Ideas - What emerges from the ashes after a wildfire? (Pt 3)

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

The summer of 2026 has been defined by the smoke — and the horror — of wildfires around the world. But what comes after one of these fires? "That isn't the end of the story. That's the beginning of a whole different kind of story," says Nlaka'pamux ecologist Jennifer Grenz. That's why we have decided to follow the long-term story of one 21st century megafire: the 2021 McKay Creek wildfire in interior B.C. Producer Pauline Holdsworth returned in September 2025 — four years after the fire — to find new life emerging from the ashes, and new questions about the road ahead.This is the latest episode in our ongoing series Healing the Land. Listen to other episodes:How brutal wildfires are 'killing' Indigenous ways of life (Pt 1)How Indigenous ecology is reviving land destroyed by wildfires (Pt 2)Guests in this episode:Chief Justin Kane is the elected Chief of Ts'kw'aylaxw First Nation.Michelle Edwards is the Tmicw Coordinator for the St'át'imc Chiefs Council and the former Chief of the communities of Sekw'el'was and Qu'iqten.Dr. Jennifer Grenz is an Indigenous scholar and assistant professor in the department of forest resources management at UBC, and the principal investigator at the Indigenous Ecology Lab. She is a member of Lytton First Nation, where she sits on the lands committee. She is also the author of Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A Journey toward Personal and Ecological Healing and the forthcoming book Burned: Truth and Hope in the Fires.Virginia Oeggerli is a PhD student in the Indigenous Ecology Lab in the Faculty of Forestry at UBC.Dr. Sue Senger is a biologist working with the Lillooet Tribal Council.Gerald Michel is a council member and the lands resource liaison for Xwísten First Nation.

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Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. So this is the first time that I am seeing a deer here. It's four years after a devastating wildfire in interior British Columbia, and a deer has just appeared out of nowhere. So is hopping across the road. I just love the deer hop. It's just, it's so good. But I just, every time we see them, I just can't help but feel like I need to, like,

yell out the window like, I love you, you know, because I feel like we've been, oh, there's even more. In 2021, the McKay Creek Wildfire incinerated 40, 46,000 hectares of land in the territory of the Stathliam Nation in British Columbia's interior. You'll remember when you were here two years ago, you know, this forest was devoid of life. There were no deer. I mean, this just, the forest was silent, and this was our greatest, one of our greatest worries. The fire burned huge swaths of the mule deer's winter habitat.

Scientists estimate it'll take between 80 and 120 years for their forest ecosystem to fully recover. Mule deer are a really critical part of Stetlium diet. So to have their winter range decimated with this wildfire, you know, we're just so worried. And what's really amazing is an elder told us, you know, after year three and four of the fire, when the trees start to fall, the mule deer will come back. And, you know, elders never seem to be. be wrong. And in this case, they most definitely were not. There's one on the road looking at us now.

And oh, there's even more. Look at this. Oh, there's even way up there. So we're into a whole herd. Oh my gosh. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. There's, yeah, we're into a herd here. And now I'm crying. Hey, guys, we've been trying so hard for you. The summer of 2026 was defined by smoke and the horror of wildfires around the world. The images are impossible to forget. People fleeing the fires by boat in northwestern Ontario as their communities turned to ash behind them. And I saw swaths of forest also turned into smoldering ash in Bordeaux, France, and homes transformed by the fire into hulks of charred concrete remains.

But what comes after one of these? fires. That isn't the end of the story. That's the beginning of a whole different kind of story. That's why we've decided to keep following the story of one 21st century megafire. I'm so happy to see you again. Let's go sit over here. Producer Pauline Holdsworth first visited Stapleim territory in 2023, two years after the McKay Creek wildfire. She returned in September 2025 to see firsthand how the next chapter of this story is unfolding. I feel pretty emotional.

I really remember talking so much about the mule deer, and that is the first time I have seen them here. I mean, you know, I wish we could interview them. This is Healing the Land, Part 3. As the sun was rising in Lillowet, I got in a pickup truck with Jennifer Grans, and we headed out down this particularly bumpy road. The tagline for Lillowet is guaranteed.

rugged, and that definitely applies to the road that we're on. I mean, just normal conditions in Lillowet, but accentuated by, you know, the fact that the fire has also changed the hydrology of the area. We get a lot of really sharp rocks falling onto the road as well. And in fact, actually, our lab has become extremely good at changing tires over the last couple of years. Jen is an Inglikakak-Moch scholar and a member of the nearby Lytton First Nation, where she sits on the lands committee. So we're coming into, this is McKay that we're coming into now. That's right, yeah, we're just starting to come into the McKay Creek Burn area. She's the principal investigator at the Indigenous Ecology Lab at the University of British Columbia.

And we are now four years post wildfire, which is really hard to believe. Alongside her students, she's been studying what's happened to this land, and the plants, animals, and people who rely on it. This fire is probably one of our greatest teachers. So what are you seeing as you're looking out here? Well, I think, you know, what I'm seeing is probably different than what I would have seen in the past. So, you know, I think for someone who doesn't understand the historical ecology, of this place.

You know, if they looked around, they would see a lot of burned trees, you know, almost complete loss of canopy in these high severity areas, like what's in front of us up the hill right now as we're driving on the West Pavilion Road. And I think a lot of people might, you know, categorize that as totally devastating.

But I think as we are, you know, humbling ourselves to learn from this fire as a teacher, I'm not sure that I see devastation. anymore. So now what I can see are shrubs, berry species, coming back. Whereas, you know, a couple of years ago when we were here together, we looked up at this hill and it looked like the moon, right? It was gray and ashen and looked hopeless. And now all we see is, you know, a mosaic of life. This is where we're in this really critical moment of what do we want this place to look like? What is it? telling us about what it should be. What this place should be might be very different from what it used to be. Someone asked us when we were doing our vegetation study, when we were setting it up, what's your control, you know, that you're comparing to?

And we didn't have one. We had to make the argument there was no control. The unburned area also is not healthy ecosystem. And I think that is something we have really learned from this fire. is the unburned areas are just areas waiting to be burned. Before the fire, the area we're driving through featured densely packed pine trees and very little else. It was a practice of modern forestry and potentially a dangerous one. They weren't forests. They were tree plantations that underneath look like a biodessert.

Everything underneath the tree canopy is brown. It's really almost an optical illusion of peak environmental conditions. If you look from the top, you're like, oh, trees, you know, this is a healthy environment. But underneath, there's no food at all. There's no light. What is the difference between a forest and a tree plantation? This is a really important question. I think we have all been fooled into thinking that trees mean forest.

And on a very basic level, perhaps that's the case. but here in British Columbia, our forests largely have been treated like tree plantations. Well, what's a tree plantation? Well, we're growing trees for wood, right? Like, you know, we're farming trees. And so how you farm something to be a crop is a lot different than how you would grow a forest for other benefits other than just producing timber. And I think it's so important for us to make this distinction between, tree plantations and forests because I challenge that they can never be the same thing.

And I think this is where we are failing our forests by trying to have those two things be the same thing. A forest to me is, you know, different types of trees, you know, coniferous, deciduous, that shrub layer, food for all relations, humans, animals, birds, insects, that's managing for a much different value than just an economic one. Whether we grow forests or tree plantations makes a big difference during a wildfire. Jen reminds me that a fire needs three ingredients. Fuel, favorable weather, and a source of ignition. The climate crisis, which has brought soaring temperatures, droughts and erratic storms to

Canadian forests, has created the conditions for megafires. But that's just part of the story. tree plantations, like the pine trees still sticking up out of the ash here, like burnt toothpicks, make excellent fuel. How do lodgepole pines do it fires? Pine burns incredibly well, and I don't know if you've ever thrown a pine log onto a bonfire, but you can hear that crackling and that popping of those oils that are in the pine species, and they grow also quite quickly. I'm Virginia Ogrely. I'm a Ph.D. student and Dr. Jennifer Grenz's lab at UBC. you can see a lot of the lower branches all the way to the ground. And so if you had a ground fire going through here, which is usually low severity,

it can catch those lower pine branches and then it carries up the tree. And then when it gets up the tree into that foliage into those pine needles, that's when it starts getting really hot and it can spread very quickly. A similar story played out in France in the summer of 2026, where another tree plantation was at the center of a raging fire. pine trees planted during the reign of Napoleon III to produce timber and resin. An article in Limond put it this way. What is burning today is not just a forest, but a way of inhabiting the land that is no longer possible.

As we were driving deeper into the burn area, Jennifer Granz told me that if we want to have a better relationship with the land, we're going to have to learn to see the forest beyond the trees. we look around and we're like oh look at all these trees it's a forest we feel good you know it's become the symbol of modern environmentalism but if you walked in there and look below i'm not sure you would feel so good so i really hope people start to make this distinction and that perhaps when we're planning on a landscape level we decide we're going to do tree plantations over here and we're going to manage forests over here in this other place we can still harvest trees it's not about stopping one thing, it's not black or white, this or that. It's just we can have all of these things if we can reclaim and adapt and revitalize stewardship practices that worked on these lands for thousands of years. Four years after the McKay Creek Wildfire, another older ecosystem is beginning to emerge from the ashes.

We're seeing a lot of our aspen and willows coming back in very shrubby, bushy, And then we're seeing a lot of our birch leaf spirea and fireweed, and those are giving those orange and red colors. And we're seeing Douglas Maple, and that's having our red leaves. And then that's all kind of surrounded. Those beautiful colors are popping out of the golden grasses. Having seen them in the summer and now seeing them in the fall with their beautiful foliage, it's this beautiful palette of color.

And I was almost thinking some of these oranges really, like I was thinking of what way I should describe the color orange. And in my head, fire orange is like the kind of color that these oranges are. And I think, you know, what we should remember is if all these trees that are now burnt that are sticking up, like there was not this color palette on the forest floor before this fire, right? It was too dark. It was too dense. So this is, you know, color that's come back onto this landscape for the first time in 100 years, probably. Not everywhere, but in a lot of these areas. How is it that plant species can reemerge after decades?

The answer lies in the seed bank. I like to call it the memory of the land. This is where, you know, in our soils, seeds are deposited over time. time, over long periods of time. So there are plants whose seeds can still be alive in soils, you know, after 50, 60, 70 years. And I think that's something that we're really leaning upon, given how dramatically these landscapes have been changed by, you know, colonial land management, right? There's a totally different way of understanding and using the land. And what's happened with these fires is the land is sort of showing us what was before. You know, as as these trees burn,

the soil is burning away and we're getting down to these depths where that seed bank is. And in some cases, this is where we're seeing this resurgence of plant life and diversity that we haven't seen here, you know, ourselves. Even within my lifetime, we have elders that tell us, you know, this is what it looked like, you know, when they were children. And the most thrilling thing to emerge from the seed bank this year, berries. This is where we were picking this summer. Like, this is the produce store. Jen leads me to a spot.

She calls one of the miracles of this recovery. Yeah, I mean, we all, we just walked in. You can actually see the really red leaves here. they're all raspberry plants. Wow. So this is all the red you see. I mean, right up into the valley further up the hill, that's all raspberry. And then creeping along the ground beneath it is strawberry.

Like you were afraid to where you were walking because you were, no matter what step you took, you were stepping on top of strawberries. I videoed and marveled watching everybody's reactions because all you could hear from the hillside was, oh my gosh, oh my gosh. Holy cow! Like because yeah, I mean, to think that you can go from absolute devastation to just this bounty, right? The plants we're going to walk over to that are right there with the sort of waxy, almost shiny like green leaves is Husham, which is soapberry. Or where I'm from, we say Shusham.

So there's the relationship between the intersailish languages. So now that I've kind of taught you to identify it, if you look across. the landscape, you will see that there is a lot of it all through here. There really is, and there's, yeah, that kind of slight sheen. Yeah, and this is a plant that has been in trouble for a long time. You know, elders keep telling us, like, it's getting more difficult to find. And this plant is a victim of fire suppression. You know, these are fire-adapted plants.

Many First Nations have historically used what are called traditional burns. strategic low-intensity fires used to regenerate plants like Husham. We don't necessarily understand all the mechanisms from a Western scientific perspective yet, and we're working on it. But, you know, they clearly require fire to help them regenerate. Traditional burns also clear out dead brush and tender and reduce the risk that the next wildfire will spiral out of control. Jen calls them fires of choice rather than fires of chance. But a patchwork of laws across the country banned them for over a century. So we quit burning, not totally.

We more like burnt our berry crops than that. I think our Forestry Act coming in 1942. Chalas members, the chief over there, was incarcerated for burning. Probably a bunch of others. Professor from UBC studying traditional burning, She went to Penticton, met the Kruger family, the firekeepers there. And they did a study. She sent her students out to each fire scar tree to a core sample.

Core samples told us that we quit burning in 1858, contact. We moved out of the bush. We moved to town. This is Gerald Michelle, who goes by the name Bobo. He's the lands and resources manager for Hoistin First Nation, one of the 11 communities that make up the Statliam Nation. I can't even quit my job. They can't even fire me.

I've been all over here for over 30 years. I'm 71 years old. Can't retire. But I enjoy my work or enjoy my job. Hoyshton is one of many indigenous nations around the world, now revitalizing traditional burns. We just did it for the community, more for community protection.

We did 151 hectare burn last year. It did get rid of a lot of, of the fuels that were on the ground and tickets and such, burn my berry patch. So it'll be a learning experience where we could document the regrowing of the Saskatoon's. We did meet with other nations, communities. We started a group through FireSmart called the Firekeepers. We invited people from Australia. Like we talked about our burns,

a couple hundred hectares. Australians, they talk about square miles, square kilometers. They burn a heck by them. They got a lot more to burn than that. We talked with Californians, Oregon. Oregon, this one fellow, his sole job is to look after the hawkleberries. Soul job, that's all he does is the chief of hawkelberries. I did. And how and when to go back in earth, to burn, to replenish, you have to have that knowledge?

Fire is not something to be feared. Fire is something we need. You know, we've made it more difficult to have fire that is safe, to have, you know, fire that doesn't cause this kind of devastation, fires of this size, fires of this severity, but boy, do the land need it. And I'm not sugar-coding these fires, these incredibly catastrophic severe wildfires. They shouldn't happen. It should never have been able to get to this point. But I think that we owe it the opportunity to teach us things. As I'm walking around near the berry patch with Virginia, she stops mid-sentence and she looks up. The birds are chirping and flying all around, right? And this is something that two years ago, right?

I don't know if you remember, but that eerie quietness. That's kind of amazing just to hear these little songs and chirps again. Yeah, it's crazy to see them. It's amazing to watch them come back and just fly through the sky and the chirping. It feels alive. It feels like where we're standing right now is just singing. It's just singing. The birds are singing.

The deer, the land, the colors. Like, we're almost in this festival of life. What we're seeing in front of us right now is a gift from two, three, four generations back. Like, what's held in this seed bank was their care and love. Our colonial history is so short here. And there's still lived memory in this land from the work that people did, like my grandmother and my relatives, and, you know, Statliam people.

Jen's grandmother grew up in this area, which sits next to Inla Kachma Territory, and she has a bunch of cousins in the Statliam Nation. I sort of fulfilled one of my full-circled dream moments of harvesting Husham with my daughter on the landscape. We get these orange sticky fingers, and so, you know, my daughter, I was looking when we were driving at her, you know, orange-stained fingernails. You know, I can't help but imagine when my grandmother grew up. up here that like this is what she looked like leaving these lands. But now we have a responsibility,

you know, so I feel like also this, this fires created the opportunity to save this. You know, these things need to grow to seed. They need to go to seed. You know, it's like putting money in the bank. It's putting seeds in the bank, right? For future generations. It is almost like it's like a baton pass between generations in some way. It is. And I think that's one of the things that also has really changed for me is we're not walking out here alone. You know, we're out here with generations of people who created this. And also, you know, we're out here thinking now also about the generations of people ahead of us. You know, so what are we going to do now?

It's easy to be reminded of our responsibilities when you see kids running around. And it's easy to look back at the previous generations when you sit with your elders and your knowledgekeepers. Because they're the ones that have carried that knowledge and that history and shared. Hello, my name is Justin Kane. I'm the chief in the Squyla First Nation. And, yeah, the 2021 McKay Fire was in the heart of our territory. I caught up with Chief Justin Kane at a community softball game back in Lillow. wet.

So are you playing it all today or watching? Yeah, I'm playing. Since my last visit, Chief Justin has been re-elected. Even when I'm not a leader, now I have that responsibility for the rest of my time is what I've learned in the last five years and what I have to continue to do to support not only my community, but us as a nation and learning and passing on that knowledge. He's learned from other communities and other fires, like the Elephant Hill Wilde, which burned 200,000 hectares of land just east of here in 2017.

We were part of the Elephant Hill wildfire as well, and we had eight or nine swathing communities come together, and there was a declaration on the understory that was done. And, you know, we talked about that through this McKay fire. That term understory refers to the rich mosaic of different plants on the forest floor, like the berries and shrubs now coming back here. It's our food plants, it's our medicine plants. It's the food for the four-legged, the ones living underground, the winged ones. They're all part of that.

The declaration on the understory assert Schwet-Mick sovereignty to protect the understory all throughout their territory. It's a prescription for growing forests, not tree plantations. It's not always about putting money in the bank. It's about having our land cared for. That's our responsibilities to care for the land. And sometimes it takes for us to be challenging some of those industries that aren't thinking of a future,

but more of today's problem, not of future problems. But the seeds for future problems may already have been planted. One day, a few hundred meters from the berry patch, Jen and her team came across something unexpected. Densely planted pine seedlings, put there by both the province and timber companies. It's the beginning of a new tree plantation. What goes through you when you see these new plantings?

I feel in many locations, not all. I feel angry, especially when they're located over top of where the memory of the land is showing us what actually belong there. You know, so this abundance of berry species and bunch grasses and all of these things that feed all of the creatures of the forest and ourselves, that that's just going to be erased. And I can see the pine from here. We can see kind of those low green dotting along that hillside.

My fear is that come years from now, we're going to have these tall, tall forests with dark understories, We're going to lose these beautiful understory species that are growing right now. Which means the mule deer and other forest creatures will have nothing to eat. This is an area where it maybe was better to leave the trees unplanted. You know, boy, they got up, they're really fast to start putting pine in the ground ahead of anyone getting anything in the ground for those deer. And pine, especially planted this densely, burns extremely hot and fast.

Climate is part of this. It's only part of it. When are we going to say, whoa, what we've been doing, it's not working? Are we planting the next generation's fires? Because to me, that's what I'm seeing, is that the machine is just continuing, and we're just perpetuating our problem. Staring down at baby pine seedlings was indigenous ecologist Jennifer Grenz and PhD student Virginia Ogreley. And lodgepole pine grows quite quickly too. We might be planting the next generation's fire and that fire isn't very far away.

This is Healing the Land Part 3, the latest installment in our series following the story of one 21st century wildfire. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Looking for a different kind of summer experience? Uncover history. Discover Canadian Connections. The Toronto Holocaust Museum is a space forever. Everyone. Use code summer 26 to get 30% off your visit. Admission is free for those under 25. Learn more and book at Toronto Holocaust Museum.org. At Desjardin Insurance, we put the care in taking care of business. Your business to be exact.

Our agents take the time to understand your company so you get the right coverage at the right price. Whether you rent out your building, represent a condo corporation, or own a cleaning company, we make insurance easy to understand so you can focus on the big stuff. your small business. Get insurance that's really big on care. Find an agent today at dejerdin.com slash business coverage. How do you recover from a catastrophic wildfire? You can look across time to learn lessons from past generations about managing the land. You can also look across space. Because in our era of worsening wildfires, no one fire exists in isolation.

What we're seeing on this fire has been an overlap of other fires, so the fires haven't stopped. Which is sort of a new reality as well, right, where it's not like, you know, it's a one and done. It's, you know, there's fires next to fires, fires, fires on top of fires. That's something that just keeps coming up, that, like, healing the land here is intimately connected to what's happening with the land. You know, every place that's connected to here. Ideas producer Pauline Holesworth has been following the long-term story of one particular megafire, the 2021 McKay Creek Wildfire in the interior of British Columbia.

And then the situation became even more dire because in 2023 we had two more huge fires. We just passed a sign a minute ago. We're entering Squyla First Nation. Yeah, we're on Squyla First Nation lands, and Schweilich is, One of our primary project partners, really, they're leading the McKay Creek working group. They're more deer, you guys. I can't even right now. Sorry. I think we'll talk about this later.

Oh, man. As we drive deeper into the Byrne area, our conversation keeps getting interrupted by mule deer. We have another deer. We didn't do this. We didn't plan this. We're not paying them just so you know. They are not animatronic. The deer are a welcome site, and yet something of a mystery.

Four years after the fire, they're starting to return, but their population is just a fraction of what it used to be. You know, I wish we could interview them, right? Like, what do you remember? What happened? Where have you been? If the deer could somehow answer those questions, they might tell us how they keep finding their seasonal past blocked. So now you can see just even looking at this map what we're talking about. There's almost nothing left in terms of undamaged by logging or fire.

And so this is what we're facing and this is what the deer are facing. Sue Sanger is a biologist working with the Lilowat Tribal Council. Before we went out into the burn area, she showed me a map of the mule deer winter habitat. And you can also see that the little patches of green are kind of intersected by the red, like, are cut off? Yes, and so this becomes the problem, right? So it used to be consistent, large patches of winter range, and now it's all broken up. Very few people seem to understand there's two types of deer out there. There's resident deer who stay in one area pretty much the whole time. And then we have these migratory deer, and they leave in the spring sometime around

April, and they can travel as much as 100 kilometers out at Fawn. And that means damage in one area affects the health of another. And then they come back, starting now, like September, October, they come back onto the winter range. And so you get these pulses of deer moving across the landscape. Just get it running here. So we start out with, this is the meal deer habitat in the northern part of the territory, so it's all in green there. And then I bring in the cut blocks. So this is the logging that has happened. So meal deer winter range, again, in a normal world can be logged partly. And then we start to bring the fire layers in. And these are the historic fires up until 2009. The green areas of healthy mule deer habitat look relatively intact. The red

fires dot the landscape, but they don't blot it out, at least not yet. I've looked at the last hundred years of wildfire. What you see for winter inch burning, it's very small. It's maybe a thousand hectares, maybe two thousand, but most of the time it's way under that for all 85 years. And then 2009 hits, and it's over 10,000 hectares in one season. Sue points to the dark red spots on the map in front of us. They're starting to get much bigger. This one is McKay, so that's...

Oh, wow. Uh-huh. Suddenly, a huge patch of red covers the map. I think it's over 18,000 in one year. And then here comes the 2023 flyers. through here. 2020 3 is another 8,000. The kind of red sections are...

It's more than half. More than half. Yeah, it's more than half. This increasingly fragmented map means business as usual just isn't possible after a wildfire. From a logging forestry perspective, if a tree's been partly burned,

they want to take it out because they say it's going to die. From a wildlife perspective, we're saying if it's standing and it's green, it's providing the only habitat structure we have. So you can't touch it. That's how bad these fires are. So the thinking is even if that tree might die,

that it's still better to have it standing. Even if it dies in one year, two, or five years, we need it right now. That's the thinking. And that's a shift from where we've been in the past. But again, in the past, the fires were a lot smaller than this, right? It's the scale of the fire that's really changing the rules. Well, when we see forests as something only of economic value, I've heard people feel like they're in a hurry or they're being told this narrative.

You know, I met with a different nation recently. You know, well, there was a fire this year. We got to hurry. We got to get those logs off the land before it's too late because you have, you know, a couple of years to harvest them after the fire before they don't necessarily have any economic value. But we're removing these really critical. pieces of soil regeneration, right? There are other values associated with the burned wood and allowing it to fall and stay put than trying to get every

last dollar out of absolute devastation. I was really marveling as we were driving along, like, these pines that burned and we have the kind of black soot on the bark, but it's starting to fall away in chunks, maybe from the woodpeckers, and there's this like almost iridescent silver, bone white. Yeah, I mean, it's just all part of this, like, palette, right, that's been introduced

onto the land from fire and to begin to kind of watch, you know, life come from what is beautiful degradation. If these trees are allowed to fall where they stand, they'll return their nutrients to the soil. Those trees are holding on to carbon and materials and minerals, even though they're burned, that would help rebuild the soil. And so we're really interested in what would happen, especially in McKay, where we're having

so much trouble. What happens if we get some of those trees on the ground sort of speeding up the process? Because fallen trees often act as nurse trees for, right, they give shade, they help hold water, they do all sorts of things to help encourage rebuilding of the soil. But there are places where the soil has been increased. incredibly hard to rebuild. They're the places where the fire just burned tremendously hot. So even some of the weeds aren't really recovering. Like, the soil is really pretty dead.

It's one of the fires where you walk around out there and there's all kinds of rocks and they're all shattered from the heat. And that's a, I've not experienced that in many other fires. So they're using seed balls to help plants take root in the scorched earth. A component of the seed balls is that berries often grow out of bear scat. So part of the quadrats is we have their seed balls, but then we've also collected bearscat in similar biogeoclomatic zones and have kind of replaced that out in severe burnt areas in the wildfire and we're monitoring those because everyone we talk to it, they're also like,

you know about the bearscat, right? And we're like, yes, we've been deep in the bear scat. My name is Nina Andrassic. I work as a project's coordinator focusing on forestry, wildlife, wildlife, and lands for Shatleyam Government Services here in Shalien Territory. I first moved here in early June of 2022. I actually remember that year I was up with my coworkers, and we were checking out the status of roads.

We're doing a bit of terrain stability assessment following the wildfires, and we came across a roasted toad or a frog that was just like burnt like a charred, something that gets charred. And it was like wild to see. see and next to that burnt toad on the middle of the road was like a cattle graveyard of like all of these burnt bones of what could have only been cattle. And so that was my first like, whoa, this was, I knew it was serious fire, but like this fire took lives. Things were killed in this fire. And now I've seen like a toad in the wetland alive and well. So that's kind of nice,

going full circle. How do you make a seed ball? How do you make a seed ball? How do you make a seed ball? So, well, before it gets like very nice, you head out far up West Pavilion Road and there's a natural clay deposit. And so we harvest clay. We went out and we gathered a lot of traditional foods. So anything from Chakum to Hosham, which is like Saskatoon and soapberry, also a lot of Oregon grape, various foods that are culturally important to both stratium as a pupil, but also to the deer and a lot of foods for the animals on the landscape. and we harvested the seeds and form almost like a mud ball. We've been called mud cakes and that sort of thing,

but all into a ball and you make a little divot in the middle, and that's where you put the processed seeds, and then you close it, and then you just kind of let it dry. But, yeah, kids love it. It's quite fun for us as well. And the idea is that the seed is kind of then, like, wrapped up in all of these things that it needs. Yes, thank you.

Yeah, it has the soil for nutrients and the clay to help it stay, form so that it doesn't kind of blow away in the wind once we're out there. We picked these really black soil areas to see if we could sort of stimulate some to grow and the results are challenging. So some of the seed balls didn't even break open. We had a few plants that germinated, but they all died. So we're thinking about moving forward, changing our ratios of clay to soil or just trying other methods, but it's important to also talk about when things don't fully work the way you want them to, because that's part of life and science, I guess. And I remember, you know, Jen saying that really the kind of science that's happening here is

like learning in real time about what's going to come back in this ecosystem. Yes, without a doubt. It's all learning real time. It's an unprecedented time that we're all living in. So you get 85 years where everything's behaving the way we were taught. We were taught that fire-maintained ecosystems burn a little and then they recover. And then in the last 15 years, all of a sudden we're off the chart. And literally the graph just beeps along and then spikes and spikes and spikes. So when you talk about science, we don't know how to deal with that. That's not how any of us were trained.

We were trained that the world operates different than it's operating now. And that's why we need to be out in the field. And we need to be trying different things to say, what works when this stuff is going off the charts? In an age of unpredictable wildfires, science requires not just trial and error, but patience. Everyone wants to cover up the scar on the landscape right away because it's hard to look at it.

You know, when you were here before, right? It's hard to look at something that looks like the moon. It's really distressing. But I think it's also really key that we not follow that impulse. We need to give the land time to show us what it can do and what it remembers because, you know, one, we only have so many limited resources to pay for expensive interventions like seeding and planting. You can see across from where we are right now,

we've got some south-facing slopes that, you know, experience really hot, hot, dry conditions. and you can see there's not a lot of color over there. That hill that we're looking at there is mostly brown and gray. Right. And this is where I would say, okay, we need a different plan for over there. The land is telling us, I need help over here. And I think that's where we can also make decisions.

Like, in this case, I'm like, you know, you want to put a tree plantation somewhere? Why don't you do it there? You don't have this natural regeneration from the seed bank. But we wouldn't know the difference, right? We could have accidentally spent all of our resources over here. But now we know. I think even for myself, being patient has been one of the most difficult lessons. But I think, you know, this is where relying on, you know, the wisdom of elders and even the wisdom of the land.

To think of ourselves more in the time scale of the forest as opposed to our own very limited time scale. It really is making me think about, like, in my own. own life when I've felt pain or distress, it's really hard to be patient. You want to get better as fast as possible. But sometimes rushing means that you're just kind of suppressing or repressing. And yeah, like the true work of healing is a long-term project. Totally. And, you know, do we even know what healing means, right? Like, like, what are we trying to get to? because the default is not the thing that we want to go back to, or the default of the last 150 years.

I mean, I think about this in terms of my own, you know, long-term health, right? Like, if you rush yourself into healing some minor illness, you know, you may be working your way into a different long-term chronic illness, right? And I think, you know, we have a chronic illness on our landscapes here in BC. But if damage to the land can ripple across different territories, healing can too. So we're walking down to, this is the Fraser River here. This is the Fraser River. This year was an absolutely incredible sockeye salmon run, also an incredible pink salmon run.

This whole canyon was just alive with fish and people catching fish. fish. So this is hoist in First Nation lands and there are a number of wooden structures around that not that long ago there were full of salmon drying. Yeah, you know, salmon's preserved here by being wind dried and all these little structures we see down here. You know, we're just recently kind of cleaned up for the season, but families were down here drying their fish, preserving fish for the year, you know, as been done here for thousands. of years. It was such an amazing thing to get to witness. And just like the deer, the salmon travel far and wide, stitching different territories together. Again, like, we kind of think about

issues as being in one place or the other are compartmentalized. And, you know, the removal of fish farms, you know, up the Broughton Archipelago by, you know, a number of Kwokwakwakwak communities up there that worked really, really hard to see that happen. This is, I think, the first year, there's been a full cycle of fish that have not known fish farms in their way, you know, coming through the strait and then through the Salish Sea and up the Fraser River. And, you know, we're seeing these record numbers of fish. It's hard not to do that math. Like, we're in one territory, but all the territories are connected, you know, and the fish coming through there, the fish ending up here.

Just think of all the languages when we go out and we do our first salmon ceremony and these salmon are swimming through our territories, that even that first run, the early Stewart, that run of salmon has heard probably eight to ten languages spoken to it. You know, blessings being said to this run, you know, since time immemorial. My name is Michelle Edwards. I'm a Statliam woman. I'm a previous leader, a chief of Sheklawash and Kekaitin community,

which is one of the 11 communities in the Statliam Nation. Right now I work with the Statliam Chiefs Council as the Temean coordinator or the coordinator of the land. They hear all these languages being spoken, and so that's one run of salmon. All their DNA is in all of us, right? So again, it brings back those relationship ties that we have with each other, and it's the salmon that created those ties.

And the salmon, in turn, feed the land, the soil, the berries, and ultimately the animals. Well, that would have been a teaching from the bears, right? And, you know, so, you know, through the years in our early, early evolution, it was the animals, the grizzly bear, the bears that showed us, you know, what to eat, what to do on the land. And so back in the day, our people would have been watching the bears, taken salmon from the river and carrying them out into the bush and probably putting them under trees and under bushes.

So our people started doing that. So it was a responsibility. You have baskets like birch bark baskets and you fill it with the fish guts. And then when the kids are going to then go and collect chalkam sticks or, what is Chalkham again? What do you call it in English? Oh, Saskatoon. Yeah, so Chalkham is Saskatoon.

So that was another responsibility of the children was to go and get Chalkham, but it makes sense that from watching bears, that they would have then spread fish guts around on the land. And as the fish guts decompose, they enrich the soil. Because it's all about the balance. They all depend on each other out there as well. The plants, the berries, the medicines, they all depend on each other as well, just like we do.

In the years ahead, the McCay-Cree. Wildfire will have even more lessons to share. Everyone I've met here is in it for the long haul because they're committed to learning those lessons. There's so much more to research. There's so much more to find out. There's so much more to spread about what we're seeing. It's truly just a magical place and the relationships I formed with our partner communities have what led me to continue. The first time I was here, she was finishing her master's research. there was no way I was leaving. I said, sign me back up because I want to come back. And so it just didn't feel like I was done. Now Virginia's doing her PhD. So you're now, you know, you'll be here at

least another four years. Yeah, another four more years here. And honestly, that doesn't sound long enough. I don't know where I'll go after, but I might find myself right back here too. Jennifer Grenz also keeps finding herself back here with yet another lesson to learn. I always think that I'm in this constant state of unlearning to learn. And here you are thinking you've had your pivotal moment and everything's changed, but this fire just keeps doing that for me. Every assumption I've made or thing that I've learned about ecology just keeps getting turned on its head. But just being here, I mean, I think you're having that experience now too, right? Who would have thought it looked like this? And the only way you're going to learn these lessons is by being with this. fire and being with this fire in a long-term way. Like that's a long-term relationship. Yeah, someone recently said to me, you know, are you, are you studying other fires? Like, you're always talking about like, hey, and like, yes, we're starting to look at other fires, but I'll never leave this fire my whole life. Like, this will be where I keep coming back to listen.

We need these lessons because we're facing, you know, this is everywhere. And we need to be applying what we're learning, you know, in other places. Yes, it's different in different places. Every fire is different. But, you know, I just have never experienced the land speaking so clearly. You know, I had an elder tell me once, like, you just need to listen and let the plants talk to you. And I, I never really understood what that meant. And now I understand it because it's all I can hear out here. And so, you know, what I hear here is now protect us. Protect us. Let us keep doing this. Thank you so much and thank you for having you back.

I am looking forward to next time already. Yeah, let's see what happens in the next couple of years, right? Standing by the banks of the Fraser River in Lillowet, BC, that was Indigenous ecologist Jennifer Grenz. When I was here two years ago, your first book, Medicine Wheel for the planet, was just about to come out. And now you're working on your second book. Can I ask you what it's called?

It is called Burned, Truth and Hope in the Fires. This is the third installment in our ongoing series Healing the Land from Ideas producer Pauline Holdsworth. Actually, there's a moose print right there in the ash. And you can see like there's so much life, but, you know, it's all amongst the ash. If you'd like to hear parts one and two, go to our website, cbc.ca.ca slash ideas, or search our podcast feed. Thank you to everyone who welcomed us to Stathliem Territory. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso.

Technical production, Danielle Duval, our senior producer, Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. Oh, so what is this? This is Black Cat Raspberry. Oh, wow. And I think it's one of the most underrated of berries. The flavor is sort of like a raspberry and a blackberry had a baby. And they're dried up on the plant right now, but you can even have a little.

Okay. But also you can feel there's a texture. There's a lot of seeds. But when it's fresh, the seeds kind of pop in your mouth. One of the things, you know, I often do this time of year, not just kind of have a little flavor sampling, but then we just throw them, right? Because we are part of nature,

and we're going to disperse these seeds. And there you go. We'll come back next time, Pauline, and your black cap raspberry plants will be growing over there now. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.