The well-managed section of PIB forest that underwent a prescribed burn four months earlier

(DAN WALTON / iNFOnews.ca)

It may seem counter intuitive, but intentionally burning the land could be what saves the Okanagan from more devastating wildfires.

First Nations people have been practising controlled burns in the Okanagan for thousands of years as a way to mitigate wildfires and regenerate the land, Mic Werstuik and Jordan Coble at Westbank First Nation told iNFOnews.ca.

“Traditional burns or cultural burns have been done for forever, basically, because we do live in a fire environment,” Werstuik said. “It was used as a tool by our people for one, protection, and also on an agricultural level they used burnt areas to enhance growth of traditional plants for medicines and for gathering and also for berry production.”

“It’s been a part of our practices for thousands of years,” Coble said. “The forests that we see today, the forests that have burned down recently, they didn’t look like the forests of the past, they didn’t look like forests 200 years ago.”

Werstuik and Coble explained that fire has traditionally been seen as tool in First Nations culture.

“We had specific fire keepers," said Werstuik. "They were the ones that had all the knowledge of when to burn, where to burn, all those types of things and with colonization and stuff, the view of fire (changed) as being destructive rather than a tool that should be utilized.”

"Fire has always been seen as a medicine in our community and in our nation and within our language itself," Coble said. "We just lost our ability to kind of harness that spark into a manageable flame, now the flames are just overwhelming for anybody."

Due to a lack of small, natural fires within the ecosystem, the densely packed forests that have recently gone up in flames bear little resemblance to the old landscape of the Okanagan, Werstuik explained.

“There would be large ponderosa pine, large fir trees spaced periodically and it wouldn't be a lot of… dead fuel, and then also (there would be) a lot of regeneration,” he said. “The smaller trees would get burnt periodically too so they wouldn't provide what they call ladder fuels that basically take fire from the ground up into the canopy of the trees.”

Werstuik explained that the lack of prescribed burning practices has led to an unbalanced ecosystem and one that is ripe for wildfires.

“For these fuels to get to the levels that they are now it's taken a hundred years to get to that point and Mother Nature is going back and saying you know what, this isn't natural and this is what the natural environment is, and here's a little reminder of the power,” Werstuik said.

Not only are prescribed burns a useful mechanism for eliminating fuel build up, rejuvenating the soil and making way for new life, but they are also recognized by BC Wildfire Service as an essential tool in the fight against wildfires.

READ MORE: McDougall Creek wildfire crews shift from lighting fires to mopping them up

However, thisl approach came after a long history of dismissal and suppression of First Nations teachings and Indigenous knowledge.

“It's something that we've known for thousands of years and now both municipal governments and the provincial government is basically putting a lens on it that they've come up with this idea to FireSmart the province,” Werstuik said.

“They're [doing] planned ignitions, they're utilizing fire to help bolster up fire guards and so forth up at McDougall Creek and they're using fire as a tool,” Werstuik said. “But that tool should be utilized in… prevention. The best way to keep yourself healthy is not to get sick, and we have a sick ecosystem.”

Coble said BC Wildfire has acknowledged that the fire fuel build up on the westside of Kelowna has been accumulating for a very long time.

“It was our firefighters within the Wilson’s Landing fire department that acknowledged that this was more than a hundred-year burn,” he said. “There were fuels that had been on the ground that needed to be burnt or taken care of hundreds of years ago and because of colonization and settlement and displacement of our people we weren’t able to carry out that work as we had for thousands of years leading up to it.”

Werstuik explained that prescribed burns have helped save communities from extreme fire damage in the past.

“People have quoted and said that their homes were saved more than likely from the work that we had completed previously,” he said. “Because we went in there and did fuel mitigation work, we did things that fire would do, but we had to do it manually.”

READ MORE: Deliberately set fires in West Kelowna area will help 'FireSmart' efforts

Unfortunately, many limitations have been placed on First Nations that impact their ability to carry out cultural practices and limit their capacity to do prescribed burns.

“What limited our ability to carry out our practices was limitations that were imposed upon us when it came to just travelling off reserves and accessing traditional territory,” said Coble. “Our traditional practices basically became obsolete in the eyes of the government, in the eyes of the settlers. So that kind of initiated the coming of the reality of the forests that we see today that are burned.”

Coble and Werstuik explained that, despite the restrictions, Westbank First Nations has still been able to carry out some successful burns.

“We were able to carry out a prescribed burn this past spring up in the Kelowna area of the Central Okanagan,” Coble said. “It was done in conjunction with BC Wildfire services so that we could use it both as fire mitigation but also as just a learning experience (and) educational experience for everybody and to emphasize that collaboration is always a really good way to go.”

“(The burn was) the first one that had taken place in anyone’s recent memory and I emphasize that because our Chief, Chief Robert Louie, he has knowledge about our communities more than most any historian and he can't remember when we had prescribed burns,” he said.

READ MORE: Westbank First Nation wins award for leadership in wildfire risk reduction

However, the extent to which these practices can be carried out remains very limited, with specific venting and climate conditions being required by provincial and local governments. 

“There's a multitude of obstacles and barriers that limit our abilities to carry out this work, and like I said, we want to be able to do it. When we do this, we want to do it with partners. We want to do it with our local fire departments. We want to do with BC Wildfire Services,” Coble said. “We want to make sure folks are aware of what we're doing, how we're doing it, why it's important, and why it's not just important for us as Indigenous people and the land itself, but the entire community, all Canadians really, is who it'll benefit in the long run.”

"There has to be an avenue to have a discussion about what is healthier: either a devastating forest fire where we saw huge blankets of smoke that could have been devastating and probably were devastating for so many folks or a few burns here and there throughout the spring and fall where things might not be as bright and shiny as they are today, but still you can still go outside and do your work,” Coble said. “We have to live in the realities that we're facing today and it's going to cost us way more money to react to these fires than it is to do the work to prevent the fires.”

Despite the restrictions, Coble and Werstuik said that they feel hopeful about future practices of cultural burns.

“I’m an optimistic person at heart,” Coble said. “I am hopeful that the practices will change. Unfortunately, it sucks that it has to take something right in your face like the fires we’ve experienced this past year for folks to understand the importance of things like prescribed burns and traditional ecological knowledge from an Indigenous perspective. But the attitudes are definitely changing. There's way more openness now to supporting this work, to focusing more, not just on fire mitigation, but prevention.”

“There's a lot more hope today. I sit as a director on the Regional District of the Central Okanagan,” Coble said. “There was a very heavy focus on emergency preparedness, not just response and not just reaction, but actual preparedness and also getting into preventative measures, like prescribed burns. And there's a lot of the directors that sit around that table, like myself, that advocate for implementing more traditional knowledge into the consultation process.”

"It's going to take time," said Werstuik. "People are fearful of fire, so it's not going to be something that happens overnight. But, like I said, we live in a fire ecosystem, so we are going to have fires regardless of the efforts of everybody to try to put fires out... like I've said so many times, the fire is a tool and it should be utilized."

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