Warren Mirko: Wildfires shouldn’t be used as a reconciliation morality play

Amid another brutal stretch of hot, dry weather across Canada, the so-called cultural burning practices of North America’s Indigenous peoples are in vogue. In fact, they’re being inflated to the point of being celebrated as an ethnically exclusive competency, supposedly distinct from western science.

Parks Canada’s online resources say cultural burning must be Indigenous-led, “so as not to misappropriate cultural practices,” while claiming that prescribed fire — the deliberate use of fire for land management — is a “colonial adaptation of cultural burning practised by many different Indigenous groups in Canada.”

In British Columbia, a video embedded in the government’s “Cultural and prescribed fire” website describes the preservation of Indigenous cultural burning as “sacred,” placing it beyond ordinary scrutiny, skepticism or criticism.

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As the interior of British Columbia burns and the province is placed under an official state of emergency, more than 20,000 people have been evacuated. The Bald Range inferno in the Okanagan has exceeded 24,000 hectares and has led to at least one death. On the other side of the country, Ontario is reporting over 100 active fires in the province.

Without a doubt, these fires are out of control. They reflect failures of land management, administration and logistics, and governments must bear a large share of the blame. Fires don’t need to be transformed into yet another morality play tied to reconciliation. That will not stamp out a single ember any more than invoking Poseidon will bring rain and restore blue skies.

We know that Indigenous communities have historically used low-intensity fires to maintain grasslands for grazing, corridors for travel and forests, among other purposes. The evidence of this is substantial and not in question, nor is the effectiveness of those methods in their particular contexts . But that is not uniquely Indigenous knowledge. It is a basic principle of fire management that’s understood and applied around the world.

Neither Indigenous nor western systems require traditional knowledge keepers or elders to understand that fires are driven by a combination of combustion, wind and fuel. Ancestry has no bearing on understanding how fires work, nor does any group have an exclusive claim over how to combat it.