Aaron Hemens photographed and reported this story in syilx Okanagan territory for IndigiNews.
April 15, 2025 8 min. read
This article was originally published on
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For countless generations, hereditary fire chiefs cared for the forests in syilx territory. As wildfires become more severe and dangerous with a changing climate, the practice of controlled burns is re-emerging as a critical strategy to mitigate risk.
Growing up in the bush in the mountainous syilx territory of snpink’tn (Penticton), Charles Kruger learned about fire from his family when he was no older than five.
“Being able to start a fire really young was crucial,” Kruger, who is of syilx (Okanagan) and Sinixt (Arrow Lakes) ancestry, said.
“Because we live off the land — deer, moose, elk, grouse, stuff like that — being able to start a fire in the rain, in the snow, is super important. That’s a skill in itself.”
Kruger comes from a long line of hereditary fire chiefs, stretching back “many hundreds of years,” he said.
“My grandma would be the one to tell everybody when to burn. She was the fire-keeper, I guess you could say.”
Charles Kruger has noticed the impact a hotter, drier climate is having not just on the intensity of wildfires, but the decline in animal populations as well.
For a millennia, long before settler colonialism, syilx Okanagan people would regularly conduct low-intensity controlled burns, carefully planned to maintain and replenish the health of the land and the tmixʷ (all living things).
Viewing fire as a medicine, this method of burning forests and grasslands — what are today known as prescribed, controlled, cultural or traditional burns — also limited the threat of devastating wildfires blazing out of control.
His nation once had many villages across the region, and his ancestors would keep their communities safe with such practices.
“My grandma’s grandma’s grandma said that we had to burn around our villages,” Kruger recalled. “What that would do is it would protect the village” in the hottest months of summer.
“It makes a lot more vegetation and stuff,” he added. “That’s what we used to do for a long time to get the fresh green shoots that come up … a lot of animals live off of that.”
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But with colonialism came the gradual suppression of fire from the landscape locally, as settlers in syilx Okanagan territories favoured reactionary wildfire-suppression strategies.
Maintaining healthy forest ecosystems — which can require fire to thrive in the long-term — suddenly became secondary to logging and extracting resources.
The settler approach to fighting fires came at a cost. An extreme buildup of dry fuels and vegetation cover in fire-prone areas that have resulted in unhealthy forests more likely to burn uncontrollably.
All those factors, combined with drier conditions brought on by climate change, have resulted in the devastating wildfires experienced in recent years — and seen multiple communities in B.C. and Alberta largely burned to the ground.
“When you look around the forests now, it didn’t look like that hundreds of years ago,” Jordan Coble, a Westbank First Nation councillor and president of Ntityix Resources, said in an interview with IndigiNews in 2022.
“We’ve had lots of fires here in the Central Okanagan,” he said. “But none of those fires would’ve been so massive had we been able to carry out our traditional fire-burning practices.”
Coming from a family of hunters, Kruger said he’s noticed the impact a hotter, drier climate is having not just on the intensity of wildfires, but the decline in animal populations as well.
In some areas he frequents that once had water flowing through them, today much of the water has dried up because of lower snowpack. Without water, vegetation has dwindled — and so has the buck population.
“What that means,” he noted, “is that we’re getting a little drier and drier every year.”
Sometimes called prescribed, controlled, cultural or traditional burns, First Nations forest management practices were outlawed and replaced by settler methods that have — along with the hotter, drier climate — exacerbated the risk of severe wildfires.
‘We can’t prevent a fire from starting. A fire is going to start’
Responsible for treating areas within the First Nation’s community forest, Ntityix’s wildfire mitigation projects have proven to be effective.
One key activity to maintain forest health is removing surface and ladder fuels — smaller trees and pruned lower-hanging branches — to keep fires close to the ground.
For the last decade, Ntityix Resources has performed cultural burns and wildfire mitigation on syilx homelands to address the risk of wildfires.
Earlier mitigation work in the Glenrosa area — including pruning tree branches and creating more space between adult trees — kept the flames of the 2021 Mt. Law wildfire from reaching the top of tree canopies, and then spreading into community neighbourhoods.
The mitigation work of keeping fire from climbing up the trees ultimately limited the wildfire’s growth, and helped firefighters maintain its intensity by keeping the flames on the ground.
Thanks to these efforts, only one home was lost in the area.
Similar groundwork helped save even more homes in the 2023 McDougall Creek wildfire, which burned through 8,000 hectares of Westbank First Nation’s community forest.
And like the Mt. Law wildfire, Ntityix’s previous fire mitigation work in Rose Valley Regional Park enabled firefighters to effectively contain its spread, dropping flames in the forest canopy down to the ground.
Peter Kascak, a mentoring forester at Ntityix, explained that holding flames on the ground lets firefighters “work on the ground in front” of them — at once protecting people’s homes and keeping them safer while doing their jobs.
“We call it mitigation because we can’t prevent a fire from starting,” Kascak said. “A fire is going to start — it’s just going to happen. But what we can do is create a situation where it could be of less intensity.”
Peter Kascak, a mentoring forester at Ntityix, says mitigation work that prevents flames from climbing high into the treetops can help to limit the damage from wildfires. Pruning lower branches and thinning trees help control the flames of inevitable wildfires.
‘The greater the distance, the better’
Kruger joined Ntityix as a technician about four months ago, and he’s been contributing his knowledge of fire to the rest of the crew ever since.
On March 20, Kruger and a handful of other Ntityix technicians were burning slash piles in the Westbank First Nation community forest, again in the Glenrosa area.
The piles consisted of accumulated forest debris, as well as surface and ladder fuels collected during Ntityix’s mitigation work in the spring of 2024.
Keenau Saunders, a technician with Ntityix Resources, ignites a slash pile with a drip torch. Slash piles consist of accumulated forest debris, surface and ladder fuel, which increase the risk of severe wildfires when left unmanaged.
This part of the Westbank First Nation community forest within the Glenrosa area had been identified as a critical priority area, because it’s close to private property lines within a wildlife-urban interface.
Kascak said the technicians prefer to have a minimum 100-metre buffer space between properties and forest — and ideally double that.
“We’re creating some depth in there,” he said of the strategy. “The more you have mitigated, the better; the greater the distance, the better. The more chance, if fire is up in the canopy, of it dropping to the ground.”
By the time they finished their mitigation work in the area last year, it was too late to burn the piles of wood they made, he explained.
There’s a risk to the work. Burning the wood piles at the wrong time could spark a grass fire, especially if it’s timed too close to wildfire season.
“So you’re getting into a situation where you could start a forest fire if you start burning piles,” he said.
“So we have to leave them. The nice thing about that is that they dry out over the summer and they’re a little easier to burn.”
The March day’s moist conditions proved to be a favorable time to burn the piles, he said. Kruger agreed, adding that the timing was perfect.
“The snakes, the frogs — everything — are all underground,” he said. “It’s the perfect time to burn, this time of year.”
Kruger said he was helping to teach the others in the crew how to pile wood properly — in a stacked formation — preparing to burn it.
“The way I was taught … I always stacked them,” he said. “When I do it parallel like that, the embers will fall and they won’t hit the ground or go out. They’ll stay — you want them to stay.”
In March, technicians from Ntityix Resources burned several slash piles to create a fire guard between the community and the forest, to give “a better chance of fighting it in these areas.”
Once the dozen or so remaining slash piles had burned, the years-long effort to increase the fire guard between the Glenrosa community and the nearby forest was done.
“If a fire was to be out on the boundaries coming in this way towards the little village,” Kruger said, “well, the firefighters have a better chance of fighting it in these areas.”
He takes a lot of pride in the work he does at Ntityix. They’re ultimately working to protect people’s homes, he said — and their lives.
But if fire is to be reintroduced to the ecosystem — and used as good medicine like it once was — he said that fire should be treated with more respect by everyone living in the Okanagan Valley.
“It could save your life in the cold months. It could also hurt you if you don’t know what you’re doing,” he remarked.
“Respect that fire. It can hurt you, it can scar you — just respect the fire, which we do, and utilize it.”
Another year of keeping a close watch
Here at The Narwhal, we don’t use profit, awards or pageviews to measure success. The thing that matters most is real-world impact — evidence that our reporting influenced citizens to hold power to account and pushed policymakers to do better.
And in 2024, our stories were raised in parliaments across the country and cited by citizens in their petitions and letters to politicians.
In Alberta, our reporting revealed Premier Danielle Smith made false statements about the controversial renewables pause. In Manitoba, we proved that officials failed to formally inspect a leaky pipeline for years. And our investigations on a leaked recording of TC Energy executives were called “the most important Canadian political story of the year.”
Here at The Narwhal, we don’t use profit, awards or pageviews to measure success. The thing that matters most is real-world impact — evidence that our reporting influenced citizens to hold power to account and pushed policymakers to do better.
And in 2024, our stories were raised in parliaments across the country and cited by citizens in their petitions and letters to politicians.
In Alberta, our reporting revealed Premier Danielle Smith made false statements about the controversial renewables pause. In Manitoba, we proved that officials failed to formally inspect a leaky pipeline for years. And our investigations on a leaked recording of TC Energy executives were called “the most important Canadian political story of the year.”
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With headlines blaring about tariffs, a trade war and a 51st state, it can be easy to feel helpless. Here’s where I see hope: The Narwhal is reporting doggedly on issues surrounding the natural world in Canada that feel so under threat today — including the autonomy and sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples. It’s why I’m a member — and why I hope you’ll be one of 400 readers who joins me this April. Sign up now and receive a Narwhal tote bag as a gift of thanks! — Tanya Talaga, journalist, author and recent Narwhal board chair
With headlines blaring about tariffs, a trade war and a 51st state, it can be easy to feel helpless. Here’s where I see hope: The Narwhal is reporting doggedly on issues surrounding the natural world in Canada that feel so under threat today — including the autonomy and sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples. It’s why I’m a member — and why I hope you’ll be one of 400 readers who joins me this April. — Tanya Talaga, journalist, author and recent Narwhal board chair
