There were multiple wildfires in Manitoba province in Canada. Photo / Fire and Emergency NZ
Fire WE025 started small. But in late May, hot and dry conditions and gusty winds whipped it into an out-of-control inferno.
Over 116 days, it swept across northwestern Manitoba, chewing up 180,895ha of Canada’s boreal forestone of many massive conflagrations in one of the country’s worst wildfire seasons on record.
In its path lay the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation. Chief Gordie Bear grew alarmed as thick smoke blanketed Pukatawagan, their remote fly-in community of 2200 people.
The fire, Ashley Charlette recalled, “lit up” the sky “like something I’ve never seen before”, eventually knocking out power.
When an evacuation order was issued, help was slow to arrive.
Many remote communities in Manitoba and beyond were threatened by fire, and there were only so many aircraft to rescue them in what officials in the province said was the largest domestic air evacuation in Canadian military history.
Panic and frustration set in, Charlette said, and people were “getting their boats ready” to flee on their own.
“There’s no place to run,” Bear told the Washington Post. “Your life is in your hands, but you can’t outrun fire.”
The Nation’s plight shows the outsized impact of Canada’s wildfires on Indigenous people, who make up a disproportionate number of evacuees in a country where climate change is making blazes larger, more destructive and more frequent, threatening the land and wildlife on which they rely for sustenance, survival, and cultural traditions.
According to figures compiled by the Post, Indigenous people make up 5% of Canada’s population, but they have made up more than half of its wildfire evacuees this year, the second-worst wildfire season on record.
Some people were driven to seek refuge in other provinces, where they would stay for months. As of Friday, more than 1280 of the 45,300 First Nations evacuees had yet to return home.
“Research suggests that the extent of losses and the number of evacuations that First Nations populations experience could drastically increase in the coming decades,” Natural Resources Canada reported this year.
“This may translate into major consequences, including structural and cultural losses, more land alterations and more inherent social disruptions due to evacuations.”
Indigenous leaders, scientists, and government watchdogs have long alleged the government response to wildfires in Indigenous communities has been reactive instead of proactive, marred by confusion about jurisdiction, constraints on resources, and the near-total exclusion of Indigenous knowledge from forest stewardship and emergency management.
“What I’ve been seeing across Canada from Indigenous nations is really this palpable frustration this year that it seems to be the same things over and over that are happening,” said Amy Cardinal Christianson, a Metis former research scientist at the Canadian Forest Service.
“Indigenous communities are predominantly impacted, yet there is still a huge power imbalance in how these issues are dealt with.”
Indigenous Services Canada said it has agreements in place to aid First Nations during emergencies, but “more work needs to be done” to ensure they are “full and equal partners in a comprehensive approach to emergency management service delivery, including support for Indigenous-led approaches”.
“ISC is committed to improving emergency management services and transferring control of emergency management programmes to First Nations partners,” Maryéva Métellus, an agency spokeswoman, wrote in an emailed statement.
This year’s wildfire season got off to a quick start. By early June, Manitoba and Saskatchewan had declared states of emergency, and smoke from Canada’s blazes had spread to the United States and as far away as Russia. By early October, more than 5600 wildfires had charred 8.3 million hectares and displaced more than 70,000 people.
Manitoba has suffered its worst wildfire season in three decades. Above-average temperatures, drought conditions and a low snowpack had turned the province into a tinderbox, Canadian researchers reported in the journal Earth in August. By the end of the century, the Canadian Government estimates, climate change could double the area burned in the country.
Indigenous people are in the flames’ path.
They are 30 times more likely to be affected by wildfires than non-Indigenous Canadians, Natural Resources Canada has reported, and more likely to suffer adverse health effects.
They often live in or near forests prone to fire, and the remoteness of their communities - in some cases, a legacy of colonialism - limits their ability to evacuate by land.
As a result, some communities have been forced to evacuate more than once - even within the same wildfire season. The Mathias Colomb Cree Nation, about 700km northwest of Winnipeg, also evacuated in 2022. This year’s evacuation lasted more than 100 days.
Long-standing infrastructure problems on Indigenous reserves also leave people vulnerable.
David Monias, chief of the Pimicikamak Cree Nation in Manitoba, said his community can’t install more sprinkler systems, for instance, because its water plants are so “old and obsolete” that there isn’t sufficient water pressure. The reserve, home to 6600 people, has one fire appliance and a few hoses, he said.
“What we’ve seen in some of our First Nations communities is that they were asking for fire suppression supports before the fires became too big and unmanageable,” said Kyra Wilson, grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs. “And yet again, it was falling on deaf ears.”
For some Indigenous people, a report from the Public Health Agency of Canada found, evacuations are “traumatic reminders” of being separated from their families by the Canadian Government and taken to state-funded, church-run residential schools or of the Sixties Scoop, in which provincial governments took thousands of Indigenous children from their homes without their families’ consent and placed them for adoption into non-Indigenous homes to assimilate them into the Eurocentric culture.
“As a little boy, I left home at 6 years old to go to residential school,” Bear told reporters last month. “Just as painful today, I go through that pain of missing home … Comfort is not easy to find when you’re in a concrete jungle. We find comfort at home in a bush, among the trees, the rocks, the water.”
In 2022, Canada’s auditor-general found Indigenous Services Canada was not providing necessary support to First Nations for emergencies such as wildfires. Its actions, the watchdog wrote, “were more reactive than preventative, despite First Nations communities identifying many infrastructure projects to mitigate the impact of emergencies”.
“Until these projects are completed,” the auditor wrote, “First Nations communities are likely to continue to experience emergencies that could be averted by investing in the right infrastructure.”
The auditor-general found the federal Government did not have emergency service and wildfire agreements with all of the provinces and territories. Those agreements help ensure First Nations have access to emergency services comparable to those that safeguard non-Indigenous people.
“This issue was identified in our 2013 audit and in the department’s 2013 and 2017 internal audits,” the auditor wrote.
Three years after the 2022 report, agreements still aren’t in place with all provinces and territories.
Indigenous Services Canada said it developed a “comprehensive” plan to address the auditor-general’s recommendations.
“New agreements are being developed at a pace that respects partners and emphasises collaboration, as part of a multilateral process to clearly define the roles and responsibilities of all parties in emergency events affecting First Nations communities,” Metellus said.
The disproportionate effect of wildfires on Indigenous people feels particularly cruel, leaders say, because their generations of knowledge of how to steward the land has been ignored. The disregard of the Indigenous practice of cultural burning in favour of fire suppression, for instance, has left vegetation to dry out on the forest floor and provide fuel for fires.
In recent years, federal and provincial authorities have sought to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into forest management practices. Christianson, a former Indigenous fire specialist for Parks Canada, said the outreach is welcome but it’s often for “one-off” projects, and not being approved at the scale necessary.
“There is positive movement,” she said, but “the pace is very slow.”
In Pukatawagan this spring, after several days waiting for help to arrive, military helicopters finally airlifted out Charlette and her 3-year-old daughter.
It was only the beginning of an odyssey to find shelter. The town of The Pas, 200km away by helicopter - there’s no land route - was packed with wildfire refugees. They took a plane to Winnipeg, where conditions were no better.
“I didn’t know where to go or what to do,” said Charlette, 33. “It was like a lost feeling.”
Mother and daughter eventually settled with hundreds of Manitobans in Niagara Falls, Ontario, where many would stay well into September.
The Pimicikamak Cree Nation was forced to evacuate in 2023, Canada’s worst wildfire season. People had three hours to escape, Monias said, “driving through fire” on the only road out.
This year’s evacuation brought its own challenges.
Monias said he asked the Canadian Armed Forces for assistance but was told the province had to declare a state of emergency and request help first.
By the time the province had done that, conditions had deteriorated so badly that aircraft couldn’t land. Some people drove or were ferried out six at a time to neighbouring communities where they could be airlifted to safety. Many carried no clothing or medication.
While the federal Government has jurisdiction over First Nations reserves, emergency management and forest management is a provincial responsibility. That often creates confusion, Indigenous leaders say, which slows the response to fires.
“That should not be the case,” Monias said. “Wildfires do not respect boundaries or jurisdiction.”
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