Eva Jewell is research director, and Hayden King is executive director, at Yellowhead Institute. They are both assistant professors of sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University.
As we write from Toronto, a haze has descended over the city. Smoke from wildfires is engulfing the country, and the fact that we can see it in the sun’s odd glow across the most populated region in Canada should alert Canadians to the urgency of the climate crisis.
In recent days, the haze also has us reflecting on the connections between colonialism and the climate. Smoke and fire were key elements in the creation of Canada, after all. Around the time of Confederation, between 1846 and 1904, emerging cities like Toronto, Montreal, St. John’s, Calgary, Ottawa and Vancouver all nearly burned down. It was as if the land was trying to tell Canadians something then, as it is now.
For the Anishinaabeg, the people to whom we belong, fire represents our nations. Sometimes we flicker as a small flame, at other times we are an inferno, depending on the political circumstances. But our understanding of the power of fire, even metaphorically, has translated into our management of it. There is no doubt that the practices of Indigenous peoples maintained healthy woodland and prairie ecosystems for centuries, while ensuring that when there were wildfires, they were limited. Canadians then usurped this managed landscape and began to reverse those efforts. Given the scale of the fires we confront today, this is among our national tragedies.
This Canada Day, we were faced with a country covered in smoke and burning to ash. We know that Indigenous peoples in contemporary Canada are disproportionately affected by wildfires as well, having to relocate at least 30 per cent more often. The fires burning in northern Ontario and Quebec this summer have affected regions farther south with smoke, but forced First Nations to flee. It is a dynamic that reflects the writings of Secwépemc leader George Manuel, who argued that the destruction of Indigenous land was necessary for Canada to exist, and Paiute researcher Kristen Simmons, who has described the ways in which colonialism scorches the sky – with tear gas at land defence actions, and now smoke from fires. The atmosphere has been weaponized, Ms. Simmons argues. But fire has now become destructive for Canadians as well; shall we all be consumed, celebrating indoors beside our air filtering machines?
The grief for the land, water and air lost is no longer the exclusive domain of Indigenous people. We now all have fire “seasons” that require dedicated planning for unpredictable travel. Resource companies build contingency plans for work delays. International firefighters are on standby.
In the past 60 years, these fire seasons have become longer and more intense. Smoke from Canada now reaches Europe. Globally, the UN expects wildfires to increase by a third by 2050. This is all, by and large, a consequence of climate change, which is itself a consequence of the colonialism that marks the genesis of this country. Deforestation from logging, the loss of biodiversity from replanting mono-crop tree species, endemic dry conditions from unrelenting carbon emissions generated by energy production (the overwhelming source of global emissions) – all of this takes place on lands that Indigenous people have been dispossessed of, as their management practices are also marginalized and erased.
Wildfires are a type of climate feedback loop; the effects are multiplied. With the loss of millions of acres of trees, more carbon is released while less can be sequestered, leading to even higher emissions. Amidst it all, Canada keeps on keeping on, waiting for the winds to change and the smoke to pass. Canadians watch the fire forecast maps like the weather radar and lament their bad luck when the predictions refuse to change, as if these were merely scattered showers threatening the red-and-white Canada Day parties at the lake or around the barbecue.
This extends to policy as well. Canada’s action plans for wildfires and climate crisis mitigation are woefully inadequate. They’re also not expected to make an impact until 2050. In a recent Yellowhead Institute special report on climate change, Gitxsan and Cree-Métis writer Janna Wale called Indigenous inclusion on climate plans an “illusion,” and asked: “When decisions related to climate policy are made by the same people using the same knowledge systems and predisposition towards extraction that has fuelled the climate crisis in the first place, how can we expect different outcomes?”
The answer is, of course, that we can’t. If anything, the smoke should give Canadians pause to reflect on this place that we all call home. That reflection ought to consider how fire has shaped our collective paths to the present, but also how the consequences of ignoring that reality for so long are now in the air we breathe.