Amy Cardinal Christianson on Indigenous fire stewardship as climate action & cultural practice

Amy Cardinal Christianson is a Fire Research Scientist with the Canadian Forest Service. Her research on Indigenous fire stewardship, Indigenous wildland firefighters, and wildfire evacuations is important to any sort of comprehensive view of the shockingly intense wildfires that have burned 4 million hectares so far this year in Canada, and that produced almost 60 million tonnes of CO2 in May. She’s also the co-host of the invaluable Good Fire podcast, which I strongly recommend you listen to. She and Matthew Kristoff talk to luminaries on the contemporary reality of fire’s extreme intensity and destructiveness, and what can be done to restore a balanced relationship with fire. She’s the author of an abundance of work in this field, but I’ll just highlight two co-authored books: First Nations Wildfire Evacuations and Blazing the Trail: Celebrating Indigenous Fire Stewardship. Amy is drawing attention to realities and precarities that are too often ignored in the colonial state of Canada. She makes it clear that the impacts of today’s fire are “generational” where First Nations and Metis communities are “not [going to be] able to participate in their cultural activities on their land base for a long time.” While that is criminal—the uneven impacts of wildfires that have been supercharged by greenhouse gases and global heating—the irony is that future-oriented forms of Indigenous fire stewardship have historically been outlawed in Canada, the US and Australia, in particular. Amy helps us understand the history and motivations behind that policing of cultural fire. Her research is tough for a number of reasons, and not least because, she says, even though she is a Métis woman from Treaty 8 territory, it’s hard to earn the sort of trust necessary to learn fully how Indigenous peoples have preserved their cultural fire practices. In her words: “for Indigenous nations there’s a long history of distrust around fire with outside people” and “outside agencies.” It’s also becoming difficult to talk about the practice of prescribed burning because of the ways that climate change is altering the atmosphere and making conditions more volatile. Nonetheless, the things she has learned are eye-opening and progressive, reaching down to the roots of the problem of conflagration and problematizing things like land use planning and building design from a deeply decolonial perspective.