Photo: Chad Thomas, centre, out in the field
“If we want change, and we want to get there as a country, we have to start working together.”
When I spoke with veteran Indigenous wildland firefighter Chad Thomas this week, he had just returned home to his community of Tahltan First Nation after weeks on the fire line. He was spending a rare summer week with his family before heading back into the field.
As 800 wildfires continue to burn across Canada, Chad believes the country already has much of the knowledge and experience it needs to better prepare for longer, more destructive wildfire seasons.
The problem, he says, is that we’re leaving some of our strongest expertise on the sidelines.
A member of the Tahltan Nation, Chad has spent nearly 24 wildfire seasons protecting communities across northern Canada.
He founded Yukon First Nations Wildfire, helping grow it into one of Canada’s largest Indigenous emergency management and wildfire organizations that is renowned for deploying across Canada to help out when regional wildfire crews need expert assistance
Today, Chad works alongside First Nations communities in northwestern British Columbia, helping them prepare for wildfires, floods, and other emergencies.
Over those two decades, he’s watched wildfires become a growing threat due to climate change as forests become hotter and drier.
“For many Canadians, it’s not a matter of if your community is going to be threatened by wildfire. It’s a matter of when.”
Chad believes some of the knowledge Canada needs to meet that growing threat already exists within Indigenous communities that have been stewarding these landscapes for generations.
“Some of the best firefighters that I’ve ever worked with in my career have been First Nations,” he says. “They grow up hunting, trapping, camping all the time. They grow up with oral knowledge from their grandparents and great-grandparents about how to protect the land.”
Yet that expertise isn’t reflected in how Canada prepares for and responds to wildfires.
“When it comes to the national decision-making on wildfires, First Nations aren’t at the table. We’re not even in the room.”
One example is cultural burning, a practice Indigenous Peoples have used for thousands of years to reduce the fuel that can feed larger, more destructive wildfires while also renewing habitats for wildlife.
After decades of governments prioritizing extinguishing fires instead of allowing healthy, low-intensity fires to burn, many forests have been left with an unnatural buildup of fuel. Combined with the hotter, drier conditions caused by climate change, those fuels are helping drive today’s megafires.
Chad says cultural burning is one piece of a stronger wildfire strategy. “It’s another tool in the toolbox, and we need to be using all the tools we have.”
But he says using every tool also requires a wildfire system that helps the people using those tools work together.
“We need to find a way to create a national wildfire standard”
Chad believes a coordinated national wildfire agency could bring provinces, territories, Indigenous nations, and wildfire organizations together under shared training standards while still allowing regions to adapt to local conditions.
He says that would make it easier to put Canada’s existing expertise to work, sending experienced firefighters where they’re needed instead of relying on crews from overseas.
“There are thousands of First Nation firefighters and thousands of contract firefighters that are not able to go across these imaginary border lines to go fight these fires because the provinces and territories are calling the shots – and they say no.”
For Chad, that’s the larger lesson. Canada doesn’t need to reinvent its wildfire strategy. It needs to invest in the people, knowledge, and experience it already has, strengthen coordination across the country, and recognize the generations of Indigenous knowledge and stewardship that continue to help protect these landscapes.
Chad Thomas is one of the wildfire leaders featured in My Climate Plan’s Don’t Let Canada Burn campaign. If you’d like to help build support for better wildfire preparedness and support for wildland firefighters, add your name to the Don’t Let Canada Burn petition.
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