The Decibel - What Canada can learn from Indigenous fire practices

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

Nearly 900 wildfires are burning across Canada, and early estimates suggest Ontario is experiencing its worst wildfire season on record. In Northwest Ontario, more than a dozen communities – most of which are First Nations – have been evacuated, with some people taken to places as far away as Niagara Falls. As fire seasons get worse, Indigenous people are disproportionately affected, but their historical practices of forest management – practices that could improve conditions – had historically been suppressed in much of Canada. Riley Yesno is an Anishinaabe scholar, writer, and commentator from Eabametoong First Nation, and is a distinguished fellow with the Yellowhead Institute. She joins us to talk about how Indigenous fire practices keep forests healthy, and what happens when the people with the most experience in facing wildfires are also the people who have historically been disempowered from managing them. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Across Canada, there are nearly 900 wildfires burning right now. And in Ontario, early estimates suggest the province is experiencing its worst wildfire season on record. More than a dozen communities have been evacuated, most of which are First Nations. Indigenous people are disproportionately affected by worsening fire seasons. They make up 5% of Canada's population. But public health data from 2023 shows that 42% of wildfire evacuations occurred in indigenous communities. But these communities also have their own practices of forest management. Practices that had historically been suppressed by legislation in much of Canada.

So today, we're talking to Riley Yesno. She's an Anishinaabe scholar from the Abmatung First Nation in northwest Ontario. She'll talk about what's been happening on the ground in communities in northern Ontario, how the traditional practice of prescribed burns works, and what happens when the people who have the most experience dealing with these spires are also the people who have historically been disempowered from managing them. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the Decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Riley, thank you so much for joining me today.

Hi, thanks for having me. So Riley, you grew up in the Abmatung First Nation, a community north of Thunder Bay. That's currently under evacuation. Can you tell us what is like there? Yeah. So I lived there not my entire childhood, but definitely during a lot of formative years. I loved living on the res, actually. So Abatang or Fort Hope, as it's sometimes also called, is a flying community.

It's located on the Ring of Fire territories to give you some sort of geographical, you know, anchoring. and it's about 400 kilometers north of Thunder Bay. And it is stunning. It is just deep in the boreal, right on a lake. My family did so much hunting and fishing and trapping as like a main source of food. And so I feel really connected to the land when I think about Fort Hope. And also because it's a smaller community, anybody who grows up in small towns kind of gets this vibe. But everybody is truly related and everybody knows everybody.

And so there's a real sense of connection to one and not. other end to place there. At the same time, of course, it is experiencing a lot of the same or of the kind of hallmark issues, social and infrastructural issues that I think a lot of people think of when they think of reserves. So they haven't had clean drinking water for as long as I've been alive. They have a school that only goes up to grade eight, which is a huge reason why I also moved away when I was young. My mom was hoping if we made that transition while we were younger, it would be easier for us to acclimate to life in Thunder Bay. And they don't have a hospital. they only have a nursing station.

There's, again, no road access so you can only get in through bushplain. So while there are certainly a whole host of issues, I think part of it is also just because I was so young when I was living there, is that my memories of the place are all very, very fond. Right. And there's something, a couple of things you mentioned there, that's really interesting,

especially to this conversation around wildfires. It's just that, you know, that it's in the Boreal forest. People are very connected to the land, but also that it's, it's hard to get in and out, right? And so this is kind of what we're seeing when it comes to these wildfires. So, you know, for people who haven't been to northwestern Ontario, how representative is Atmatung of the rest of the region? Like, what is it like there? I think it is representative of a lot of communities, especially the further north you go. So we are located in Treaty 9 territory. I should also say that Northern Ontario as a whole is about the size of France. Like it's a huge, yes, massive, massive place. And so you have a number of communities. There's 49 communities in the Treaty 9 area alone, which is most of northern Ontario. The vast majority of those aren't connected by road.

The further south you get so more towards Thunder Bay, the more likely you'll get road access into some of these communities. And the more accessible they are by road, the more you might see greater infrastructure than you will on, say, like, communities like my reserve. But there's still definitely a gap between the type of. of services you can expect to see there versus somewhere like even Thunder Bay or Sue Lookout or these more urban provincial hubs. And I think that people will be familiar of this image from these wildfires that recently are still ongoing of this boat, this man on a boat from Collins Lake, right? And just like this like basically this barrier of smoke behind him.

And so people have been evacuated because this is things that people are facing. So what have you heard about the evacuations? that have been going on. Yeah. I mean, so I guess to preface is that every year for the last couple of years that I can recall at least, that there's been some evacuations. Usually those have been temporary. So there's too much smoke nearby or there's a fire that's a little bit too close.

And so folks have to go down to places like Thunder Bay, stay for some time and go back up. This fire season has felt very different in that we're also seeing a number of communities who their entire communities have been actually burnt to the ground. And Collins is a perfect example of that where they don't at this point have a community to go back to. And so that's really stark. In addition to the fact that we're just seeing a higher number of evacuations than we're generally used to.

So that's been really stressful because even for these communities that are used to perhaps, okay, it's a hot dry summer fire season might come around, maybe we'll have to leave, which is already, I think, a wild condition for them to have to be accustomed to. they actually are experiencing something very different in that. Instead of going just down south to Thunder Bay, they might find themselves now in Barry or Niagara Falls. Interesting. And that is really difficult, I think, for folks to conceptualize, like, how different and far that is.

I mean, these places, Barry is very many hours away from Thunder Bay, which you're saying Thunder Bay is south. So to go that much further is very far. And just to put some numbers on this, Ontario Premier Doug Ford said that around 1,800 people have been evacuated. from fires in northwest Ontario. Many of them were taken to Thunder Bay, and you were there last week. What was that like? Yeah.

So when we first started seeing the first wave of evacuees, I just happened to be in Thunder Bay at the time, I'll say. I grew up there. My family still lives there, but I'm based in Toronto most of the time. I was up there for a work project, and it was wild how one day it was sun shining, it was a beautiful summer day. And then truly the next morning, everything seemed like it was out of an apocalypse movie. And it was very clear that we were experiencing fires in the north

and that they were more extreme than anything I had ever seen growing up. And so as we got more and more notice that evacuees were going to be coming, there was a call for donations to the hotels and some of the sites where a lot of the evacuees would be sent. And so my mom and I went and we helped trying to sort these mountains of donations. And while it was really amazing to see all of the community support, there was also a lot of heaviness in the room. People were clumped in the hallways, old people, children, some people crying.

You know, the mountain of donations we received was lovely, but it was very hard to deal with, and it was kind of chaotic to try and manage. There didn't seem to really be a system in place on how to responsibly sort or allocate those. And so, yeah, the first couple of days especially were really heavy and chaotic. What did you hear from people who had been evacuated? There is, I think, a real sense of shock, especially at that time. The main sentiment I could see on people's faces was like this kind of disbelief, that their community, like you know intellectually now, you've seen that smoke, that it's gone. But I think that that's a really hard reality to actually swallow.

Especially in the moment, right? Because you're just trying to deal with the now. but I'm sure those are kind of the feelings that are going to come up later on. Totally. And a lot of anger, I'll say. I think a lot of people were very angry that they were put in this situation in the first place. And a lot of people, I think, rightfully believe that there could have been more done to, even if it was just to give them more time, would have, I think, made a big difference in how people felt that they experienced this fire crisis. Tell me more about that.

Because, again, we've seen these images of people evacuating when the wildfires seemed to be really raging. And what have you heard about why people weren't evacuating sooner? Yeah. So from what I've heard, there has been a really wild number of people who didn't actually get the call from the Ministry of Natural Resources or from the province to say, hey, we're monitoring the fire situation in your region. It's getting kind of close. You guys should leave here. We'll come and send you planes or boats or whatever it is. Instead, what it was was that local communities felt the fire encroaching and then ended up,

having to self-evacuate in many cases, going door to door by themselves, piling people into boats. And that was the case for Collins, Ontario. That was, I hear the case for all of these number of places. I've heard stories about people also calling and saying, hey, the fire's getting close. But, you know, we won't get anything from insurance if we just leave on our own accord. You have to tell us that this is an emergency and we can leave. And then insurance will cover it. Sorry, so the province or the federal government needs to tell them to evacuate in order to get this insurance claim. This is what I was told in that they were. We're saying like it's getting close, it's getting close.

And then finally, when it was essentially at their doorstep, then the ministry was like, okay, now you can go. And so there's a huge amount of frustration in that the communities themselves knew that this issue was dire, but that they weren't receiving any institutional support or at least not sufficient institutional support. And I think that feeling of kind of abandonment and disposability is one that's tied into like just the long legacy of colonialism. And so this is just another example of it that really, you know, not trying to be punny, but burns. What are people who have been evacuated asking for from provincial and federal governments to do differently? So it's interesting because some of the asks that I think people need are from provincial governments and some are from federal governments. So reserves, first of all, are federal jurisdiction technically. And so the underfunding of infrastructure, like I was mentioning, like the airport conditions or hospital.

or emergency services on reserve, those are actually the federal government's responsibility to fund. And we have seen generations of underfunding in that, such that, you know, maybe they won't prevent the forest fire. Maybe they won't save a community if a fire is raging, but they could certainly give people more time and more of a sense of the ability to prepare an evacuation plan. In general, though, the province is responsible for emergency fire services. And there's been a lot of critique of the way that this government especially has

been now underfunding fire services for the better part of a decade. So to put it into perspective in 25, 26, the Ontario Fire Management Fund received $150 million from the province. The Toronto police has a budget of $1.4.3 billion. So we are seeing really, really chronic underfunding of the services. And, you know, then the government will come out and say, well, when the fires actually happen, we'll give you as much money as you need. And indeed, we've ended up spending about double what that original allocation was in, say, the last fire season. But it always then means that we're on the back foot. We're reacting and having to demand these funds in the moment when the crisis is already here, as opposed to being able to prepare for it ahead of time.

And so that can include things like training people to deal with more out-of-control fire situations. It can help make sure that we're doing more prescribed burning during the regular non-wildfire season. It could mean that we could have more monitors in these remote areas where the fire we know burns every year. So there's a lot that we could do with more resources. And I will say that we heard from Doug Forge that he is planning or at least planning to discuss something called a national fire strategy. We don't know what that is, but this is something that the premier, Ontario Premier, has brought up. We'll be right back. So, Raleigh, First Nation communities have been dealing with forest fires for,

generations, right? And there are traditional methods they use to manage the forest, something known as prescribed burns. Can you tell us a bit about what that practice is and what role it plays in forest management? Essentially, what prescribed burning is, is in, you know, a healthy forest. Fire is part of the life cycle of a forest. I think it's important to note that indigenous people and fire experts, you know, non-indigenous today will tell you that the forest needs. to burn as part of its healthy life cycle. What we want to do is limit the factors that make a fire more destructive, less easy to control and to mitigate. And so one of the ways that we can do that is by preemptively burning the tinder that is likely to burn fast and harsh. So if we do that

outside of the forest fire season, it means when inevitably a fire does come, it has less fuel. And so thus should be easier to manage. And indigenous people have known about this technique and implemented it for generations. And not just for forest fire management, there's also practices of doing this in order to regenerate some food sources. There's a bunch of cultural sort of uses for it in addition to fire management. But that's a really big one. And we were doing that for generations until I think BC was the first point. province in the 1870s or so to ban burning.

And they called it the Bush Fire Act and, you know, all of the provinces shortly thereafter followed suit. So since the early 1900s, Canada has effectively banned indigenous people and anyone from burning in this way. What was the reason behind this ban of prescribed burns? So at the time, they said it was to prevent like locomotive fires and, you know, potentially dangerous fires. They said it was for people's

safety. But what historians and what indigenous people will say is that whether it was intentional or not, and some really do think it was intentional, was it was a very effective way of legislatively cutting First Nations people off from the practice of

prescribed and cultural burnings. And at the time, especially, the assimilation of indigenous people was the government's explicit priority. It was into secret. And so it's not a surprise to people that legislation like this passed and helped facilitate that process by eliminating or making it difficult to practice one way of life. Right. And so Canada kind of moved towards something called fire suppression versus prescribed

burns. And before we get into the impacts of that, can you just describe to me what a prescribed burn looks like? Yeah. So it's actually, I don't think people should have this image of like, you know, it's a bunch of indigenous people getting around and just like lighting a match and tossing it in the forest. These are people who know these lands also so, so intimately. I'm thinking back again to the people in my own community and how well I would trust them to know that bush. And so when you know the bush well enough, you'll know these areas where, again, there's a lot of dead pine, for example. people will wait, for scout, they wait for the right conditions in order to burn. And hopefully it's not too hot, not too dry, so that when they do inevitably light this fire, it doesn't, you know, get out of control.

Yeah. Exactly. And they have dozens and dozens of people around to kind of watch the perimeters of this till the soil so that you can build like almost like a trench also around the area that you want. And if the soil is truly clear, it kind of creates a stop gap. for the fire to not spread any further, ideally. So there's a lot of careful planning and practice that goes into a prescribed burn. Has this evolved at all as time has gone on? So there is a long period where there were essentially no prescribed burnings

because of that legislation that we mentioned. And as far as I understand, it's because, you know, then modern science, Western science, caught up to this knowledge that we already had, which was that, you know, Prescribed burning is actually very good for a forest and managing out of control fire conditions. And so once that became more well known, provinces like BC repealed the legislation and tried to invest more in bringing back prescribed burns. Now we have partnerships between local First Nations, BC's a great example, and provincial forest fighters and academics and ecologists to run prescribed burns themselves. With that said, even at this level of revitalization that we're currently at, we are burning, doing prescribed burns on areas that are far, far insufficient in order to truly protect the forest and to tackle the millions of hectares of forests that we actually have. The U.S., which has less forests than we do, burns more in a prescribed burn fashion, for example.

So Canada has a lot of catch up to do. And it's actually also very daunting to imagine that we could do prescribed burns on enough of the forest in order to totally mitigate the out-of-control fire conditions. And so I think we definitely need to invest more in revitalizing this, but also see it as one solution of many. A tool in the toolbox, basically. Yeah. And given the nature of fires now and their intensity, right, because that's kind of what we're seeing now with wildfires is that, I mean, they've always existed. But now they're just so much more intense. how should we be looking at this practice of prescribed burns?

Like, is this a tool and toolbox? Does that still work of fires that we're hearing are more intense? Like, how do we get forced to a manageable level where we can use prescribed burns? I think that part of the reasons why we're still so slow to get there in addition to just like the legacy of the colonial impact of separating indigenous people from this practice for so long is, for example, you fire is scared people and rightfully so. when you tell people we are going to set a fire in or around anywhere near your community, people don't like that. And so there has to be, I think, more education around that for people to really see this process working and see it as part of the solution. I think people are also still very much scared of liability. Nobody wants to be the person to say, okay, now let's light this.

And then it can get out of hand. This has happened in the state sometimes with their prescribed burnings. And so there is some precedent that makes people wary. At the same time, the current fire situation that we have, our current emergency management practices clearly are insufficient. And I don't see how leaning into generational knowledge is going to make that any bit worse. I think it can only really help us in the long run. How are you thinking about what comes next, especially as the smoke clears and people are going to, if they have, a place to return to, return to their places, their communities.

But yeah, what are you thinking about what comes next? Oh, man. I mean, I was talking to a friend about this the other day. And we were talking about how this fire season, yeah, feels different. And it feels so heavy. And that I, now that I'm back in Toronto, especially, I'm kind of starting to sit more with the grief that I knew was coming. But my friend put it well where she says, you know,

Why it's so hard to watch this happen is also because I love these lands and I don't know who I am without these lands. I don't know who I would be if I didn't grow up in the middle of the boreal and if I didn't rely on those rivers and lakes to fish in and if that wasn't where I played and swam. And it's it's so difficult to see those places be destroyed. It's also so difficult to see the people like my grandmother who right now has been evacuated to Niagara Falls with a lot of. of the rest of my community, be separated by force from those places. I saw online and I've been taking up this language because I think it's really apt is that we've essentially made indigenous people climate refugees in their own territories. And I think that that's extremely shameful. And it is something that makes me so, so frustrated. I want a future where our children and our grandchildren,

like I could take them back to my home community and we could spend a summer there without having to worry that they could have to pack a bag on a moment's notice. And it just seems like right now that that isn't a future that is being made available even though I feel like it should be so intuitive. And so instead it's a future we have to fight for.

And we will, but I also sometimes, you know, sit with like also the feeling of just being so tired. And I think a lot of people in the North feel that. This is not their first fire season, even if it is the worst, and it's exhausting. Another thing I also wanted to flag is, like, I think about my family right now that's in Niagara Falls. And I think about, for example, the comments that a former city official made just a couple of weeks ago about how the presence of evacuees in the town made it seemed less desirable for tourism. And I just think that indigenous people are being often also sent after they've lost so much to a lot of these communities that are explicitly.

hostile towards them and who see their presence as like an aesthetic downfall on these places. And so I'm also think that there's a lot that the general public can do in knowing that this wildfire seasons will continue to make places more hospitable to them. Something I'm thinking about that I'm sure a lot of listeners have seen come across their social media screens. but there was this quote, climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it. And I'm sure that's very poignant for people that are living in these communities. Absolutely. 100%. You know, as much as I'm glad people are paying attention to it now, it's not lost on me that I think the reason why we're also paying attention to it so much this season is because it affected Toronto.

It affected big cities in the states and got people riled up. And in fact, again, these communities and communities like it all across the country, this is, again, not their first wildfire season. And so this is another way that I think we could be more proactive as opposed to reactive as instead of waiting for the smoke to hit our doorstep, is to be looking and listening to those who are experiencing it in advance. Riley, thank you so much for coming on today. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks for having me. That was Riley Yes, No. A Distinguished Fellow with the Yellowhead Institute at Toronto Metropolitan, University. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy McLaughlin, and Mahal Stein. Our editor is David Crosby. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.