The land just outside the powwow arbour is filled with overgrown prairie grasses, patches of invasive plants and soil along the riverbank that is just beginning to erode.
It’s here that members of the Blood Tribe, also known as the Kainai Nation, are looking to restore the land in the traditional way, for the first time in decades: by embracing fire.
Supported by the Kainai fire department, Waterton Lakes National Park and members of Blackfeet fire management in Montana, fire has come back to the land not to destroy, but to heal.
In early May, four agencies came together over four days for a knowledge exchange on cultural fire, training on how to responsibly set fires (known as prescribed burning) and, finally, putting fire directly back on the land.
In a small circle under the afternoon sun, the gathered firefighters and land guardians each held a small piece of tobacco while Kainai Elders Calvin Williams and Dennis Chief Calf led a prayer.
Then, setting two dried cattails aflame, Williams and Chief Calf ceremoniously lit the ground on fire. Slowly, the sparks grew larger, burning low and slow across the landscape.
“Our culture is being threatened — not just by colonial aspects, but invasive species, climate change — and we’re trying to figure out ways to reignite those cultural pathways,” Alvin First Rider, Kainai’s environmental manager, says.
For decades, a fire like this would not have been possible and, at one point in time, illegal. As Western settlers moved across Canada, wildfires were actively stopped in a bid to protect land and property — called fire suppression — and relatively few resources have been put toward bringing fire back to the landscape in a controlled way.
“Fire suppression is a colonial tactic,” he says. “It was used to remove us, remove bison, off the landscape, and that’s one thing we need to get back on the landscape and express our sovereignty, is using fire as a tool the way we always used it.”
Bringing cultural burning back to the land is part of First Rider’s vision to reintroduce traditional land management techniques. His plan is to restore fire alongside the rematriation of bison and beavers to rebalance ecosystems. Now, supported by three years of funding from the federal government, Kainai is creating the first fire guardians program in Canada.
The Blood 148 reserve is the largest in Canada, encompassing 1,400 square kilometres and home to more than 8,600 of the nation’s roughly 13,000 registered members. The Blood Tribe or Kainai Nation is one of four making up the Blackfoot Confederacy, along with the Blackfeet Tribe in Montana and the Siksika and Piikani Nations in Alberta.
The traditional use of fire among the Blackfoot people goes all the way back to creation stories, particularly the tale of Napi and the Sun Leggings.
In that story, Napi, a trickster, stumbles upon the Sun’s lodge and sees a pair of beautiful leggings the Sun uses to start fires when he hunts. After Napi tries and fails to steal them several times, the Sun gives Napi the leggings, but warns him they must be used responsibly.
Napi ignores these instructions, and in his arrogance and vanity, sets the grasslands on fire — destroying the leggings in the process.
“It just kind of goes to show that power of fire and how you’re supposed to follow direction. And then just community-wise, it’s powerful, there’s that respect,” First Rider says.
Williams says these stories are important because they explain how fire was traditionally used by ancestors “in a good way,” as a “beneficial means for our tribe.”
First Rider explains Traditional Knowledge and methods were handed down generationally by fire keepers, such as using bison horns to transfer hot coals.
“There was that notion historically that these lands weren’t maintained and wild, but historically they were. We managed them, and that’s one thing we’re trying to reintroduce is how we manage our landscape,” First Rider says.
Many people on the reserve recall their Elders and grandparents burning land around their property to manage pests, clear out trash or replenish a nearby berry bush.
But in the 1980s and ‘90s, the use of fire to manage the land died out in the community.
“The last time I ever seen anyone burn was in the mid-1990s,” First Rider says.
“It always kind of astounded me that people went away from that. That fear mongering really got ingrained into us, to where people are so scared of fire that they don’t use it. There’s a taboo around it.”
Under the Indian Act, fire management and protection services on First Nations reservations are managed by band councils and regulated by community bylaws but paid for by the federal government.
In 1990, the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs (now Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada) signed a three-party agreement with the Treasury Board and Human Resource Development Canada to establish new ways of suppressing fire and providing greater fire protection services for First Nations communities to reduce wildfire risk in Alberta, Ontario and New Brunswick.
But while this may have hastened the decline of cultural fire practices, the history of restricting Indigenous uses of fire goes back much further. Amy Cardinal Christianson, senior fire advisor with the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, told The Narwhal the use of fire among Indigenous people wasn’t lost but taken away through colonial fire exclusion policies. In 1874, B.C. became the first province to outlaw cultural burns; by the early 20th century, it was banned across Canada.
“It’s not like people just forgot it and walked away, it was systematically taken away from Indigenous Peoples through prosecution, through fines, through jail time,” she says.
But it’s now understood that cultural burning, along with prescribed burns, mitigate the risks of serious wildfires — risks that have been exacerbated by decades of fire suppression policies. And Indigenous communities are disproportionately affected by wildfires.
“I think for me it also becomes a social justice issue right now, where we know we need fire on the landscape. So, who better to do that than Indigenous Peoples?”
Although prescribed burns share a similar purpose in how they impact the land, a cultural burn is distinct in that it is led by traditional Indigenous land management practices and knowledge.
“Indigenous people across Canada have used fire on the landscape historically to steward for cultural objectives and so that’s burning to improve a berry production, to get more green grass growing, to make firewood, to open up trails,” Christianson says.
In comparison, a prescribed burn also works to support healthy landscapes but is done primarily for wildfire prevention and ecological wellbeing purposes, and not for cultural reasons.
“Prescribed fire really comes from wildfire agencies, and so it operates very similar to wildfire response,” Christianson says. Both are directed by wild firefighting services operating usually outside Indigenous communities, rather than the communities themselves.
Christianson says cultural burns are also community driven and often led by families. They can involve the whole community, from youth to Elders.
“When you’re on a cultural fire, there’s laughter, it’s fun. People are visiting, smiling, hanging out together, learning from one another, and so that’s really what I love about cultural fire.”
Parks Canada has been using prescribed burns to help reduce wildfire risk by eliminating built up wood, grass and plant material and to restore ecology for several decades now.
These burns are grounded in Western scientific techniques and typically use gasoline or diesel drip torches to light the land. According to Parks Canada, the agency did 13 prescribed burns in seven parks last year.
The fire crew at Waterton Lakes National Park, which is on traditional Blackfoot territory and borders the Blood reserve, have been helping support the development of a fire guardians program for about six years. That’s when First Rider met the park’s fire management officer Matt Rance, and spoke with him about Indigenous land sovereignty and its connection to fire.
“I started to tell him my vision, and he got it right away,” First Rider says.
Rance, who has worked with fire as a firefighter and technician for over 23 years, has been with the park since 2019. He helped First Rider and Kainai do their first two burns in the Blood Tribe Timber Limits, 1,940 hectares near Waterton managed by the tribe for cultural use. He also assisted First Rider in getting several members of the Kainai land management department their standard wildland firefighting course certification.
“They’ve really helped us build capacity to where we’re able to use it from a Western certification standpoint and get that Western lens on how they plan burns and the proper way to communicate burns,” First Rider says.
Rance says working with the fire guardians has been “one of the more fulfilling parts of my role.”
“I just feel humbled to be in this room with these folks who are doing such amazing work and anything I can do to help and support that we’re going to do,” he says.
According to Indigenous Services Canada, the federal government provides annual funding for fire protection services, such as firefighting, fire hall operations, equipment and insurance, which between 2016 and 2024 averaged $50.2 million annually to the 634 First Nations communities across Canada.
In March, Natural Resources Canada granted Kainai Nation $500,000 over three years to establish a fire guardians program.The grant, which comes after years of work by First Rider, will “strengthen the integration of Indigenous cultural practices and fire-related knowledge,” while helping the First Nation develop tools and resources to incorporate these cultural practices and knowledge into fire management within the community.
Nathan Provost tells The Narwhal he is the first to be hired with this funding as the fire guardian program coordinator. He says he wants the program to educate the community and empower youth.
“Letting them know that this is what we used to do back in the day, and [that] fire is good. It’s not that colonial notion that fire is bad,” he says.
There are more than 200 Indigenous guardians programs in Canada, and many have received federal funding since 2017, which has been managed by the National Guardians Network since 2024. But this one is unique for its focus on fire.
Christianson says there are currently no other federally funded guardian programs for fire across Canada, but for there to be more, there needs to be better funding for proper salaries and sufficient resources.
“These are very knowledgeable practitioners that are going to be hired in these programs. We should be paying them a lot more,” she said, adding funders “seem to think when it’s an Indigenous program that the wages can be much lower.”
First Rider says the next phases of the program will focus on acquiring equipment to do cultural burns and hire cultural practitioners within the community who already have fire knowledge.
To plan the four-day knowledge exchange and training session on burns, First Rider reached out to neighbours in the Blackfoot Confederacy, across the Canada-U.S. border.
Sheldon Brewer, a fuel specialist in Browning, Montana, and member of both the Blackfeet Nation and Kainai, has been working with fire for almost 30 years, including wildland fire fighting to prescribed burns.
Brewer says when he got into prescribed burns he started learning about traditional methods of burning by the Blackfoot people, such as lighting cattails, sap-covered pine cones and cow or bison dung.
“Everything that we use presently as field specialists derives from a history, and that history started out back when First Nation Peoples pretty much dominated the area that we currently live in,” he says.
Being invited to be part of the training as a Blackfeet fire specialist is a full-circle moment for Brewer.
“To be home and to participate in this project that’s happening, especially early stages, is one of the biggest key moments in my life that I can say I’m very proud of,” he says.
Wildfire seasons have become more intense and more destructive in Canada, and the costs of fighting them have also risen.
2023 saw the most destructive wildfire season to date an estimated 5,475 fires ignited more than 17 million hectares of land. That’s over 10 million more than the previous record in 1995.
Last year, Canada saw nearly the same number of fires, but only roughly five million hectares were burned. Still, 2024 had more singed hectares than than the annual area burned in any of the previous 10 years before 2023.
And at the time of publishing, more than 1,900 fires have already burned over 3.6 million hectares of land across the country. In late May, Manitoba declared a state of emergency as wildfires raged in the north of the province, forcing the First Nations of Pimicikimak and Mathias Colomb to issue evacuation orders. Saskatchewan declared a state of emergency shortly after.
Firefighters from across Canada have been called in to fight the flames, as well as from the U.S. It all comes at an enormous cost to governments and communities.
In comparison, Christianson says the cost of cultural burns and investing in fire guardian programs is “peanuts.” Fire guardians also reduce the risk of fire on the land, which in turn helps reduce the risk and cost of large wildfire disasters.
Christianson points out that a guardian’s salary is around $80,000 per year, whereas “we’re spending millions to billions of dollars on fire in Canada.” The cost of wildland fire protection has frequently exceeded $1 billion annually. Manitoba recently put a down payment of $80 million dollars on three water bombers, with the full cost still to be determined.
So a fire guardian, she adds, “makes it a really good economical case from a Western sense.”
But Indigenous fire experts argue climate change is only part of the smoldering problem.
“Smokey the Bear, he did a damn good job in making our forests unhealthy,” Brewer says, referring to the mascot which has been a symbol of wildfire prevention in the U.S. since the 1940s.
“We go against Mother Nature, we get end results from it and a lot of the time, it’s not what we expected.”
Southern Alberta is no stranger to wildfires. In 2017, the Kenow Fire was one of the area’s most devastating wildfires in recent years, burning 35,000 hectares of land, including “almost half the vegetation” in Waterton, according to Rance.
He says the fire created an opportunity for the park to press the reset button and utilize prescribed burns in areas they might not have been able to before, and including cultural perspectives into those burns as well.
“We’re looking at it as an opportunity to [create] the future plan and make sure that an event like that doesn’t happen again.”
With the training, First Rider hoped to forge a type of fire network among the participants. He wanted them to come away from it with experience of using fire as a land management tool “from a cultural lens, respecting it,” and not fear it.
During the post-burn debrief, Provost said he was thankful to the Elders for their prayer to make sure “the grandfathers were watching — helping for everything to run smoothly.”
“I remember the older ones used to always burn, and you just never seen that anymore, because, you know, getting in trouble after a while,” he says.
“Just really feels good to see everybody come together like that.”
As the area by the powwow arbour burned slowly, the red, blue and yellow fire suits of the various agencies mingled on the landscape, as participants lit the grasslands aflame and controlled them with water hoses.
The participants and community onlookers watched the fire, talked and laughed. Even those who said they felt initially panicked by the flames felt a calm wash over them as the burn went on.
“For me, what was much more exciting about it was their relationship building and just being out on the land with people who are so proud of their culture and just so excited to be together and working together,” Christianson says.
“It’s about much more than fire. It’s about that cultural pride in what you’re doing and bringing communities together.”
Despite working with fire for more than three decades, this was Brewer’s first cultural burn using traditional methods.
“It’s something that I’ll cherish for a long time,” he says.
The burn is only the beginning for First Rider’s holistic plan, who calls it a “living restoration project.”
“The goal is to rematriate our connection with fire along with our bison,” First Rider says. A bison herd was reintroduced to the Blood reserve in 2023.
First Rider is also looking for more areas in the community where his team can put down fire, but says there’s still healing that needs to be done in the community.
The plan now is to plant willow cuttings and saplings back to the burned area to stabilize the stream bank and encourage beavers to return. Then the rain will come in to do its job — and then it’s time to burn some more.
“This land needs guardians, and we really need to be able to express our sovereignty and our culture by using these historical practices,” First Rider says.
“That’s in our DNA: fire and bison.”
Updated June 12, 2025, at 4:06 p.m. PT: A previous version of this story stated the cost of wildland fire protection and management reached over $1 billion annually for the last six of 10 years. That statement was pulled from a dataset spanning 2007-2017. The story has been updated to state the cost of fighting fires frequently exceeds $1 billion.
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