A Fire We Can Walk Beside
If a forest fire were to come towards Dr. Amy Cardinal Christianson’s house, her home would be more protected than many of her neighbors’. Dr. Christianson has already burned what would otherwise be the easily combustible, dead vegetation surrounding her property to not only prevent catastrophic fire but to tend the land itself. Recently, I produced a piece about Dr. Amy Cardinal Christianson and learned more about this practice, known as cultural burning.
Dr. Christianson is Cree-Métis and grew up in Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta, Canada. Through her family’s cultural practices and involvement in firefighting, Dr. Christianson saw fire all the time and learned the significant role it plays in forest management. It wasn’t until she moved into a more urban area that she realized most people don’t grow up surrounded by fires. In fact, the idea of a fire burning in the forest is a scary thing for many people.
Even though burning has been practiced for thousands of years, and is an inherent right for these communities, it’s been hard work fighting for Indigenous legal rights to burn on the land. Ever since European settlers brought fire exclusion policies to Canada in the early seventeenth century, Indigenous Peoples have faced opposition to their use of fire on the landscape from Western governments and institutions.
Dr. Christianson herself has spent years steeped in higher education – she holds a PhD in Hazard Management from the University of Western Alberta. During this time, she worked with Métis elders who spoke about how the surrounding landscape had become unhealthy. “We need to clean the land,” they told her. Dr. Christianson began to rediscover her own family’s use of fire. “Good fire,” they call it. Fire that benefits the land and people. As opposed to the wildfires occurring with climate change that wreak havoc on anything and everything in their path.
At the same time, she was learning about the science behind prescribed burns, or intentionally setting fire to an area of forest in order to reduce fuels and prevent larger fires from becoming catastrophic. She hoped that her research would convince Western agencies to let Indigenous Peoples burn freely. But after producing countless papers and nearly two decades of working as a fire social scientist, first for the Canadian Fire Service and then Parks Canada, Dr. Christianson saw that a lack of scientific knowledge was not the issue. The opposition to Indigenous burning was rooted in systemic racism and an unwillingness to trust those who have stewarded the land for centuries.
These days, Dr. Christianson lives in Treaty 6 Territory, co-hosts the “Good Fire” podcast, and works for the Indigenous Leadership Initiative as their senior fire advisor. Through that work, she has found that the best approach to changing minds is to bring Western fire management teams out onto the land and walk them through a cultural burning practice. Dr. Christianson takes them to an area that she’s noticed needs burning. When she starts the fire, it’s more akin to a campfire, one they can calmly walk beside. She shows them how it’s nothing like the giant walls of flame typical of a forest fire or even the low to moderate flames typical of a prescribed burn. Often, the fire will put itself out through natural breaks, like snow lines, and doesn’t require tons of water or manual labor.
However, in areas that have faced severe impacts due to our warming climate, it isn’t safe for Indigenous people to put cultural burning on the landscape the way they used to because the fire would become too big for them to control. Dr. Christianson sees this as an opportunity to work closely with agencies that can safely carry out large-scale burns with more advanced equipment, helitorches for example, to remove vegetation so that Indigenous people can safely bring cultural fire back to that area.
But preventing wildfires from burning out of control is just one use for fire. There are hundreds of other reasons why Indigenous People burn, and these vary depending on location and climate. For example, berry bushes tend to get overgrown as they age and the parts that are no longer producing berries can be pruned with fire while still leaving their roots intact. Come summer, those big juicy berries will attract animals that many Indigenous cultures depend on.
Over the last several years, I’ve heard a lot about prescribed burns. Right now, a number of prescribed fires are burning in California to hopefully prevent some of those catastrophic fires from happening again. But I really didn’t know much about cultural fire. Speaking with Dr. Amy Cardinal Christianson has deepened my understanding of Indigenous burning, and I hope sharing her story will increase your awareness of the struggles that Indigenous people face just to be able to take care of their land and our natural world.
Sophie Bokor
Editorial Intern
