How Indigenous Cultural Burns Can Help Heal Climate-Ravaged Forests—and People

From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Aynsley O’Neill with Amy Cardinal Christianson, a senior fire advisor with the Indigenous Leadership Initiative.

To combat increasingly dangerous wildfires, modern fire management teams may use prescribed burns to reduce fuel buildup before fire season begins. But around the world, Indigenous people have been using fire on the landscape for thousands of years.

One such practice comes from the Métis tradition in Western Canada.

While a prescribed burn is typically a larger, low- to moderate-intensity fire, the Métis burning practice is much smaller, more closely resembling a campfire, and it carries cultural significance.

Cree-Métis scientist Amy Cardinal Christianson is a senior fire advisor with the Indigenous Leadership Initiative and host of the Good Fire podcast. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

AYNSLEY O’NEILL: How did you get involved in this world of fire stewardship?

AMY CARDINAL CHRISTIANSON: I remember growing up having lots of my family involved in firefighting. Back then, we had fires all the time, but they weren’t scary fires. I never actually thought much about it until I moved to an urban center, and then I realized that that wasn’t really a normal life experience for a lot of people.

I started working with Métis elders during my Ph.D. and hearing this concept of cleaning the land, and really got interested in rediscovering my own family’s role in use of fire, and also just how this could be a potential solution for our current wildfire crisis.

O’NEILL: Many of us might be familiar with this concept of prescribed burn. How would you say that is similar to or different from a Métis or Indigenous burning practice?

CHRISTIANSON: They’re both very important practices but they’re also like apples and oranges. Lots of people use the two terms interchangeably, but really they’re very different conceptually. 

For Indigenous people, when we use cultural fire, it’s around Indigenous governance systems and knowledge of when to burn, and it’s done to achieve cultural objectives on the landscape—things that we need to sustain our cultures. 

There’s hundreds of reasons why Indigenous people burn. Some of the most common and shared are burning for berries. Berry bushes often get overgrown as they age, and when we go in with fire in the early spring or late fall, it’s almost like pruning those berry bushes. You burn the dead parts of them that aren’t producing, but leave the roots intact. The next spring, they put up really healthy new growth. For cultures that rely on bears, the bears are attracted to the new berry growth. It lures the animals into that area. Then at the end of the summer, you get really nice fat bears to harvest. 

Prescribed fire is done for quite a different reason. It’s usually to reduce hazards, to remove vegetation and other things. It also generally follows quite a paramilitary approach. It’s dominated by white men, and there’s lots of equipment and helicopters. There’s nothing wrong with that. The fires that they’re doing are usually higher risk than the cultural burns that we do. They’re both very important practices, but just quite different in how they’re actually carried out on the land.

O’NEILL: How did colonization change burning practices across Canada?

CHRISTIANSON: When settlers first came to Canada, they saw trees as money signs. They didn’t understand why you would want to potentially burn in an area. They brought fire exclusion policies; the first one in Canada was in 1610, in Newfoundland. That made Indigenous burning illegal. There was also the campaign of systemically removing Indigenous people from their lands. Through the Indian Act we have in Canada, putting people onto reserves, through residential schools, all of those things led to this huge severance of our knowledge systems.

O’NEILL: What kind of pushback have you faced against these cultural burning practices over the years?

CHRISTIANSON: There are all sorts of acts and regulations and other things in place right now that keep us still from burning as we need to. Even amongst our communities, there’s a reluctance or a fear of fire because we’ve been told for so long that that’s not an appropriate practice to carry out on the land. For me that’s been one hard thing to watch, because we need fire. We need fire on the landscape, and what these out-of-control fires are showing us is that we’re not stewarding forests properly.

O’NEILL: I’m curious how your participation in burns is tied to, or influenced by, your relationship with the forest or nature on a general level?

CHRISTIANSON: I think that it’s implicitly tied. If you don’t have that relationship, you don’t understand why fire would be needed, and you don’t understand then how that vegetation and other things might respond to fire. 

One thing that’s really important for us when we’re using fire is thinking about nesting birds. If we know that they’re there we don’t want to burn that area, because we’re basically burning up their nests. There has to be that cultural tie to the landscape. 

When I go burn, usually I go with my husband and my kids. It usually takes us two or three hours, so kind of an afternoon activity. We don’t use a ton of water because we have natural fire breaks like snow lines. Actually, my daughters find it boring after you light it, because it’s a very, very controlled activity.

One thing I often hear as a criticism for cultural burning is that there’s no training required, or there’s no planning required, and that’s incredibly insulting, because for us the training comes from years of working with people who are more knowledgeable than us with fire, and then the planning is done endlessly. It’s something that we’re constantly looking at and observing as we decide when and where to put fire. 

Cultural burning is a slow activity; you hear the birds, you notice the trees. I’m pretty familiar with most trees on my property, which I know people might think is crazy. But I can tell if they’re sick or if things are different about them. That’s the thing I like most, just being out there and continuing that relationship.

O’NEILL: Many of us do consider firefighting dangerous. How do you protect yourselves from the potential dangers of being around large-scale fire?

CHRISTIANSON: When we’re talking about cultural fire, it’s usually a fire we can walk beside. When we go out, it’s almost like a campfire moving across the ground—that’s about the scale of it. I don’t feel scared or like it’s dangerous; it’s really kind of quite a nice, calming practice. 

Most cultural burners I know have never had an escape fire, but you always have that in the back of your head like, well what if, and so I would say that I burn with way more caution than I used to, because of this and because of my role and the advocacy components of it. 

Because we’re removing that dead, dry vegetation from the landscape and promoting a healthier environment … it’s much easier to stop the fires. As a fire is coming toward my area, because I have burned and we have a lot less dead vegetation that the fire can basically eat as it’s moving toward us, it makes it easier for firefighters to put out the fire. So It’s proven to reduce wildfire risk to communities from out-of-control fire.

O’NEILL: Your podcast is called Good Fire. What is good fire?

CHRISTIANSON: With good fire, what we’re trying to do is produce a mosaic landscape. You have old growth forest and older trees, but then you also have meadows, and you have younger trees and you have a mix of deciduous trees and coniferous trees, so leafy trees and needle trees. The reason we do that is so that we have less far to travel to access the cultural resources that we need. 

When I’m talking about bad fires, what I’m talking about are these climate change-induced fires that are burning at such high intensity and with such severe impacts that they’re really devastating the forest for generations.

O’NEILL: Your fire knowledge is not just from Métis cultural practice. You also have a history with Western-based science education and research. How have you combined those two?

CHRISTIANSON: I did my Ph.D. with the Métis community, learning about cultural fire, and then I went and worked for the Canadian Forest Service, where I was a fire social scientist for almost 14 years. 

When I started, I was very idealistic, and I thought, if we just have a really good Western scientific paper or something like that, it’ll change people’s minds and let us start burning. We’ve produced paper after paper on that and have actually seen very little change. 

What I then realized is really it’s an issue of power and systemic racism that we’re experiencing. It’s not a lack of scientific knowledge or Indigenous knowledge. It’s really much bigger things at play that are keeping us from being on the land. 

I got offered a position at Indigenous Leadership Initiative, which is an advocacy conservation organization that’s Indigenous led. We’re trying for action now to really target policies, regulations and other things that are keeping us from being able to burn. 

We’re not obsessed with fire. We’re obsessed with healthy landscapes, and fire is one way that we can get to that. When I’m speaking about cultural fire now, I show videos behind me of cultural fire. I had one lady come up to me and [say], “Oh, that’s all you want to do.” It’s not like we want to go and start mountainsides on fire, although maybe there’s some elders that eventually would want to do that. For us, it’s just having a lot of fires on the landscape that are small and controlled that produce these mosaics that we want to see.

O’NEILL: In what ways have you seen successful collaboration between Indigenous groups and also perhaps non-Indigenous groups when it comes to fire management?

CHRISTIANSON: Probably the best example is the Blood Tribe in southwestern Alberta. Alvin First Rider and his team there have been working really hard to establish a fire guardian program, and they’ve done that in partnership with Parks Canada. Parks Canada has been a really good supporter, but not trying to control, if that makes sense. Part of that is because, at the moment, the guardians aren’t trying to burn directly in the national park, but they’ve been coming out and supporting burns on the reserve, and it was a really great experience working with them. 

The Blood Tribe program has been inspirational and I hope that we see it replicated across Canada. Because of the changes to the forest and climate change in many areas, we can’t just go out and put cultural burning back on the landscape like we used to. Those areas need either a prescribed fire or mechanical thinning, or hand thinning to remove a bunch of that vegetation because if we went and tried to do a cultural burn there using the techniques we usually use with community, it would just be way too big of a fire for us to control. 

To me, that also speaks to where really good partnerships can come in, like if an agency that has access to heli torches, where people don’t actually have to be in the fire, they can just drop fire into an area and they have all the firefighting equipment and other things, if they can go into those areas and burn them first, then we can slowly begin to bring cultural fire back to that area in a safe and sustained way.

O’NEILL: Can this Métis burning practice be a tool for healing or cultural connection among Métis people? 

CHRISTIANSON: The beauty of it is just getting people out on the land together and really being proud of their culture. Any workshops that we’ve had where we’ve brought Métis people together, it’s just been a wonderful experience. We’ve done a few with youth where we go out and teach them about why this practice was important. Most have really no idea that Métis people used to burn like this. It was an important part of the buffalo hunt and trapping. 

The other thing that I’ve really liked about it is just being able to work so closely with our relatives, the First Nations, because really, we’re related to those folks. We use fire in similar ways, and it’s really been a wonderful way of unity. There’s so many divisive things in the world, but when you get people out on the land and learning and being with one another, it really helps the mental health and physical health of people who participate.