“The power of fire is so intense and humbling.”

Three weeks ago, I wrote to you about how northwest B.C. reporter Matt Simmons dropped working on a pretty incredible feature story to cover the premature wildfires that erupted in various parts of British Columbia. That piece, about a Gitanyow-led effort to use fire to heal the land, was published on our site a few days ago — the first in our brand-new series, In The Line of Fire.

Kira Hoffman, a fire ecologist who worked with Gitanyow, texted Matt the night before the cultural burn to invite him to come and witness it himself. Knowing he couldn’t pass up the offer, he headed out to the territory in late April to see how the ignition team calmly painted the dry landscape with blazes that help restore cultural connections, heal the land and strengthen communities. (He’s ordering a new hard hat, we swear!)

For thousands of years, fire was brought to the landscape to manage resources like food and medicinal plants and the animals that eat them. The suppression of Indigenous fire practices, along with other aspects of cultural life — among the genocidal policies enacted by colonial governments in Canada — made the forests more flammable. 

Now, the BC Wildfire Service is teaming up with Indigenous communities to support these burns. And with more than 30 burning projects already taking place in the province, a new chapter of collaboration has begun. “I think it’s a beautiful thing,” Gitanyow Elder Darlene Vegh said.

For Matt, the sensory experience of being so close to the flames was all-encompassing: the sound of it, the smell, the wall of heat, its movements and colours. “Watching how everyone interacted with the fire was so fascinating,” he told me. “There’s this amazing sense of calm and control — it was really reassuring.”

To the east in Nova Scotia, 90 per cent of the hemlock trees could die in the next 10 to 15 years — all because of the hemlock woolly adelgid, an invasive species that has also spread to southern Ontario. It can’t survive extreme cold temperatures, but a warming climate means the pest could adapt and find ways to infect other hemlocks beyond its current northern limits in Canada.

But there’s one patch — Wapane’kati, the old-growth eastern hemlock forest at Asitu’lɨsk, an hour west of Halifax — that can still be saved, thanks to a Mi’kmaq-led effort. This April, freelance journalist and photographer Crystal Greene went to the forest as volunteers inoculated trees against the bug.

Community members know they can’t save all their “grandmothers” — “but we can save enough of our hemlock forests that we will have a hemlock forest for the future,” one project support officer told Crystal.

Both these features, full of hope, shine light on how pairing Indigenous Knowledge and western science is forging new paths to protect the natural spaces we still have left. Check out Matt’s fiery piece, with incredible photos of the burn by Marty Clemens, and then go read all about saving the hemlock grandmothers in Mi’kma’ki. 

Take care and save what you can,

Karan Saxena
Audience engagement editor 

This week in The Narwhal