentation at the Salish Fire Keepers Society gathering in Kamloops on Mar. 17. 

The workbook guides readers through different considerations when planning a cultural burn, and was created through a series of community interviews by Amy Cardinal Christianson and Natasha Caverley.

“My role in [its] creation has been trying to make sure that it’s accessible for First Nations. I’m not much on the technical side, I’m … looking at the art and how that can help tell the story for people without strong English backgrounds,” she said.

During the March 2026 gathering, Antoine and the rest of the society’s board gifted each guest speaker with sweetgrass and sage, two traditional medicines among many First Nation cultures across Canada. 

There were many women in attendance, underscoring how things are beginning to shift.

This is an initiative she championed. “We are taught by our Elders when you ask for information or stories, you validate their teachings and what … they have taught. You honour them with medicine,” she said.

Prioritizing traditional protocols, ceremony, and medicine at this year’s fire gathering is an example of how Antoine brings balance to the fire space.

Not only has she broken down barriers for women to come after her, she also creates opportunities for those in the fire industry to connect, heal, and share knowledge – work that can be forgotten for those in the heat of fire. 

Antoine said “we’re in fire dependent ecosystems, the land needs fire.”

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Summary

• A recent gathering of the Salish Fire Keepers Society brought together over 100 experts and community members to discuss the role of fire on Indigenous territories in Interior B.C.
• Over a century of fire suppression practices have left Interior B.C. vulnerable to catastrophic wildfires, like the one that destroyed Lytton in 2021.
• Indigenous firekeepers advocate for the use of cultural and prescribed fire to manage risks and restore balance to ecosystems.

In 2022, one year after wildfire tore through the Village of Lytton, a blaze broke out at the nearby Stein Valley Nlaka’pamux Heritage Provincial Park.

The site, co-managed by Lytton First Nation and the B.C. government,  contains pictographs, petroglyphs and culturally modified trees, along with more important cultural sites.

So the BC Wildfire Service called in Sheresa Brown, a 31-year-old Lytton First Nation member who works as a field technician and archaeology monitor with the Nlaka’pamux Nation Tribal Council. When fires happen near registered archaeological sites, Brown works with BC Wildfire Service crews and structural protection specialists to safeguard cultural heritage. 

“I was all for it,” Brown says. “But I wanted to do it in the right way.”

To avoid the pictographs washing away from firefighting efforts, Brown outlined a 75- to 100-metre buffer zone around the cultural site. 

Sprinklers were set up around the buffer zone, and crews watched as the sprinklers stopped the flames from reaching the pictographs.

“That really helped me confirm that this was a good idea,” she said.

In other wildfires, she has helped to determine which registered archaeological sites are within a fire’s boundaries and are along its projected path, directing crews where to work. For example, she will advise where heli-pads can be constructed to avoid cutting down culturally modified trees, and will guide where hoses can be laid to protect artifacts — such as arrowheads — on the ground.

“We make sure that everything is done in a very respectful way,” she said.

Brown was one of more than a dozen experts and technicians drawn from the realm of Indigenous fire stewardship — from researchers to Indigenous land managers and fire practitioners — who gave panel talks at the Salish Fire Keepers Society “Reigniting The Land” spring assembly on March 17 and 18. Around 100 people attended in-person in Tk’emlúps (also known as Kamloops, B.C.) in Secwepemcúl’ecw, with more tuning in virtually.

Secwepemcúl’ecw is the traditional territory of the Secwepemc Nation, which stretches across approximately 180,000 square kilometres of Interior B.C. and encompasses 17 Secwepemc communities.

The panel discussions ranged from protecting cultural heritage sites and values in the event of wildfire, to the experiences of youth engaged in cultural burning and different approaches to land management post-wildfire. 

While honouring the work of their ancestors and the efforts by Indigenous firekeepers in recent decades, the gathering also gave insight into the role that Indigenous youth are having in the future of fire stewardship and emergency response.

Resources around building capacity for community-based fire stewardship and emergency response initiatives were also highlighted, and there was dialogue in bridging opportunity gaps between the BC Wildfire Service and Indigenous communities.

“We need to collaborate with our people. We need to share. We gotta look at those imaginary lines and get rid of those, and work together,” George Campbell, a Nlaka’pamux Nation member from the Boothroyd Indian Band, said. Campbell is a wildfire officer for the Fraser Fire Zone with the BC Wildfire Service.

Fire Keepers Society brings Indigenous nations together to share knowledge, experiences

Comprised of Elders, youth, Knowledge Holders and firekeepers from Salish communities — including the Nlakaʼpamux, syilx, Secwepemc and Stʼatʼimc Nations — the Fire Keepers Society is a grassroots initiative that started in 2016 as a means to promote awareness around culturally prescribed burns throughout the province.

The society annually hosts a spring and fall gathering, where they aim to build connections between Indigenous nations by sharing knowledge, and promoting and supporting fire stewardship opportunities in different communities.

“We as nations, need to be working together,” Tiffany Traverse, a Secwepemc Nation member who serves as one of the society’s board of directors, said.

“We have shared territories. We have shared family members and family lineages.”

Fellow board director Darian Edwards, a Stʼatʼimc Nation member from Tsʼkwʼaylaxw First Nation, said that the society is looking to build support and create opportunities for Indigenous youth around fire stewardship initiatives in their respective communities.

“Youth are going to be taking over the work. They are going to be stewarding our lands after us,” Edwards said.

A century of fire suppression

Before settler colonialism outlawed the use of fire on the land through legislation such as the provincial Bush Fire Act of 1874, Interior Salish Nations had been prescribing fire to the land for thousands of years. 

Burn cycles were designed to nurture certain landscapes and ecosystems, often to sustain diversity for hunting areas and to promote the growth of berries and medicinal plants — which all supported various ceremonial purposes.

This work of regular burning ultimately helped to maintain the ecological health of the land by limiting overgrowth and mitigating fuels.

However, settlers and their rapid fire suppression practices effectively removed fire from the ecosystem in the last century. This has resulted in the spread of trees across landscapes that were not historically forested, all of which has led to the accumulation of wildfire fuels and debris across landscapes.

“Those managing forestry are not aware of the historical ecology of our lands and how they were changed through a century of fire suppression and how they were afforested,” Jennifer Grenz, a Lytton First Nation member who is a restoration ecologist and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, said.

In the past, she noted, “so much of our territories didn’t have trees all over them.”

“They were not meant to be these high-density, single or two-species tree plantations that they were transformed into,” she said.

Grenz made the comments during her panel presentation on the restoration work she conducted following the 2021 McKay Creek wildfire that broke out near Lilloet in St’at’imc territory.

Last summer, four years after the fire, she and a team of researchers found that burned landscapes are at risk of invasion by fast-growing, fire-prone invasive species of grasses.

However, they also identified historic berry-gathering areas that had once been cultivated and maintained by Indigenous people. 

These sites were sprouting in locations that were impacted by the fire, and did not see any human intervention efforts post-fire.

“Several areas have managed to survive being forested for tree plantations and these mega-fires to remind us of these very large areas that people created — that our people created,” she said.

While many of these areas are recovering on their own post-fire, she noted that “those are the first places that we’re seeing tree planting occurring.”

“The provincial government is going in and planting on top of these areas,” she said.

“This is where I really feel like there’s a really important piece for us to take back greater territorial land management, and find these areas and assert them, as these are our historic berry-gathering areas, food areas. And we don’t want to find trees planted on top of them.”

Grenz said that Indigenous communities know that the mega-fires of today “are not our fires.”

“This is just a totally different level of trying to figure out what to do next,” she said.

‘It’s really important to expose our youth to this work in a good way’

During a panel discussion led by three Indigenous youth, Skuppah Indian Band member Amber Wilber from the Nlaka’pamux Nation said that there’s a lot of trauma in her community around fire, especially among youth.

Skuppah Indian Band is located just two kilometres south of the Village of Lytton, which was the site of a devastating wildfire that swept through the area in 2021 and burned down 90 per cent of the village. Nearly five years after the fire, communities in the area, such as Lytton First Nation, are still in the process of rebuilding their homes and infrastructure.

“I’d love to see that fear of fire shift to a respect for fire — learning that fire can be a tool that we can use to manage our land, and help bring balance to it, instead of something to be feared,” Wilber, who is in her second year working with BC Wildfire Service, said.

Wilber said growing up, she used to watch from inside her family home as her dad and grandpa burned patches of land outside to support berry harvesting. She would later help her uncle with fuel management work — it was her uncle who taught her that the practice is “an important tool that brings balance to the ecosystem.”

“Not only when it comes to fire prevention and fire management, but also, creating balance in an ecosystem for birds, for elk as well, in our local area. Making way for them to travel through our forests, and giving birds good nesting places,” Wilber explained.

“We also use fuel management and cultural burning in our area as a way to knock down the tick population, because they can be quite pesty in the spring.”

She described this experience as a young person practising and revitalizing fire stewardship knowledge in her community as “eye-opening.”

“It’s really ignited a connection to the land in a way that I don’t think I ever would’ve gotten anywhere else,” she said. 

“It’s very unique, and it makes me have a lot of appreciation for traditions and cultures. It makes me feel connected to my ancestors in a big way.”

She advised Indigenous youth to get involved in cultural burning “in any way you can” — from listening to family members, to seeking out firekeepers in their communities. 

For the more seasoned firekeepers in the room, she encouraged them to involve their youth in burns, no matter the size of the fire. 

“Bring them out, even if it’s just a small job,” she said. 

“It’s really important to expose our youth to this work in a good way. And let them see your mistakes as well. … Later on, they’ll have that experience, too. They’ll have more grace for you and understanding. It’ll help them feel a little more humanized as well.”

A workbook to educate on cultural burns

Last summer, the First Nations’ Emergency Services Society (FNESS) and the Indigenous Leadership Initiative (ILI) released their “Worksheets To Create A Cultural Burn Pathway” workbook, which is both a physical and digital resource designed to guide Indigenous Nations in creating cultural burn programs within their community.

The workbook is the product of multi-years of community based-research, where more than 50 Elders and Knowledge Keepers were consulted, with additional input coming from gatherings and workshops.

Jaci Gilbert, a prescribed fire specialist with FNESS from the Secwépemc and Tsilhqot’in Nations, contributed to the workbook and gave a presentation about it during the Fire Keepers’ gathering.

“The aim of the workbook is to help nations navigate cultural burning with the impacts of climate change. We are not seeing the indicators that we’re used to, or seeing them at different times that don’t align with our burn windows,” Gilbert said.

“We hope that this workbook will help nations do burning in this new time.”

The workbook is divided into seven worksheets. The ILI, however, recognizes on their website that, “cultural fire is culture and location specific. So instead of a prescriptive approach, each worksheet poses a set of questions and prompts that can be answered collectively.”

Amy Cardinal Christianson, a Cree-Métis senior fire advisor for the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, helped lead the development of the workbook. 

She appeared virtually at the gathering, and said that the workbook has been used by Indigenous land guardian programs, such as the Kainai Nation’s (Blood Tribe) fire guardian program.

“It’s a really easy resource to use for communities. It also talks a lot about the importance of governance,” Christianson said.

She said that Indigenous fire stewardship is not just limited to culturally prescribed burns.

“Yes, culturally burning — but it can also be firefighting, emergency response, post-fire recovery,” she said.

“It’s any activity where Indigenous people are asserting their jurisdiction and exercising their rights related to fire on the land.”

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Indigenous leaders from the Similkameen Valley are “deeply disappointed” by a provincial decision to approve a contentious mine expansion in their territories — emphasizing that they did not give consent for the project to move forward.

On Monday, the B.C. government announced it had issued Mines Act and Environmental Management Act permits for the New Ingerbelle expansion of the Copper Mountain mine near Princeton, B.C., in smǝlqmíx (Upper and Lower Similkameen Indian Band) territory.

The expansion project will see the century-old mining operation revive its old Ingerbelle open-pit gold and copper mine site near nməlqytkʷ (the Similkameen River). The expansion will extend the mine’s operation until 2047, the province said.

In the province’s statement, it acknowledged that the mine is in the Upper and Lower Similkameen Indian Bands’ territories.

“The permitting review process included engagement with both First Nations, along with technical review by provincial agencies to assess environmental impacts, tailings management and public safety,” it said.

However, a joint statement issued Monday by leadership of both bands says that “chiefs, councillors, natural resource departments and community members of the bands did not give consent for this project to move forward.”

“The smǝlqmíx and our neighbours that choose to be here forever will have to deal with the consequences long after the profits and monies have left the valley,” said the statement.

“The chiefs and councils of the Upper Similkameen Indian Band and the Lower Similkameen Indian Band are deeply disappointed by the Province of British Columbia’s decision … to approve the New Ingerbelle Expansion Proposal for the Copper Mountain mine.”

The First Nations noted that participation agreements they signed with the mine earlier this month “expressly state that advance consent to New Ingerbelle was not provided.”

The new participation agreements with the mine that were signed by the bands replace older ones that were signed in 2019. They include “community benefits and environmental terms related to the mine operations and protecting the Similkameen River,” “stability and certainty” for mining operations and “structured processes” between Upper and Lower Similkameen and the mine “to work together on monitoring mine operations and mitigating its environmental impacts.”

The bands said they will now review the approval conditions and reasons for the decision, and “assess all available options to ensure that the waters, all living things and the lands will be taken care of.”

Separating the Ingerbelle pit from the mine’s main site is the 197-kilometre-long Similkameen River. Part of the expansion project will see a bridge constructed over the river to connect the two sites.

The mine’s already existing 192-metre tailings dam — roughly equivalent in height to a 58-storey building — will also be increased by an additional 87 metres, according to the province’s Environmental Assessment Office (EAO).

Meanwhile, Robert Carter, senior vice-president for Hudbay Minerals’ operations in Canada, thanked the province and the Upper and Lower Similkameen “for their open and efficient collaboration throughout the process.” 

“Through our strong commitment to responsible resource development and the expansion of copper production from Copper Mountain, we will be continuing to provide a metal that is vital for electrification and the global energy transition and supporting B.C.’s Critical Mineral Strategy,” Carter said in a release on Monday.

The project’s approval comes less than a month after the Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals told IndigiNews that the expansion proposal still required further consultation with the Upper and Lower Similkameen.

The spokesperson also said the expansion plan had to “meet or exceed B.C.’s world-class environmental standards.”

Last May, a pipe failure at the mine site resulted in 3,000 litres of mine tailings seeping into an area beside the Similkameen River. The B.C. Ministry of Environment and Parks told IndigiNews that it’s unknown if the mine water entered the river or was absorbed into the ground.

In 2024, the provincial Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy issued six fines to Copper Mountain mine totalling $105,348. 

The string of offences, which occurred between 2019 and 2022, all relate to the mine’s unauthorized seepage and discharge of mine water from its tailings pond into the surrounding waterways of the Similkameen River and Wolfe Creek, which both flow through the mine’s area of operation.

In 2021, the mine at one point exceeded the legal limit of copper waste discharged from its tailings pond into Wolfe Creek by more than 4,500 per cent.

Two years ago, one Lower Similkameen member spoke of a time where you could drink the water from Wolfe Creek, which is a tributary of the Similkameen River. Despite a series of mine contamination events into the creek, a senior representative for the Copper Mountain mine told the community that she would still drink the water.

In January, a province-wide council of outdoor recreationists declared the Similkameen River among the province’s most endangered rivers – citing the mine’s expansion as the main threat to the waterway.

Last November, y̓ilmixʷm (Chief) kalʔlùpaɋʹn Keith Crow of Lower Similkameen told regional officials that leaders were failing the Similkameen River, which “had been black for the last month” due to poor water quality. 

Lower Similkameen Elder Rob Edward listed the mine as one of the reasons for the river’s decline. He noted that he hasn’t been able to fish out of the Similkameen River since 1982. 

In 2022, Crow told IndigiNews that the Similkameen River is the lifeblood of the valley.

“If we lose that, we lose our identity. We lose who we are,” he said.

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First Nations fish hatcheries on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border are celebrating 10 years of a collaboration to help salmon blocked from migrating by dams and other threats.

Last month, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in Washington transferred more than 6,200 chinook salmon eggs from their Chief Joseph Hatchery to the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s kł cp’elk’ stim’ Hatchery in snpink’tn (Penticton, B.C.), nearly 200 kilometres north.

This year marks one decade since the two tribal hatcheries started working together to restore the fish’s population throughout the Columbia River Basin.

The partnership has seen Colville Tribes send more than 115,000 eyed chinook eggs to the Okanagan Nation Alliance over the past 10 years. One year alone, 2019, saw 40 per cent of those eggs transferred north.

“They don’t have to do that; they don’t have to give us anything,” Tyson Marsel, a biologist at kł cp’elk’ stim’ Hatchery and member of Lower Similkameen Indian Band, said.

“But for them to recognize that this is for the betterment of the environment and conservation, it’s not only helping us, but it’s also helping them.”

As salmon grow in their eggs, the dark spots of their eyes become visible through their shells — a stage early in their development known as the “eyed eggs” period.

Salmon have been a vital source of sustenance for Pacific Northwest Indigenous nations for thousands of years. 

But several salmon species, particularly sockeye and chinook, have seen their runs and populations severely depleted across the Columbia River Basin in the last century. 

As settlers built numerous dams along the waterway, they effectively blocked the fish from migrating up-river and into its tributaries. 

Salmon populations have also been impacted by habitat loss, overfishing and warming water temperatures linked to climate change.

Whether it’s sk’lwist (summer-run chinook) or ntitiyx (spring-run chinook), the fish have for decades become stuck at the Chief Joseph Dam on the Columbia River in Washington, which lacks a fish passage route.

Opened downstream to the dam in 2013, the Chief Joseph Hatchery catches adult fish blocked by the dam to collect their eggs. It’s part of a broodstock, or fish-breeding, program that spawns nearly three million young chinook each year.

“They’ll be collecting millions of chinook eggs in a year,” Marsel said. “Versus us, our best year is 10,000 that we’ve collected from the Okanagan River here.”

The salmon eggs sent from the Colville Tribes’ hatchery roughly doubled the Okanagan Nation Alliance hatchery’s chinook population compared to last year, when it had just 6,500.

kł cp’elk’ stim’ Hatchery stores the transferred roe in an incubator, where water temperatures are gradually increased from 3 C to 10 C over the course of a few weeks, to help support their development.

The fish were expected to hatch around the end of January, and will remain housed at the hatchery until June. Once they weigh between three to five grams, the Okanagan Nation Alliance plans to release them into suwiw̓s (Osoyoos Lake).

The adult fish are expected to return between 2029 and 2031.

Although much of the Okanagan River has been channelized — engineered to straighten the waterway — there’s a more naturally flowing portion north of Osoyoos Lake, in the town of Oliver, B.C.

It’s there that Marsel said the fish like to spawn. 

Even if the fish can make it up-river past Osoyoos Lake, they’ll still reach the Chief Joseph Dam and Colville hatchery downriver.

“Some of our fish that we’ve released from our facility have gone into Chief Joseph Hatchery’s program,” Marsel said.

He added that “every fish counts,” especially when it comes to chinook. The species is a key cultural figure for the syilx Okanagan Nation, being ntytyix (Chief Salmon) of the Four Food Chiefs.

“People don’t realize how rare they are, and a lot of people don’t even know that there’s chinook in the system,” he explained.

While much attention has been paid to sockeye salmon restoration efforts, Marsel said chinook hold a particularly important place in the culture.

“For the syilx Nation and all the people here, it means so much more,” he explained. “Not that sockeye aren’t important, but ntytyix holds a lot more meaning.”

The partnership to help chinook recover by sharing eggs hasn’t just transcended the border, however. It might also be helping transcend some political divisions between First Nations.

In recent years, the newly established Sinixt Confederacy — under the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation — has at times been at odds with Okanagan Nation Alliance over legal and territorial claims related to the historically displaced Sinixt people, and which tribal council represents their descendants. The Okanagan Nation Alliance has asserted that the Sinixt people have always existed as part of the larger syilx Nation rather than as its own entity.

During the hatchery partnership’s decade, the tensions have resulted in chinook egg transfers being withheld, Marsel said — but he firmly believes the two tribal governments realize working together for salmon outweighs their inter-governmental disagreements. 

“We have this same common goal,” he said. “Working together is what’s going to make it better.”

“To have the collaboration is extremely important, not only for the people but definitely the environment, the salmon [and] everything that thrives off the salmon.”

But long before the two modern-day tribal organizations were formed, Marsel said Indigenous communities in the region always supported and traded with one another.

“We have family down in Colville Confederated Tribes,” he said. “There was trading constantly across that imaginary line that’s now put up.”

“It’s not like this is a new thing where we’re working with Colville Confederated Tribes — but it’s exciting that now we’re working together for a common goal, and that’s conservation.”

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Growing up in Nlakaʼpamux and syilx territories in the 1970s, Joe Gilchrist can’t remember a single summer when wildfire smoke ever trapped him indoors. 

The Merritt, B.C., region’s semi-arid landscape still saw scorching summer temperatures back then, the Secwépemc Nation member recalled, but not the record-breaking fire seasons of recent years. 

“That was thanks to our work that the Indigenous ancestors did on the land,” Gilchrist, who now lives on Skeetchestn Indian Band’s reserve with his daughter, said. 

“Then, everything was still fairly spaced out; the fires were easier to handle.”

Although settlers’ wildfire suppression efforts had become the dominant form of land stewardship when he was young, Indigenous communities in the Nicola Valley were still using fire to “cleanse” the land, Gilchrist said.

Cultural burning was a key part of Indigenous land stewardship for thousands of years, he told IndigiNews. “It was all across Canada — it used to be done to the north, the south, the east and west.”

Sharing his knowledge at the UN climate talks in Brazil

Now in his 50s, Gilchrist is playing a leading role in uplifting and advancing his ancestors’ fire-keeping traditions — and sharing that wisdom far beyond his own nation’s territories. 

But he didn’t always conduct burns. For three decades, Gilchrist served as a professional firefighter.

Since retiring from that career, he has assumed the role of a traditional Indigenous firekeeper. 

That work now takes him around the world to promote the benefits of Indigenous land stewardship — in particular how to cleanse the landscape with cultural burning — in hopes of making it more widespread internationally. 

This month, his mission took him far south to Brazil, where he spoke at the United Nations climate summit, COP30.

At that major international event, he shared his extensive experience as a leader in a growing Indigenous-led fire movement. The summit saw fierce confrontations between security and Indigenous land defenders.

“I got into talking, presenting and just seeing the importance and the need for cultural burning as climate change happened,” he said in an interview before his departure.

“Seeing that the forest was too thick — that it needed to be looked after properly.”

He’s also been to Australia, Fiji, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Colombia and United Nations meetings in Rome to promote cultural burning and land stewardship.

In his travels, he’s met countless fellow Indigenous people who share and advocate for those same values — many of them with ancient cultural burning traditions of their own.

Gilchrist is widely recognized for his leadership in the movement in his homelands, serving as vice-chair of the Thunderbird Collective, an Indigenous organization pushing for more cultural fire practices. He’s also a member of the Salish Fire Keepers Society.

Through the Thunderbird Collective, he hopes to train and support Indigenous communities in fire stewardship and cultural burning.

Being a cultural firekeeper requires significant responsibility and time. But he realized advocacy work was also needed — something he’s taken upon himself, after recognizing how frequent and devastating wildfires have become in the era of climate change. 

“The loss to fires is getting pretty catastrophic,” he said. “It’s always sad to see the loss.”

“There is a better way of looking after the land, so that it’s not so dangerous to the public. … It is doable.”

‘Our ancestors used to do that all across North America’

Gilchrist began working with fire when he was just 15, to help support his family, after his carpenter stepdad got injured on the job.

He started his 30-year firefighting career with the BC Wildfire Service in 1982, working with the agency until 2012. He retired from fighting fires shortly after.

In 1991, he was a member of the Merritt Firedevils, a type one all-Indigenous emergency unit crew, which is a group of firefighters who are “usually the first to arrive at a fire site to suppress a wildfire,” the BC Wildfire Service states.

One year later, he became the crew’s leader, and travelled all over the country to fight fires, carrying on the prescribed burning traditions of his ancestors. 

In 1996, he moved to full-time work with the BC Wildfire Service, completing a 16-week government training program, Indigenous Fire Prevention.

That’s where he began to learn more about fire prevention and Indigenous use of fire to steward the land.

He also discovered the practice wasn’t just common in his own territories. 

“It’s amazing that our ancestors used to do that all across North America,” he said. “It goes all the way down to South America, Africa, Australia — the whole thing was all burning.”

‘You can’t do work on the forest just once’

Historically in his region, Gilchrist said Indigenous people conducted low-intensity controlled burns every spring and fall, to support different habitats and maintain varying landscapes — including to deter forest overgrowth.

The ancestral practice — also known as prescribed or cultural burns — helped “cleanse the land” by preventing trees from encroaching on one another. This kept forests healthy by decreasing fuel — such as low-hanging branches, small or dead trees and other vegetation — from accumulating as time passed.

“When you burn it lightly in the springtime, the fire consumes the fuels and turns it into nutrients for the plants,” Gilchrist explained.

But, he emphasized, that process was never a one-off. Treating forests with light burns needs to happen every seven to 15 years.

“You can’t do work on the forest just once,” he said. “It has to be continuous — it has to be more of a lifestyle change.”

During prescribed burns, trees are pruned by slashing low-hanging branches. This tactic thins forests and creates more space between trees. It also helps prevent fires from climbing to treetops and spreading to other trees.

Slashed branches are piled with the other gathered fuel and sometimes burned at a later date, which was typically sometime in the winter season.

“The longer that you don’t have fire on the ground, the [more] fuel builds up,” Gilchrist said. “But also the forest encroaches on itself — trees become denser and thicker.”

“Then they become diseased, because there’s only so much water for the trees and for the land.”

Different burn cycles achieved different landscapes, and helped prevent trees from taking over, he said.

“That’s how it was for thousands of years. And if you don’t do that, you get to where we’re at now, where it’s too thick.”

“It happens if you don’t look after the land — if you don’t steward the land with fire.”

Historically, much of the Nicola Valley was grassland, rather than the thick forests found in many areas there today, Gilchrist said.

Since ancient times, the local valley bottoms were host to massive cottonwood trees, growing alongside Indigenous pithouses and other traditional structures.

Firekeepers maintained those grasslands and meadows by burning the land every two years, he said. Controlled burns destroyed any tree seedlings, needles or pine cones, preventing them from spreading.

But thinning the woodlands also made hunting easier, too.

The practice helped local communities, too, improving hunting areas and encouraging different medicines to grow in the open grasslands left by burning.

“You have to burn every two years — perpetually — for thousands of years, and it’ll stay a healthy grassland,” he said. 

“But once you miss a few burn cycles, the trees become taller than the light burning can kill. Eventually, the trees start to take over.”

In the fall, at higher elevations, burning every four years allowed huckleberry patches to grow and prosper. These burns also nurtured other medicines, and habitat for both ungulates and wetland species.

Light burns along river banks helped deepen and strengthen the roots of some deciduous trees — such as cottonwood, willow and alder.

Encouraging those trees to flourish helped keep the water cool for fish, as it provided patches of shade over a waterway. It also protected river banks from erosion and flooding.

“There’s a lot of reasons and ways that the fire was used in a good way,” Gilchrist said.

A large Indigenous settlement once stood where the city of Merritt is today, at the junction of the Nicola and Coldwater rivers.

“The area around the community was burned just for protection and safety from fire in the summertime,” he recounted.

“Everything was known, especially by the matriarchs of the land. … The females kept the stories of when it was last burned, where the medicine was picked, where the berries were ready, when it needed to be burned again.”

Settler fire suppression gradually stamped out cultural burning

Settlers built their houses and towns out of wood, often in the middle of heavily forested, fire-prone areas.

“A lot of people want to live in the forest with the trees,” Gilchrist said. “They don’t want to see fire in the trees.”

This practice of low-intensity controlled burns slowly became less common by the end of the 20th century, as settlers’ worldviews about land stewardship and suppressing fire came to dominate.

“I think it was the fear of fire,” Gilchrist mused. “Seeing people lighting fires must’ve looked dangerous, I guess.”

“You make that illegal — so that people aren’t adding fire to the land — then you just start putting out fires that you see.”

Summertime wildfires, many sparked by lightning, began to threaten colonial settlements — and this is when Gilchrist believes today’s rapid-response fire-suppression model took root. It was a “hit fast, hit hard” approach to wildfires, he said.

In a semi-arid landscape, unless there are smaller, frequent burns to consume fuels that fall to the ground, that natural debris will pile up and dry out even more.

“They don’t deteriorate,” he said. “They just stay on the ground and wait for fire — it just keeps building up and building up.”

“It just becomes more and more of a danger, the longer that you don’t have a fire on the land. … Now we’re seeing huge megafires because of that kind of land stewardship.” 

Gilchrist sees cultural burning as a type of medicine for the ecosystem. Suppressing that medicine, in favour of reactionary firefighting efforts, has now resulted in the fuel-filled forests that we have today — as he sees it, thick and sick with disease and debris.

“Now, we’re seeing responses becoming ineffective, because the fires are just too intense,” he lamented. “With climate change, the only thing you can really change is the fuel.

“Over thousands of years, it was done. It’s a cleansing. It was made natural by Indigenous people.”

Today, combined with the effects of climate change, hotter, drier and even windier summer conditions have created “the recipe for megafires,” he said.

“The earth can only handle so [many] trees on it, because there’s just not enough rain, not enough moisture, to support the amount of trees that are here,” he said.

As the climate has changed, so has the typical fire season. At one time, Gilchrist recalled, that season would usually be over by early September.

“Now, we’re seeing it move into October, maybe even longer,” he said. “The burn seasons are even getting longer, too, with climate change.”

“That’s just adding more and more of a danger to society.”

Learning to apply fire ‘when we could, as often as possible’

During his decades-long career with BC Wildfire Service, Gilchrist helped conduct hundreds of prescribed burns “for all different reasons.” 

In that time, he and his crews applied fire across thousands of hectares around Merritt and the surrounding Nicola Valley, even going as far as Lytton and Hedley. 

That work often involved partnering with municipalities and First Nations. 

And, like how his own ancestors conducted that work, different burns were done in the spring and fall seasons.

“We did elk, deer and moose habitat burns, even mountain beaver,” he recalled. “​As we discovered person-caused fires, we would burn those, too.

“We applied fire just when we could, as often as possible.”

His crew favoured a “light hands on the land” approach to their prescribed burn work, avoiding when possible heavy fire-suppression machinery such as bulldozers.

Areas that required prescribed burns were determined by their proximity to a community — such as creating a 2.5-kilometre “buffer” around the city of Merritt, he said.

Previous prescribed burn work he and his crew did ultimately helped mitigate the Lily Lake wildfire outside of Merritt in 1999, which burned approximately 110 hectares.

“We burned it at nighttime to control it,” he recalled. “We did a lot of work around that area.”

Revisiting burns of the past

In July, Gilchrist brought IndigiNews to visit places he’d applied fire to decades ago, such as a forested area around Fox Farm Road. He estimates it’s been at least 20 years since the area was treated.

At the city’s north end, Gilchrist showed IndigiNews another area he once treated with fire, roughly 15 years ago.

He pointed out how signs of his work can still be seen today, for instance how well-spaced the trees are from each other, he noted, and how their lower branches had been pruned to reduce wildfire fuel. 

But in the years that passed, piles of needle droppings from the tree branches had since accumulated into a thick layer blanketing the ground.

“You can pick it up and hear it crunch,” he said. “It’s not powdery yet, but it’s still able to burn.”

Over the course of 20 years, he also did fire mitigation work on the property around his sister’s home in Nooaitch Indian Band, within Nlaka’pamux Nation. 

That work included cycles of spacing and removing damaged trees, slashing, piling and burning every two to five years.

The results of his work there, he said, offer proof of the importance of ancient fire practices amidst climate change.When the catastrophic Lytton fire jumped the Nicola River and swept through the area in 2021, his sister’s home remained unscathed, even though it was made of logs.But it also underscored how personal the climate crisis has become for many. Just months later, that fall’s catastrophic atmospheric river flooded the region, and washed away his sister’s log house, Gilchrist said.

Cultural burning could help mitigate a smoke-filled future

Nearly 50 years since his youthful days in Merritt, smoky summers — for weeks or even months — are no longer a rarity for communities in the province’s Interior.

Nowadays, such summers have simply become normal and expected, along with the air-quality warnings and extreme health concerns that come with them.

“Our kids are going through that,” Gilchrist lamented.

In syilx Okanagan homelands, for example, smoky summers have seemingly been normalized in recent years — with local media outlets even using terms like “Smoke-anagan” to describe the distressing climate-fuelled trend.

Since 2021, there have been more than 1,600 wildfires each year in B.C., according to the province. Two years ago, nearly 2,300 fires burned 2.8 million hectares — 300,000 more hectares than the record-breaking 2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons combined.

Niigaan Sinclair, an Indigenous scholar and commentator, told Canada’s National Observer that one in seven First Nations in Canada experienced being evacuated during this year’s wildfire season.

Gilchrist himself said that he’s been evacuated at least five times in the last five years.

He noticed that wildfire seasons were starting to worsen following the 1994 wildfire in snpink’tn (Penticton), also known as the Garnet fire, which saw 5,500 hectares burned. More than 3,500 people were evacuated and 18 homes and structures were lost.

Amid the climate crisis, Gilchrist said the devastation wrought by worsening wildfires could be likened to a form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“There’s kind of like a PTSD that people get when they see fire and things like that,” he said.

“When you wake up in the morning and the valley is filled with smoke — you wonder where the fire is at, whether it’s going to be a danger to yourself.”

Prescribed burns on the rise in B.C. — but more are still needed

Gilchrist said that prescribed burn work in the province is “slowly” going in the right direction, “but it needs to be multiplied hundreds of times.”

Last year, 3,400 hectares of land were treated with 48 cultural and prescribed burns — 23 of them in partnership with First Nations, according to the BC Wildfire Service.

That’s more than double the total number carried out the year before, and up more than a third from 2022. 

The planned burns are skyrocketing year-over-year. This year saw 135 planned, the provincial fire agency said.

But even with the increase in such projects, Gilchrist said even more are needed to keep the land healthy. He believes hundreds of thousands of hectares across the province need to once again be treated with prescribed fire.

“We’re not burning enough,” he said. “It’s just a mind-boggling amount of work that needs to be done. … We need to speed things up.”

But even as authorities increasingly support the ancient practice, he believes prescribed and cultural burns need even more buy-in from government, academia and media. 

During the Thunderbird Collective’s first formal gathering in snpink’tn (Penticton) in September, the group heard from numerous Indigenous communities about the colonial barriers they said still exist against cultural burning, including regulatory and permitting challenges.

So public education is increasingly essential, Gilchrist said.

“Start spending more on prevention, wildfire mitigation and Indigenous land stewardship,” he said. 

More planned fires on the landscape bring not just greater ecological health, he emphasized. They also offer financial savings.

“You’ll start spending less money on suppression. People know that there is a better way of managing the forest and the land.”

“My thing now is pushing for Indigenous land stewardship and the Indigenous use of fire on the land. We need to get things going.”

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As the morning sun beams down upon them, dozens of elementary students eagerly make their way from their bus to a large garden plot of soil by the banks of sq’awsitkʷ (the Okanagan River).

Waiting for the group from Outma Sqilx’w Cultural School are shrubs native to syilx homelands — snowberry, chokecherry, saskatoon berry and wild roses — and trees including willow.

The saplings, still in their infancy, are ready to be planted with the help of the children’s hands and enthusiasm. 

“We’re going to save the world! We’re going to save the world!” one student enthusiastically proclaims as they stride along.

And with the guidance of adults — who had brushed the saplings’ roots with mycorrhizal fungi or bone meal fertilizer to help support their growth — the students get to digging and planting. Just steps away, the river roars past. 

The vegetation will not only grow to provide shade and help keep the water cool for future salmon migrating through the passage site, but it’ll also create habitat for different animals, too — birds, rodents and bugs, to name a few.

Changed landscape, restored ecosystem

The community planting event was a two-day effort that began on Nov. 7. Participants planted roughly 500 native species into the land around the dam’s fish passage channel, which opened in August.

At this point the waterway diverts into two channels — the main vein going straight through the Okanagan Lake Dam in sn’pink’tn (Penticton), and a smaller flow bypassing the dam into kɬúsx̌nítkʷ (Okanagan Lake) through the fish passage.

The Okanagan Nation Alliance and several partners built the fish passage around the dam earlier this year to support returning salmon as they migrate to the upstream side of the dam, hoping to spawn in waterways connected to the lake.

“In 10 years, it’ll be an absolutely changed landscape,” said Lee McFadyen, an environmental advocate who helped organize the event.

“It will have a changed feel to it — it will become an ecosystem unto itself.”

For decades, salmon were blocked from moving upriver into the lake because of the dam and channelization — an engineering process to straighten a winding waterway. For thousands of years before settler colonialism, the fish swam freely into kɬúsx̌nítkʷ and its creeks.

McFadyen said this fall season’s salmon run saw the first sockeye in decades return to the lake. 

“The first time since the 1920s,” she said, proudly.

To build the fish passage channel, some trees had to be removed, disturbing soil in the area. McFadyen said part of Okanagan Nation Alliance’s philosophy is to plant native species when soil is disturbed by a project.

Planting event was a ‘collaborative effort’ with over 200 children and adults participating

The group from Outma Sqilx’w Cultural School were among the 115 other students across four schools in the region who took part in the planting event’s first day. 

Additionally, roughly 100 adults joined the planting, too, as well as community youth groups including Penticton Scouts and Venturers.

“What I really love about it is the collaborative effort — the coming together of communities. That is so important,” said McFadyen.

“If we all don’t work together, we’re not going to make it.”

She said it was wonderful to have syilx kids there, whose ancestral relationship with salmon “has been so much part of their history.”

Being out on the land and learning gives the children “a sense of place, a sense of time, a sense of pride and a sense of belonging,” she added.

“One of the things that they might take away — and I hope that they do — is a pride of place, and a reconnection with their past. But moving forward with it.”

She called the planting event “a historical moment” for everyone involved.

“It is righting a wrong,” she said. “It is food for the future for so many species and communities.”

Land-based learning is integral to syilx education, teacher says

nx̌əx̌sítatkʷ Shayla Allison, a culture and language teacher at Outma Sqilx’w Cultural School, accompanied three of her grade school classes to the planting event.

She said that the land-based learning activities that her classrooms engage in — from planting and harvesting, to visiting hunting camps — are “authentic to who we are as a people.”

“Before there were Western systems, schools and classrooms, our children have always learned … by being, connecting, learning and being intimate with the connections around you, like life and land,” Allison said.

“That’s how we survived and lived. We knew about the science of plants, ecosystems, habitat — everything. The ways that we learned came from those ways of connecting with people and places.”

Every week, she said, they go out on the land and learn.

“Just connecting with the land. Also making sure that we’re respectful to the land, and leaving it better than it was when we got here,” she said.

“The way I always try to look at it, is wanting these kids to not learn from a book. Or learn that science is from a Western construct, or done and taught in Western old school ways of sitting in a class.”

The beauty is seeing young people with learning or social challenges “thrive in that outdoor environment” and become “whole new kids.”

“They get out, they’re the ones that are digging in the land — they’re smiling and they’re helpful. You see a new person,” she said.

“You see the value of taking them out, and seeing them be less censored and scared or afraid of being wrong. There is no wrong.”

Whatever teachings they learn on the land are then brought back to the classroom, where they then “solidify what they learned and how they learned it,” Allison said.

“Everyday, they learn how — one, they’re sacred as being children — but also, they can do good things and be helpful, even with learning. Your energy, your prayers and your thoughts go into everything that you do,” she said.

“They learn, each time, about coming with good intentions and good feelings, being helpful.”

Coming in with good intentions enables them to be mindful of where they are and who they’re with, she said.

“We’re all here to learn. We may make mistakes, but we make sure to come with good intentions and heart,” she said.

“It teaches them to be more observant and seeing — seeing the natural world and the people.”

There’s no better place to educate children “than getting out and doing things” through experiential learning, she concluded — “finding a way to connect everything to what we’ve already always known — to be authentic in sqilx’w and Indigenous teachings wherever you can.”

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Sitting among a group of fellow Indigenous fire keepers in syilx homelands, Rachel Cavanagh shared knowledge about cultural burns where she is from in Australia.

“Ceremony,” she said, “has such a huge part to play in implementing fire.”

A Minjungbal woman from the Bundjalung/Yugambeh Nation, Cavanagh journeyed more than 12,000 kilometres to attend the inaugural National Indigenous Fire Gathering in snpink’tn (Penticton). 

The summit brought together more than 100 Indigenous knowledge holders, leaders and experts from Canada, the United States and Australia between Sept. 23 and 25. 

As Cavanagh explained it, the practice of implementing cultural fires year-round is not just about taking care of the landscapes and ecosystems on her nation’s territories — what Indigenous Peoples in her homeland call “Country.”

“It is about our medicines,” she said. “It is about the right type of smoke that is actually really healing for the body.”

“We use it to welcome our babies onto Country. We use it to say goodbye to our Elders as they transition through. We use it for all manner of different things.”

Having Elders out on Country during cultural burns — whether they’re implementing fire themselves, or telling stories and dancing — is key.

“It’s that intergenerational transfer of knowledge,” she emphasized. “It’s the sharing and storytelling that comes with practicing our culture and doing what we’re doing.”

As a member of the cultural fire movement, she said Indigenous fire practitioners are pushing for Australian governments to recognize them as “traditional custodians” of their territories.

“We still struggle to access our land,” she said.

Her message was far from unique to the Southern Hemisphere. It resonated with — and echoed — the experiences of many other Indigenous fire experts at the gathering. 

A renewed need for cultural burns

September’s gathering in snpink’tn came roughly five years after an earlier meeting of Indigenous representatives from nations across Canada.

At that earlier event, attendees had raised alarms about “how sick the land was,” because its forests were no longer being maintained appropriately, leading to a thick overgrowth of vegetation and woody debris.

They warned this was fuelling the severity of fires, urging Western governments not to ignore the risk any longer.

“It was a really great gathering of like-minded people that are interested in cultural burning — how Indigenous people want to be able to look after the land again,” said Joe Gilchrist, an Indigenous fire keeper from the Skeetchestn Indian Band, a Secwépemc community west of Kamloops.

“Everything was causing pressure for us as Indigenous people to raise our voices and say, ‘We have a way to save communities … with cultural burning and Indigenous land stewardship.’ ”

Before settler colonialism, Indigenous nations across the continent regularly conducted low-intensity controlled burns, carefully planned to maintain and replenish the health of the land and its ecosystems.

This ancient method of burning forests and grasslands — using what are today known as prescribed, controlled, cultural or traditional burns — encouraged particular plants and medicines to grow, while also preventing forest overgrowth. 

Those practices limited the threat of devastating wildfires blazing out of control.

In the valleys, Secwépemc people conducted early burns in the spring, Gilchrist explained; in the fall, they repeated the practice in the mountains.

“Early spring was for our medicine down below in the grasslands,” he added, “and up high was for our higher elevation medicine areas, food for the animals to eat.”

But while Secwépemc people saw fire as a medicine, settlers gradually removed it from their ecosystems, suppressing it as a problem to be fought. 

Settlers favoured logging over maintaining forest health. As reactionary approaches to fighting wildfires became conventional, they led to more debris accumulating in the country’s forests — ironically, leading to even more devastating wildfires today.

Indigenous fire keepers see directly how bad today’s wildfires have become — “how bad the losses are, evacuations, all that kind of stuff,” said Gilchrist.

But they also see something more positive in their communities.

“How much people just love the land, the animals, the fish, the air we breathe, the water,” he said. “How fire is essential to all of that.”

‘Breaking down those challenges and barriers’

As they gathered in snpink’tn, Indigenous experts from around the world discussed ways they have been using fire to steward their homelands for generations.

They also highlighted bureaucratic barriers impeding their ability to do so.

The similarities between different First Nations’ approaches — and colonial resistance to them — were numerous.

“People are interested in collaborating and networking, to see what other people are doing,” said Charlene John, a member of the Tsal’alh First Nation, a St’at’imc community west of Lillooet. 

John chairs the Thunderbird Collective’s steering committee, which organized the three-day gathering.

One of the meeting’s goals, she said, was for Indigenous communities to share strategies to overcome the various longstanding barriers that exist to cultural burning.

“Then, the Thunderbird Collective can start working toward breaking down those challenges and barriers, by providing resources or tools, or linking people in networks,” she said.

Common issues highlighted by Indigenous participants at the gathering included regulatory and permitting challenges around conducting cultural burns. 

A growing number of First Nations communities want to be included in improving their landscapes through cultural burning, John said, “and how that creates safer environments from wildfire.”

Cultural burning also requires removing barriers to Indigenous communities participating in responding to wildfires, too. 

To John, that means creating First Nations structures parallel to Western governments’ incident-command wildfire-fighting agencies, “to be able to initiate how the fire should be put out, to be able to have that say,” she added.

“Not only here, but many First Nations people wish to advance and wish to seek the rights and authority to assert themselves in [fire] scenarios.”

Hearing these concerns is crucial, as it helps provide the collective with a framework on “how to solve those issues, eventually, as we develop and regrow,” John noted.

But it’s not just about creating greater access to cultural burning for Indigenous communities — it’s about land stewardship. 

Or, as John puts it, “seeing the resilience brought back.”

To achieve that, she described “four pillars” of the movement: knowledge-sharing, advocacy, land-based cultural practices and sovereignty.

“These types of gatherings are going to help drive us to what we’re doing in our four pillars,” she said.

“As we develop, we can also grow and help fill those gaps that people are still seeing in the different systems.”

Supporting ‘practices that Indigenous people want in the fire world’

Before the Thunderbird Collective arose from a 2024 naming ceremony in Tk’emlúps (Kamloops), the group was called the National Indigenous Wildfire Management Working Group.

Last month’s gathering was the federally funded group’s first formal gathering under its new name.

“Our goal is to grow and develop,” John said, “and move beyond the federal funding.”

The Indigenous-led organization is “restoring the sacred relationship between fire, land and people,” she explained, “cultivating healthy landscapes, resilient communities and multigenerational learning.”

The steering committee consists of nine Indigenous people from different nations across Canada — many of whom are fire keepers and specialists who participate in and promote cultural burning around the world.

“That’s a big part of why they’re here,” John said. “To support cultural burning, to support all the practices that Indigenous people want in the fire world.”

One of those specialists is Secwépemc fire keeper Gilchrist, who is the steering committee’s vice-chair. Gilchrist started fighting fires when he was just 15. 

He led the Merritt Unit Fire Crew from 1991 to 1996, before finishing his firefighting career with BC Wildfire Service in the early 2010s.

“Now, I travel around and I spread the word about cultural burning and Indigenous land stewardship,” he said. 

That work has taken him to Australia, Fiji, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Colombia and United Nations meetings in Rome to promote cultural burning and land stewardship. In his travels, he’s met many Indigenous Peoples who share and advocate for those same values.

Later this month, he’ll be taking his message to COP30 in Brazil, for the 2025 United Nations climate change conference. 

“Just all over the world they say the exact same thing as we do — about our love for the land, our love for our animals and our water,” he said.

“Fire was used … all around the globe.”

Keeping Indigenous fire traditions alive isn’t just about caring for the land and preventing out-of-control wildfires, however.

Co-ordinating with other communities on the issue is also helping assert Indigenous sovereignty, “upholding our jurisdiction, and practicing our rights,” Justin Kane, chief of Ts’kw’aylaxw First Nation and a member of the Thunderbird Collective’s steering committee, said. 

‘This work is a part of our assertion of sovereignty’

On the gathering’s first day, both regional and international Indigenous communities spoke of the different ways that they use fire to manage their territory — work that correlates to exercising title and sovereignty over their land.

In sməlqmíx (Similkameen)-syilx territory, Lauren Terbasket of the Lower Similkameen Indian Band said managing her people’s territories through fire and water diversion is a way of asserting “title and rights.”

“We believe that this work is a part of our assertion of sovereignty on the land,” she added. 

Continuing to use traditional and ancient management practices, such as cultural burns, is a way to prove her nation’s “ongoing use and occupation,” Terbasket said.

“It’s not just a matter of making partnerships, although that’s what we do — it is our way of asserting our title, our jurisdiction and our rights on our own lands.”

In 2018, the band conducted a prescribed burn in the Crater Creek area with BC Wildfire Service and other government agencies. 

This area is located within the Ashnola Corridor, which was designated as an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area in 2022. 

When the Crater Creek wildfire swept through the area in 2023, burning more than 40,000 hectares of land, Terbasket said it exhibited “high intensity burning right until it hit the edge of our traditional burned area.”

But many homes located on different reserves throughout the community were not touched by the fire, she recalled.

“We and our Elders believe that it’s because we continue to exercise our responsibility to the land,” she said.

The band is now in the middle of a multi-year prescribed burn project to the akɬʕpas (Place of the Nighthawk) area, with phase one seeing 40 of 370 hectares treated last spring.

“It was really in response to habitat degradation — it was an area that was completely overgrown with sage brush,” Terbasket said. 

“Nothing else was growing there. Our traditional foods were no longer growing.”

Without fires ‘our homes become tinder boxes’

Similarly, Margo Robbins, of the Yurok Tribe in California, said her culture also depends on fire. 

Fire helps them in many ways, she explained — regularly burning the landscape helps foster medicines and traditional food sources, and also encourages the growth of plants used for basket-making.

“Before we started burning, you’d seldom see a deer on the reservation,” said Robbins, co-founder and executive director of the Cultural Fire Management Council.

She described her community’s young men leaving their reservation — sometimes risking heavy fines — to bring deer meat home to feed their families.

“Now,” Robbins said, “they just go to the places where we burn.”

Fire also impacts her community’s water quality, she said.

“When we burn and leave the charcoal on the landscape, it filters the water, making it more pure,” she explained.

“Also, it reduces the amount of vegetation on the land, [creating] more water flow to the creeks, which flows to the rivers.”

Most important, the community’s use of prescribed and cultural burning also helps prevent out-of-control wildfires.

“One of the few things that impacts the spread and intensity of wildfire is where the place has already been burned,” she said. 

“In the absence of fire, our homes become tinder boxes.”

‘Let’s take our place in the ecosystem’

It’s only been 12 years since the Yurok people reclaimed their right to do cultural burns. 

Robbins said her grandchildren have never known a world where their community did not manage fire on their territories.

“It’s really an ambition to be putting fire on the ground,” she explained, “to help create the enabling conditions for not only us to burn, but for others to burn also.”

She is part of several groups who meet together to influence state policy and guide legislation. 

In 2021, California created a prescribed fire liability fund “to support and expand private prescribed fires throughout the state,” budgeting US$20 million (C$28 million) for the initiative.

She believes it’s “our responsibility as humans” to help take care of the land with fire.

“We can’t just rely on lightning strikes to do it,” she said. “We are part of the ecosystem. We need to step up.”

She hopes more Indigenous Peoples learn to reconnect with traditions that “use fire safely” again. 

“Let’s take our place in the ecosystem to restore it to help.”

One strategy the community undertook was to get everyone involved in encouraging family burns. Robbins explained this approach was the Yurok’s “traditional way of burning” — families “out burning around their homes and gathering places, at the right place at the right time,” she said.

They also offer “aspiring firefighter workshops” for “people that have never worked with fire that want to learn how,” she said.

“It’s my belief that everybody should have the right to use fire. We used to have that right. We used to do that, and our landscapes looked a lot better.”

‘We do it the way we want to do it’

Seven participants represented First Nations in Australia at the gathering, where they offered insight into their people’s relationship with fire and how they use it on their homelands.

“In different places, during certain climates, we’ll burn for plants, for animals,” Deborah Swan, a Ngarrindjeri imimini (woman), said.

“We never use fuel. To us, that’s another contamination to soil and the Earth. We use natural fibers and things like fire sticks.”

Certain fire sticks are used depending on a burn’s objectives — for instance, what kind of plants or other resources a fire keeper is hoping will regenerate afterwards.

She noted her community comes across different government legislation that is “trying to take our knowledge” without actually respecting Indigenous Peoples leading the work.

“Sometimes, we’re being put to the side,” she said. “Or they’re still using fuel, or still telling us when we can burn.”

She believes the fire traditions must be maintained “to keep our women strong, and know that they’re supported to continue their practices.”

Cultural burns, she said, are still “very much a community burn.”

“The children are there,” she explained. “You can walk around barefeet if you want to.”

When it comes to cultural burning on Crown land, Cavanagh said Australian federal and state governments claim they want to include First Nations’ voices in fire legislation and create opportunities for them.

But that inclusion happens on settlers’ terms, “under their prescriptions,” she said — with government telling Indigenous Peoples rules such as, “You must do this training” or “You have to wear a hat, you got to wear shoes, you got to do all these things.”

But cultural fire on Country is easy for her community when it’s on their private lands, she said. 

“We do it the way we want to do it. It is actually us leading and having a say on what that looks like. That’s the important thing.”

Fire as a source of Indigenous healing

Cassandra McKechnie — who is Wiradjuri, Taepadthigi, Kulkagal, Saibailaig and Erubian — said the cultural fire space has become a source of healing for Indigenous Peoples in Australia.

“You see the impact it has on Country and everything that lives within Country, and that extends to us as well,” McKechnie said.

“I started to feel that in myself and in my spirit.”

Rhys Pacey, a Waagay cultural burn practitioner and the chief fire practitioner with Yurruungga Aboriginal Corporation, said the beauty of cultural burning is also in all the relationships it builds — not just with the community and its children, but with the land itself.

That includes interacting with wildlife, trees and other plants, Pacey said.

Once a cultural fire is started, and its smoke begins to appear, “You just see the way everything reacts,” he explained. “Then you stop and you use all your senses. You just immerse yourself. It’s repairing.”

Dean Thomas Kelly, chief executive officer of Yurruungga Aboriginal Corporation, described himself as “a proud Gumbaynggirr custodian.” 

Kelly said gatherings of Indigenous Peoples — like the one in snpink’tn last month — help him realize “we haven’t lost anything when we come together.”

“And I think that is the most beautiful journey I have been on.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This story is a collaboration between The Narwhal and IndigiNews. It is part of Generating Futures, a series from The Narwhal exploring clean energy sovereignty among B.C. First Nations.

Deep in a clear-skied valley in B.C.’s Southern Interior, a vast array of identical black solar panels stretches into the distance, digesting invisible meals of sunlight.For the occasion, Oregon Jack Creek Band Chief Matt Pasco holds one end of a giant, make-believe power outlet with a cotton rope for a wire, a lighthearted decoy to celebrate B.C.’s first grid-scale solar project at an event on Oct. 16. But the real thing is already hooked up and buzzing in the background. “We got it built ahead of schedule, by quite a bit,” Pasco says.

For Pasco, chair and title protector at the Nlaka’pamux Nation Tribal Council, the quA-ymn Solar Facility is a reminder of how quickly things can move under the right conditions. And how long it can take for them to arrive. 

Built atop a reclaimed tailings pond on the Highland Valley Copper mine near the town of Logan Lake, the project’s 39,000 solar panels span the equivalent of around 80 football fields, capturing enough sunlight to power 2,400 homes annually.

The project is a partnership between the tribal council and BluEarth Renewables and was financed by the Canada Infrastructure Bank. At the project’s outset, the Nlaka’pamux council included the Oregon Jack Creek (Nteqem/Snapaa), Lytton, Skuppah, Boothroyd and Spuzzum member communities, though the latter is no longer part of the council.

“It’s taken a real extraordinary effort to get here,” Tom McCarthy, B.C. deputy minister for policy and coordination, said in a speech at the event. “I also know this wasn’t a sure thing.”

It took a court case and snarling bureaucratic delays over a period of 14 years, a saga that concluded in victory for the Nlaka’pamux Nation as the assembled crowd toured the facility. 

Globally, solar capacity has ballooned in recent years, driven by technological innovations and economies of scale — but B.C. has lagged behind. Now that this project is complete, the nation already has plans for more. 

“We want to build a new reality and work together in our shared homelands,” Pasco says.

The politics of getting things done in B.C. are undergoing a transformation. Under a new wave of fast-track laws and coming regulations, long-held processes are being scrapped in the name of speed. These changes include Bills 14 and 15, laws that remove environmental assessment requirements and other guardrails from projects including wind farms, transmission lines and new mines. 

But as Nlaka’pamux surveys the view from B.C.’s sole foothold in large-scale solar generation, Nadine Hoehne, a title implementation specialist with the tribal council, has another approach in mind.

“There are ways that the province can be, I think, doing a lot more to support the building of an economy that does include Indigenous people,” she says, of her personal views. 

“They’re just not there yet.”

‘They had no choice’: Nation has fought to have a voice in provincial projects

Nlaka’pamux Nation has seen its fair share of projects pushed through. 

From above, its territory is carved by a web of razor cuts, including two major transmission lines carrying power from the Interior’s dammed rivers to the densely packed urban centres to the west. 

The lines have been there for decades, built without First Nations’ consent despite the wide-open tracts of permanently deforested land they would require.

In 2006, the British Columbia Transmission Corporation, soon to be BC Hydro, hatched a plan to build a third line, stretching between Merritt to Coquitlam.

Pasco says BC Hydro failed to properly negotiate with the nation to address the line’s impacts.

“They wouldn’t sit with us,” Pasco recalls. “So we had to go to court for them to take us seriously.

“Then they had no choice.” 

The province’s utility regulator claimed it had no responsibility to intervene when affected nations raised concerns, but the B.C. Supreme Court found that decision to be an “error in law,” revoking the project’s approval.

In the negotiations that followed, former Chief Melvin Bob of Spuzzum First Nation helped ensure Nlaka’pamux communities worked together as a nation, which Hoehne says was a diametric approach to BC Hydro’s tendency to negotiate with band councils in isolation.

In an email to The Narwhal, BC Hydro says it “consulted extensively with First Nations” on the transmission line’s potential impacts, adding that “BC Hydro has included band councils to take an inclusive approach and been guided by their directions on how, including collectively, they wish to be consulted.”

The process led to a commitment from BC Hydro to develop an ongoing relationship-based approach to development in the territory, and an agreement to buy power from a future energy project of the tribal council’s choosing. 

At the time, such opportunities were scarce. That’s because for most First Nations in the province, BC Hydro’s monopoly system and its vast powerlines are behind a locked door. It chooses when, if ever, to add power to its system. 

Brief openings came in fits and starts, including in the ’80s, when the tribal council’s late Grand Chief Bob Pasco, Chief Matt Pasco’s father, negotiated a partial, rights-based share of a run-of-river project in the territory. Another window opened in the 2000s, when then-premier Gordon Campbell, intent on privatizing everything from energy to health care, created the largest call for independent power producers in the province’s history. As private companies scrambled to place bids, First Nations began to assert their rights over projects in their territories, with many eventually gaining equity stakes in what was then mostly run-of-river hydro projects. 

It wouldn’t last long. By 2010, Campbell announced his government had a new plan: a megadam called Site C. Opportunities for First Nations, many of them still vying to enter the industry, would begin to dry up. 

That meant Nlaka’pamux’s court-assigned agreement with BC Hydro, signed in 2011, was a rare chance.

The nation decided on a solar project situated on the reclaimed tailings pond site. It would “tick all the boxes,” Pasco says, both for its ready-made access to high voltage transmission built for the mine, and because the already-disturbed site would incur a lesser impact. And then, they waited.

Solar project stymied by years-long provincial delays, barriers

For almost a decade, the project was idle, waiting for the B.C. Ministry of Finance to devise a tax policy that would allow the province’s first grid-scale solar project to pay its dues. “It’s pretty clear they didn’t care to do it,” Pasco says. In meetings, he recalls the province told the nation to build the project on its reserve, a prospect both insulting and spatially impossible: the reserve simply did not have the space. “That was their answer multiple times.” 

Nine years into the waiting game, a tax code was finalized at last. But the celebration was short-lived, because the policy’s fine print included a death knell. 

To capture tax revenue, the town of Logan Lake includes Highland Valley Copper mine in its municipal boundaries. Under the new tax policy, quA-ymn’s location on the mine’s reclaimed tailings pond meant the project would pay substantial taxes to both the municipality and the province. 

“It sinks the project,” Hoehne says, remembering the analysis delivered by the nation’s tax consultants.

The district of Logan Lake worked to remove the obstacle, lobbying the provincial government and bringing a motion to the annual conference of municipalities, calling on the province to adjust the rate. But the province refused to budge. 

“Why wouldn’t you support something like this?” Wade Archambault, chief administrative officer at the district of Logan Lake, says. He adds that development projects like quA-ymn offer the town a chance to build its relationship with the nation and an opportunity to diversify its own economy, currently yoked to the mine. In the final hour, the town identified a stop-gap solution, gnarled in the recesses of B.C.’s tax codes, which allows municipalities to provide a decade-long tax-free grace period to special projects. But that means the municipality can’t collect taxes from the project. It’s not a long-term solution, Hoehne says, but “we have 10 years here to deal with it.” Archambault is hoping to find a permanent solution before the 10-year window runs out for his own town, and for others. Without that, future solar projects, including on reclaimed mines, may be stymied. “You’re not going to see any projects happen within municipal boundaries,” he says. 

By email, the finance ministry told The Narwhal change is unlikely, writing, “At this time, the province is not considering the creation of additional property tax classes.” 

How much energy? 

After a decade of bureaucratic inertia, Pasco bristles when he thinks about B.C.’s recent efforts to fast-track major projects and insinuation that consent processes with First Nations are what’s slowing the province down. “I find it gross,” he says, “They’re masking the real problems.” 

Among them, he says, is the province’s disregard for the nation’s jurisdiction that long-sidelined the quA-ymn project, and its failure to plan for the energy needs of the future, which include a growing industry of power-hungry data centres.

When B.C.’s NDP government came into power in 2017, it re-committed to finishing the long-delayed Site C Dam and formally scrapped the long-closed windows for renewable producers,

“B.C. has actually been a bit of a dead zone for renewable energy development,” Arthur Bledsoe says. Bledsoe is a senior analyst on the renewables in remote communities team at the Pembina Institute, yet another group that has long warned of a coming power deficit.  

Then in 2023 BC Hydro pulled a U-turn on its energy forecast, announcing that its anticipated surplus was now an expected deficit, equivalent to roughly half the size of the Site C dam. The fine print reveals that this estimate, too, was conservative, excluding future power required to electrify liquified natural gas (LNG) and the energy needed to meet the province’s climate goals. 

Meanwhile, other threats to B.C.’s energy supply loom, including record droughts impinging on its hydropower supplies, which the province stopped disclosing in 2019 after showing a steep downward trend. 

With B.C.’s energy shortfall on the horizon, Pasco says the province is long overdue for an influx of solar. “It shocks me that solar has taken this long,” he says.

Globally, solar is booming, doubling in capacity in the last two years alone. 

“People are really talking seriously about a future where solar is one of the dominant power sources,” Sara Hastings-Simon, an associate professor in the department of earth, energy and environment at the University of Calgary, says. 

That rapid growth is thanks to falling costs in panel and battery technology and economies of scale. One of solar’s main selling points, Hastings-Simon says, is its relative simplicity compared to complex systems like gas or nuclear plants. It can be scaled up or down, to a balcony or hundreds of football fields, to meet demand. 

Compared to sun-rich provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan, B.C.’s reputation for notoriously cloudy, rainy skies suggests less-than-ideal solar conditions, but that deficiency isn’t province-wide: in the sunny Interior, for example, quA-ymn’s solar conditions match those of Ontario, which currently leads among Canadian jurisdictions for installed solar capacity. 

Even in places with less sun, Hastings-Simon still sees opportunities for solar. “It doesn’t mean that solar is uneconomical,” she says. “It just means that it’s slightly more costly.” As costs for solar continue to fall, she says opportunities for cheap solar power will only widen. 

Nlaka’pamux already developing larger solar project

After years of closed doors, the opportunity for First Nations–owned renewable projects is opening again. 

After a 15-year pause, B.C. announced its first call for bids from power projects last year, and issued a second call this summer. “It’s a time when we can’t build enough,” Cole Sayers, executive director of Clean Energy BC and a member of the Hupacasath First Nation, says. “First Nations leadership is a significant part of that work.”

This time, the province is only accepting bids from big energy projects: a minimum capacity of 40 megawatts, almost three times larger than quA-ymn. 

Thanks to its experience building a smaller project, Nlaka’pamux Nation Tribal Council was ready when the call came, Pasco says. It landed the only solar contract awarded. Once complete by around 2030, it’ll be roughly seven times the size of quA-ymn. 

“We will crush the current largest solar project with our own,” Pasco says. 

As a project developer, Hoehne says the nation intends to do the kind of business it wants to see in the territory. 

The nation plans to dedicate revenue from the projects to build an assisted living facility so that Elders can live near their families. Already, the quA-ymn project has installed rooftop solar systems in eight communities, providing communities with secure power for emergency communications during the worsening years of floods and fires ahead. 

As it develops the next solar project, the tribal council is carrying out its own approach to environmental assessment that prioritizes First Nations’ jurisdiction.

“We’re going out and meeting with the communities and understanding what processes they want to use to decide on the project,” Hoehne says. 

It’s an approach she says the tribal council brings to its meetings with the province. 

“This is the vision,” she says. “This is what we can do when we’re getting it right.”

Updated on Oct. 30, 2025 at 5:00 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Arthur Bledsoe’s name, and to clarify his professional title.

Generating Futures is made possible with support from the Real Estate Foundation of BC. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our stories.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Last year, while completing a wetland assessment with the B.C. Wildlife Federation in the highlands above sw̓iw̓s (Osoyoos, B.C.), Delaney Hall came across the remnants of an old beaver dam along Coteay Creek.

As he continued on along the now-depleted waterway, Hall identified evidence of 36 more former dams, all of which were abandoned along a five-kilometre stretch.

Of those 37, 20 of them are still in good enough condition to be patched up. Some have already been repaired, enabling them to hold back water to create the ponds and reservoirs that make dams so valuable to wetland ecosystems. 

About 15 kilometres downstream from the Mount Baldy Ski Resort, Coteay Creek quietly meanders through a large open field. This area surrounding the creek has become more like a grassland as the wetland has dried up and the beavers — or stunx as they’re known in nsyilxcən, the language of the syilx nations — have disappeared.

“There haven’t been beavers up here for like 30-plus years,” said Hall, a tmixʷ (wildlife) technician with the Okanagan Nation Alliance, a tribal council representing eight member communities.

“There used to be millions and millions of beavers, and now there’s not very many up in the highlands anymore.”

But by mimicking beaver structures, people are determined to coax them back, explained Hall.

“Once you start restoring some of this area, the vegetation starts coming back. And beavers have been known to take over after,” he said.

In the second week of September, Hall led a project with the tribal council, Osoyoos Indian Band and the B.C. Wildlife Federation. The team installed eight manufactured beaver dams along a one-kilometre stretch of Coteay Creek in this open field, in an effort to help revitalize the surrounding wetland’s ecosystem. 

Between the human-made dam structures — also known as beaver dam analogues — the crew also implemented eight additional artificial creek obstructions to mimic natural log jams. They’re known as post-assisted log structures.

“When trees fall over into the creek, it directs the water to the side,” Hall, who’s a member of Osoyoos Indian Band, said.

“We’re using that to help widen out the system, because it’s so low.”

‘The glue that holds habitats together’

Coteay Creek is a tributary of akskʷəkʷant (Inkaneep Creek), which flows into suwiw̓s (Osoyoos Lake). The headwaters of both Coteay and Inakneep creeks are located just below Mount Baldy.

Before the fur trade and settler colonialism decimated the population of beavers in syilx homelands, the semi-aquatic rodents and their dams played a critical role in the ecological functions of local wetlands.

“There used to be like 400 million beavers they estimate, in the country,” Hall said.

“And now, there’s a huge difference,” noting that there’s roughly 12 to 15 million left.

Hall estimates that up to 90 per cent of the province’s wetlands have been lost, and he said much of that loss is linked to the disappearance of beavers from the landscape.

“They had wetlands all over the place, like in every waterway,” he explained. “People need to understand that beavers are a keystone species.” 

“They are the glue that holds habitats together.”

Just a few steps from a turn in the creek and into the field, what appears to be a small mound in the ground to the untrained eye is actually the remnants of the lowest beaver structure in Coteay Creek’s former beaver dam system.

Upon finding the former natural beaver dams, Hall spoke with some Osoyoos Indian Band Elders, who pointed on a map to where they’d previously seen signs of beavers.

“You talk to some of the Elders, they remember beavers in places where the evidence is totally gone now,” he said.

The spot one of the Elders identified “was the exact same place I was talking about,” he said.

He recounted the Elder telling him, “Years ago, that whole [area] — where there’s no trees and stuff — that was all underwater, that was all beaver dam. It was an old wetland back there.”

When beavers are allowed to build their dams unimpeded, those structures act like speed bumps to slow a stream’s flow. They result in pools that hold water along a waterway’s route, Hall said. 

“Beavers create the environment that best suits them,” he explained. “If you ever see a beaver on land, it waddles pretty slow.”

Pools of deeper water are an ideal place for the rodents to swim freely, where they build their dens and canals, the latter serving as  “highways for beavers,” according to Emily Fairfax, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota.

The canals are “little micro streams” that stem from beaver ponds, “across valley bottoms and different landscapes,” Fairfax explained at a webinar hosted by the tribal council in July.

“The pond is definitely a very large and important surface water feature, but the canals take a beaver from influencing half a square kilometre of land, to influencing multiple square kilometres of land,” she said.

Their dams slow down flowing water, spreading it out into floodplains and wetlands.

“It helps recharge the ground water and it slowly releases it over time,” Hall said.

“When you don’t have any of that in a stream system, the water starts to channelize and then it starts to dig itself down.” 

In other words, streams become faster without beaver dams — they widen and straighten, rather than meander, and contribute to the erosion of a stream’s bed.

Beaver dams make landscapes fire-resistant

Wetlands are critical habitat not just for other aquatic beings such as fish and amphibians, but also land animals, including moose, deer and elk, Hall explained.

But with more frequent droughts causing a growing number of streams to dry up, he said “it’s hard out here for the animals.”

“We see them as our relatives,” he added. “They help us sustain our lives, so we gotta help take care of them as well.”

And since beaver dams enable wetlands to keep their surrounding lands moist and green, they act as natural fire breaks, too. 

Fairfax said that beaver-dammed areas are about three times more fire-resistant than rivers without beavers.

She explained that during “megafires,” ecosystems with beaver activity in them offer significant protection from wildfires, becoming what are called “fire refugia” — areas that remain mostly unburned, or experience only low-intensity fires.

“That is helpful and beneficial for the soil and the organisms,” she said.

“It’s really important to have fire refugia available. These are the places that animals will seek out to survive the fire, especially those that can’t outrun a fire.”

Additionally, devastating floods and droughts are less likely to occur where there are multiple beaver dams along a waterway, because their structures slow water down and spread it out into the ground, absorbing water and holding it. 

A wetland is “like a giant sponge,” Hall said, “it just soaks it all up, and slowly releases it over time.”

Beaver dams help cool water temperatures for salmon

In watersheds’ highlands, beaver dams also help regulate water temperatures downstream, because they store cooler water up higher for longer periods, slowly releasing it throughout the whole year instead of all at once. 

This cold water filtering into waterways also supports salmon as they return to spawn, which thrive in cooler temperatures.

“When we had beavers in the system,” Hall said, “we had more fish than we could count.”

But with a lack of beaver dams slowing and holding water, as is the case at Coteay Creek, the water descending from its headwaters flows “so fast now,” Hall lamented.

“More material and sediments have been filling our rivers, which has been destroying fish habitat.”

Snowpacks in the territory are already melting more quickly due to warming temperatures brought on by climate change. But Hill said clearcut logging in the headwaters is accelerating this process. 

Not only do tree canopies reduce local temperatures, but as more snowmelt and rain run off deforested parts of watersheds, these areas also suffer from further erosion due to cattle grazing, and landslides linked to flooding — all of which increases waterflow in streams and creeks, he explained. 

“It has degraded them, and they have suffered lots of erosion,” he said.

“Now we are faced with less snow every year.”

And unless watersheds are protected from top to bottom, he argued, “it will continue to be an uphill battle.”

“There are such huge cumulative impacts in the upper watershed from forestry, mining — all the other users,”qʷəqʷim̓cxn Tessa Terbasket, the siwɬkʷ (water) program lead for Okanagan Nation Alliance, said. 

“But also climate change — these megafires that have been going through and changing the water.”

‘Imitate the beaver’

Terbasket said that protecting upper watersheds throughout the territory should be a priority.

“There’s less things up there now that hold the water back and slow the water down in the watershed,” she said.

“Our system here is very dependent on that — if the water’s not being held up there, and we’re not getting that much snowpack, that means that we are in a drought for the year.”

While frogs, rainbow and brook trout can be spotted within Coteay Creek, most of the four-legged animals found roaming its nearby fields nowadays are cows and wild horses, with black bears and their cubs seen occasionally, too.

On top of the lack of maintained beaver dams slowing the creek’s flow, years of cattle trampling across Coteay Creek have also eroded the creekbed, cutting up to two metres into the ground in places.

Knowing beaver dams’ ability to help naturally maintain the creek’s health and keep water in the wetlands, Hall felt this stretch of the waterway would be the perfect spot to install human-made structures to mimic a beaver dam’s functions.

‘Dirt lasagna’: How to fake a beaver dam

Beaver dam analogues are built by packing layers upon layers of locally harvested fir branches with mud from the creek. The mud is spread and firmed along the upstream side of the structure, reinforcing it and enabling water to slowly trickle down on its other side. 

“Basically, we’re trying to imitate the way a beaver dam is built,” said Hall.

Leanne McDonald, a biologist with the federation, compared the technique to a “dirt lasagna.”

“The [beaver dam analogues] are here to help hold back that water, so that it’s not straight-shooting further down,” the intermediate restoration biologist explained.

The federation has been installing the analogues in waterways across the province for years through their 10,000 Wetlands project.

But the beaver mimicry initiative in Coteay Creek was the first such pilot installation for Okanagan Nation Alliance, which hopes will lead to similar projects in upper watersheds throughout its territories.

“We want to be doing it shoulder-to-shoulder with everybody,” Terbasket said, “because we just see that we need to be doing this work. It just makes so much sense.”

On Sept. 10, McDonald was among five B.C. Wildlife staff members on site to train their Okanagan Nation Alliance and Osoyoos Indian Band counterparts on the technique. 

Natural resource officers with the Lower Similkameen Indian Band also joined the crew later that week, hoping to take the idea back to their own watersheds.

“We would love for [Okanagan Nation Alliance] to be able to do this themselves,” McDonald said, “to have the capacity and the know-how to go find these sites.”

‘It’s really rewarding work’

The team also installed large poles to strengthen both the beaver dam analogues and post-assisted log structures, to keep them in place and to deter cattle from walking across the structures. 

Cattle crossing the waterway has caused a lot of “degradation that we’re seeing” in the creek, McDonald said.

“We’re hoping that by raising the water levels, it will discourage them from wanting to walk through here,” she said.

Their efforts started to pay off quickly. As they installed the structures over a week, they soon noticed the water level beginning to rise, with pools starting to slowly fill in. 

“It’s immediate satisfaction and gratification building these structures,” McDonald said. “You see the results immediately. It’s really rewarding work.”

The pools behind each artificial beaver dam are also designed to trap sediment as water trickles through. That sediment will help raise up the creek bottom, increasing water levels with it and helping restore nearby floodplains.

As the creek waters widen further into their adjacent flats, the hope is for the analogues to trap sediments and encourage the waterway to meander across the plain.

“The more the water meanders, the better it spreads it out,” Hall explained. “It gets everything greener in a wider area.”

As the structures were being built, the crews regularly used a staff gauge to measure a pool’s water levels on the downstream side of each beaver dam analogue, to see how much water was flowing through it.

“We constantly check to make sure that the water hasn’t dropped too much,” Hall said.

“If it starts to go down one or two [centimetres], then we stop and let the pool fill up, and let it start going over the top again. Let the flow do its thing again, and then we’ll start to build it up.”

Crews were careful not to build the beaver dam analogues too tall too fast, however, as the structures could blow out come spring when freshet meltwaters make their way down from the headwaters. 

They plan to return next year to build them back up, and address any broken or sediment-clogged dams.

The goal, Hall said, is to prevent the dams from fully blocking the flow.

“It’s always constant,” he said. “After they’re all built in, the flow never changes … It’s the same amount of water going through. It just slows it down.”

McDonald said they’ll check on the structures twice more next year, during high flows in the spring and low flows in the fall. They’ll also gather data and do any needed maintenance, such as adding more layers.

Eventually, Hall said they want to build beaver dam analogues farther upstream, closer to the headwaters, which would extend the dams’ current one-kilometre stretch six-fold.

“We want to start at the headwaters and keep more of that cold water up in the high country for longer,” he said. “That’s the goal.”

Return of the beaver

The analogues can survive from between two to 15 years, McDonald said. 

The secret to even longer-lasting structures, however, is to attract actual beavers.

That, she said, “is the ultimate goal” — to “have beavers on the landscape maintaining them for you.”

Fairfax, at the University of Minnesota, agreed restoring the species to local watersheds is vital.

“You shouldn’t be building their structures,” she said, “if you don’t want the beavers back.” 

Hall and McDonald both envision a day when the large rodents return to their former habitats, ideally to take over maintaining the artificial structures — and once again steward their surrounding wetlands.

“Beavers are attracted to the sound of water, and that’s where they go,” said Terbasket.

Although it might be hard to imagine how beavers would find their way to a dam analogue on a creek they’ve not used in years, McDonald said there’s “a great opportunity” in the province because the species are often seen as a “nuisance.”

“People are trapping beavers in areas where they can’t co-exist with people,” she said. 

“We can release them here and they can take over a site like this.”

But it’s not just beavers who have the potential to come back to Coteay Creek. Other wildlife are expected to return to the wetlands, too, once the structures rejuvenate the ecosystem.

Hall predicts that “all sorts” of birds would return to a healthy wetland in the area, along with other mammals such as mink, marten and muskrat.

“It’s like a magnet for all wildlife,” he said.

‘We need to act now’

One week after helping out at Coteay Creek, the B.C. Wildlife Federation crew assisted another syilx member community, Westbank First Nation, with similar beaver mimicry work, helping install beaver dam analogues in a headwater zone of the Derickson Swamp wetland system.

Terbasket said communities throughout the nation are really keen to be starting this work in their own watersheds.

“Doing beaver mimicry work in the upper watershed really seems like a no-brainer,” she said.

“Let’s learn to do this together, but also it’s so important to get our Elders’ and Knowledge Keepers’ input and direction.”

Equally crucial, she added, is “syilx-ifying” this Western-science approach to beaver mimicry, she said.

“What’s our nsyilxcen words for it?” Terbasket asked. “What’s the protocol and ceremonies that we need to also be doing for this work for it to be successful?”

She said that Elders and other community members have also said they prioritize protecting and restoring their upper watersheds. 

Hall said the nation plans to build hundreds of beaver dam analogues every year throughout their territory.

He identified the headwaters of Vaseux Creek and McIntyre Creek as other waterways that would benefit from the efforts, as they are “dangerously close to drying up in the summertime,” he said.

They’re important spawning grounds for sockeye and chinook salmon in the Okanagan River system.

“We have so many fish coming back,” he said. “Now we need all the spawning areas that we can get.”

Shuttleworth Creek has seen its waters become dangerously slow, he said, stranding hundreds of fish. 

He also listed numerous other waterways in the area that would benefit from beaver mimicry: creeks like the Shingle, Ellis, and Mission; and rivers such as the Nicola, Salmon and Similakmeen.

“We must stand up together and protect the ones that have stood up before us, to help us sustain our lives,” Hall said. “We must protect our relatives — the ones who cannot speak for themselves. For we are the caretakers of this land.”

But to take care of the Okanagan Nation’s watersheds, he warned, “We need to act now … for future generations.” And beaver dams are not just an ecosystem and climate matter, either. “Our way of life is being threatened.”

Beaver mimicry, and in turn trying to attract beavers back to their former environments, he believes, will “help make some real change.”

“More and more of our waterways have been drying up in the summertime now,” he said. “Beavers can help change that, and revive our wetlands.”

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