Climate change, wildfires disproportionately devastating to Canada’s Indigenous communities

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/08/2023 (751 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

First Nations and communities with high Indigenous populations make up five per cent of Canada’s population but experience 42 per cent of wildland fire evacuation events, according to the federal government.

Parks Canada researcher Amy Cardinal Christianson found multiple communities are often evacuated multiple times over multiple years. Between 1980-2021, 16 communities were evacuated more than five times, 14 fourteen of them being First Nations reserves.

This is certainly true this year, as wildfires rage in B.C.’s interior and the Northwest Territories after months of fires in parts of Alberta, Ontario and Québec.

In virtually every province, Indigenous communities have experienced some of the most devastating and brutal impacts of this wildfire season.

Before this recent spate of fires, 93 First Nations communities (nearly a fifth of First Nations in the country) have been impacted by fires, and almost 25,000 First Nations citizens have been evacuated.

That number now is much higher, with 20 more First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities from B.C.’s interior evacuated along with more than a dozen in the Northwest Territories.

The reasons wildfires impact Indigenous communities so deeply are mostly historical.

Due to myriad factors I’ve written about numerous times in this column, Indigenous communities are often remote, under-resourced and neglected when it comes to provincial plans — especially those dealing with forest management and emergency and fire response.

Facing overwhelming priorities such as housing, fresh water and health, fire-management systems on First Nations isn’t often a focus until it has to be.

Often, in fact, the “emergency” manager on any First Nation is usually a single person expected to deal with everything from fire to flooding to suicide to housing to… you get the point. The job is simply impossible.

Add in massive shifts in climate change – resulting in droughts and dried-out forests – and you get this year’s devastating results.

I’ve recently decided that I’m not entertaining anti-science and climate-change denialists when it comes to any conversation on this year’s record number of wildfires.

There’s simply too much evidence from legitimate and credible scientists who have shown that climate change is the main cause of the nearly 6,000 fires that have burned more than 150,000 kilometres of territory and four per cent of all forested area in the country in 2023.

In other words, I’m not wasting any more time with unqualified people who read dubious material on the internet and want to argue gravity doesn’t exist (yes, a hint to potential emailers).

With climate change increasing and too little being done to stop it, more climate-related disasters are on the way.

This is why billions of dollars from Canada’s “National Adaptation Strategy” to deal with climate change and climate-related disasters is going into building infrastructure and supporting readiness in “high risk” First Nations and other Indigenous communities.

By 2030, the federal strategy promises, every single “high risk” community will have a “wildfire community and mitigation plan” which will focus as much on prevention as reaction.

This means an increase in Indigenous firefighters, equipment for fire management and the recognition of Indigenous rights and knowledge. Indigenous leaders have been preventing forest fires through traditional practices such as controlled burning for centuries.

The impacts of fire on Indigenous communities isn’t just the loss of property, however.

Fire evacuation exacerbates long-standing historical trauma related to residential schools and forced removal from lands, resulting in increased use of health care, mental-health and social services.

Spending months in hotels leads to increased substance abuse, violence and suicide. And there are serious effects on students, who regularly experience disruptions to in their education, impacting their future prospects.

That, in turn, means increased use of the justice and child-welfare systems and emergency services.

Fires destroy cultural relationships to sacred lands, traditional burial and ceremonial sites and break down community and familial relationships.

The federal government acknowledges “Indigenous peoples experience unique and disproportionate impacts from climate change caused in part by historic and ongoing government practices and policies, socio-economic inequalities, remote and hard-to-access geographic locations, and deep cultural connections with the natural environment.”

In other words, fires caused by climate change come with deep and lasting costs for everyone, with Indigenous peoples suffering, perhaps, most of all in Canada.

Citizens in this country can take responsibility through engaging climate change meaningfully or suffer the consequences and costs when Indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted.

One other thing. What about having a healthy world to hand to our children?

That too.

niigaan.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca