Indigenous land stewards in British Columbia are reintroducing controlled, low-intensity burning to restore forests and grasslands that have been shaped by fire for generations. The practice, which practitioners describe as "good fire", clears dead brush, returns nutrients to the soil and encourages new growth of grasses and traditional medicinal plants such as huckleberries.
Leona Antoine, who is Syilx and Nlaka'pamux, carries on the practice on her family's land in the Nicola River valley near Merritt. Antoine learned it from her grandfather, who used a match to start small, patchy fires across the field. She is a former forest firefighter and a forestry consultant. Her grandfather came of age when Indigenous communities were largely prevented from using fire in this way, and Antoine's field is hemmed in by a highway and crossed by the Trans Mountain pipeline.
The movement comes as Canada's forests have become increasingly prone to burning. Decades of aggressive fire suppression, together with climate-fuelled extreme weather, have left many forests dense with fuel. Southern British Columbia has been especially affected, and the communities of Lytton and Summerland have become widely associated with recent megafires.
Antoine said her own family has been displaced twice in the last five years by out-of-control blazes. She described the period as the most intense stretch of B.C. wildfire seasons on record. Her grandson's first home after one evacuation was a hotel room.
Antoine said that communities have too often responded only after catastrophic fires occur. "We keep reacting to these catastrophic fires," she said. She asked how Indigenous practices and teachings could be restored in a way that renews ecosystems and remains sustainable over time.
Antoine's work in the Nicola Valley is part of a wider effort by Indigenous fire practitioners and researchers to bring strategic, controlled burns back onto the land, outside periods of peak wildfire danger. The approach is presented as a way to reduce fuel loads while restoring ecological health.