In memory of:
Dr. Henry (Hank) Lewis, University of Alberta
Dr. William Pruitt, University of Manitoba
High Level (2019), Fort McMurray (2016), Slave Lake (2011), Alberta, Canada! On fire, or nearly so. Fires so hot, I’m told by first-hand witnesses, that the flames jumped across the Athabasca River at Fort McMurray. A distance of more than 200 metres. A scenario which repeats itself in many parts of Canada.
And also in other parts of the world. In 2019 we witnessed horrendous fires in New South Wales, Australia. The Blue Mountains turned grey.
Yes, granted. Climate change is partially responsible for more intense, frequent fires. But, not totally. It’s way more complex than that. It’s also a result of precedence – in this case, economics over ecology. Canada’s policy of fire suppression, for well over a century, is one of the worst mistakes made in managing our forests.
Whenever I drive through Slave Lake, up to Fort Vermilion on Highway 88, I go by the burned-out area of trees on the east side of the highway. And there on the west side sit the houses of the City. The City starts where the forest stops. How can that be a good idea?
How could this happen? The answer to that question requires a lesson in Canadian history. Yes, as you will see, history can teach us important lessons to apply to the future. There’s no doubt about that. But first to learn from history, we have to read it. Too little of that in Canada.
And then, the people reading it have to be empowered to turn what they learned into policy. Too little of that too from our policymakers in Canada.
Fire, Fire: The Warning Cries
In the early 1970s, I attended lectures by Henry Lewis, Professor of Anthropology. Dr. Lewis was studying the use of fire by the Dene and Cree of northern Alberta, Canada. He just finished researching the use of fire by Indigenous people in California.
Lewis’s message was clear. The northern Dene and Cree used fire regularly to clear areas in the boreal forest to create meadows and other habitat more suitable for a diversity of game animals. And they had likely done this for centuries. The boreal forest we see today was nothing like it was centuries ago before White settlement.
And by doing so, Indigenous people, not only in Canada but throughout the world, lessened the intensity of natural forest fires. Controlled burning decreased the amount of dead vegetation, or fuel, and opened up the forests, reducing large-scale spread.
In 1976 I studied Boreal Ecology under the late Professor William Pruitt, University of Manitoba. Pruitt was a quiet man with the looks and demeanour more like Santa Claus than some ‘political shit-disturber’ which he was labelled as at the University of Alaska (for standing up against the US government’s nuclear policies). The good Dr. Pruitt repeatedly told us that government fire prevention policies in the boreal forests of North America would lead to disaster. Unfortunately, Dr. Pruitt’s words turned out to be prophetic.
The Historic Evidence of Human Use of Fire
High Prairie, Grande Prairie, Prairie Point, Jon D’Or Prairie, Buffalo Head Prairie, Clear Prairie, Meadow Lake. These are the names of a few settlements in today’s northern boreal forest in Alberta and Saskatchewan. There are more prairie names of settlements in the boreal forest than on the Northern Great Plains. Where did these names come from? Surely not because some nostalgic folks living in the woods, yearning for the prairies, named them.
No. These areas in the northern boreal forest, at the beginning of White settlement, contained vast prairies, kept open and maintained by First Nations people using fire.
Let’s go back and look at some of the evidence for deliberate burning practices by Indigenous peoples throughout the world.
Indigenous Use of Fire, Australia
“The “virgin lands” first observed by Europeans in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries were not an untouched wilderness. As several writers
have noted, the “forest primeval” was a later, romanticized creation of the
Euro-American imagination.” (Henry Lewis and Theresa Ferguson, 1988)
The Australian Aborigines used fires to create a park-like vista on the Australian landscape at the time of contact with Whites. Their activities were misunderstood and regarded with suspicion by early settlers. This created considerable strife between settlers and aborigines, as documented in a series of letters between the governor and settlers:
“I fear His Excellency will find it a very difficult subject to deal with, and impossible wholly to prevent, it has always been the custom of the Natives to fire the country during the summer season for a variety of purposes, first to assist them in hunting, it also clears the country of underwood, which if not occasionally burnt, would become an impenetrable jungle, infested with snakes and reptiles. “ (Letter to Peter Broun, Secretary to the Governor, New South Wales from Revett Henry Bland, Protector of Natives at York, 1846)
“If so – they burn for their food, whereas the existence of our Flocks and Herds depends on what to us is thus annually irretrievably destroyed and the whole district is now groaning under the ruinous spoliation…” (Richard G. Meares, Resident, 1846)
The outcome eventually favoured the settlers. As it would in many other parts of the world. Indigenous peoples were banned from burning and the dense bush began to encroach eventually creating the situations we saw last year in the Blue Mountains. Over the years fire suppression created more problems than it solved.
While driving through the outback of New South Wales of Australia in 2019, I noticed many goats along the roadsides. Feral goats are everywhere. Eating up the shrubbery and weeds. Keeping them at bay. Turns out in some communities goats are Australia’s new ‘fire’ to control bush and prevent major fires.
Indigenous Use of Fire, California
Virtually the same circumstances took place in what was to become California when the Spanish arrived. They tried to suppress the use of fire by the Indigenous people, calling it “primitive” and wasteful. In 1850, the US government passed the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, which outlawed intentional burning. According to fire historian Stephen Pyne:
“They said if we suppress all these fires, we end light burning, we will have great new forests. And we did – we had so much great new forest that we created a problem.”
In the late 1960s, the US government rethought its fire policies but is still paying the price today. Indigenous groups, such as the Yurok are again beginning to actively use fire, as they had traditionally for many centuries, to open up the forests:
“Our first agreement with our creator was to tend the land. It was taken away from us, and now we’re trying to reclaim it.” (Rick O’Rourke, Yurok fire manager, from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/21/wildfire-prescribed-burns-california-native-americans)
Indigenous Use of Fire, Boreal Forest, Northern Alberta
In Alberta, northern Canada, at the time of contact Dene used fire to manage the forest and keep it from clogging up. According to surveyor George M. Dawson in 1879, when in northern Alberta:
“…the origin of the prairies of the Peace River is sufficiently obvious. There can be no doubt that they have been produced and are maintained by fires. The country is naturally a wooded one, and where fires have not run for a few years, young trees begin rapidly to spring up.” (Macoun 1882:125)
In the early 1970s, Dr. Henry Lewis argued that places in northern Alberta:
“…prescribed fires were once part of the Indian’s own pattern of ‘landscape management’.….their selective employment of modern fire for boreal forest adaptations indicated an understanding of both the general principles and the local specific environmental relationships that are the subject of modern fire ecology….They understood and practiced controlled burning as a part of hunting-gathering subsistence activities.” (from Lewis 1982)
By the use of fire, the people kept meadows and other areas open and refurbished:
“Why the bushes so thick is because…they stop burning—the Indians stopped burning…Did you ever see them prairies? My goodness, I even remember. It was really prairie…just prairie, you know, (and) here and there you see little specks of woods….” (Beaver woman, 69, High Level, Alberta area; from Lewis 1982:24)
Such open meadows would have attracted many large game animals, including the once-abundant woodland bison:
“Until the mid-eighteenth century bison ranged throughout much of the boreal forest, as far north as Great Slave Lake and the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories….it seems unlikely that either the Athapaskans or later Algonkians would have overlooked the possibilities of providing and maintaining better habitat for woodland buffalo [through use of fire].” (from Lewis 1982; brackets mine)
“People know where to hunt. Our people have a name for those burned places in the forest called go-ley-day. They tell one another about those places and when to hunt there.” (Slavey, 69, Meander River area; from Lewis, 1982)
When asked why this practice stopped, the responses were consistent and similar to other areas of the world:
“But it is years ago they did that. Nowadays you can’t burn on the trap line because it’s against the law, and it’s not so good as before.” (Slavey 73, Meander River area; from Lewis, 1982)
Indigenous people also knew that camping and living among the trees was dangerous:
“What is that name? Maskuta? Muskotaw! Yea, that’s a prairie like place. There used to be lots of places around here. Nobody built their house in the woods like they do now. If we get a forest fire now it could be really bad. All the houses would get burned up. It’s a lot safer if you got open places…you just your teepee up there.” (Cree, 78, Trout Lake [Alberta] area; from Lewis 1982)
Obviously, that lesson, learned long ago, has yet to trickle down to today’s generation.
Anthropogenic Burning and the Historic Record, Alberta
Both Indigenous people and academics have voiced these ideas for years now. But, still not enough people are listening. Recently, however, more action has been taken to better manage the world’s forests. Including Canada’s forests.
For example, ecologists working in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains demonstrated that restoring forest areas to a pre-European landscape “resulted in dramatically lower mean probability… [of high-intensity fires] …and a smaller reduction in the mean fire size” (from Poletto 2019)
My interest in anthropogenic burning lies in how long it was used. The Fort Vermilion region contained ‘prairies’ at contact and was an important place for the acquisition of meat in the fur trade. In 1987 we found one of the largest prehistoric sites in the region, which we think might have been used intermittently for the last 9,000 years. Was this place always important historically and a prairie?
Throughout northern Alberta, archaeologists and paleo-ecologists are looking at these relationships more closely. Did these historically documented prairies have a long history of human use?
During the late 18th – early 19th centuries, traders and explorers noted several places where large game, especially wood bison, were plentiful in areas with prairies or more open parkland. Here are a few of the areas shown in the map below:
These places contain both a high frequency and some very large archaeological sites, thousands of years old. Unfortunately we do not have sufficient evidence to connect the long Indigenous land use directly to deliberate burning and the formation of prairies and parkland in the forest.
It will take years of research to better understand this association. However, it has already begun. Paleo-ecologists are examining lake sediments in some areas of the province. They reveal a long history of deliberate burning before contact. The task is difficult as one researcher recently noted:
“Although anthropogenic fires cannot be distinguished in Sharkbite Lake’s record, the charcoal record indicates that on average, every 155 years there was a major fire episode close to Sharkbite Lake. More recent regional fire studies indicate that some areas are prone to burn every 10 years.” (Christina Potello, Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta)
Back to the ‘Old Ways’
With the incorporation of the Dominion Lands Act in 1872, Canada engaged in a war against fire. Good or bad. Elizabeth Ramsey’s (2015) article on the history of forest fire management in Alberta documents the views and policies that have led to today’s crisis. As one fire expert succinctly put it, by the second half of the 19th century conflicting interests about Alberta’s resources collided, “…a new logic of economics smashed against an older logic of ecology.” (Stephen J. Pyne, 2007).
While our perceptions and actions are slowly changing toward fire, in the words of one Indigenous informant, back in the 1970s:
“It would take a long time to make the country like it was before we stopped burning…maybe fifty years to get the country back (to what it was). It would take a lot of work.” (Slavey, 73, High Level [Alberta] area; from Lewis 1982)
While it’s never too late to change course, it would take a herculean effort to take our forests back to the pre-contact days. And, does it conflict with today’s economics? Perhaps. But surely our current forest policies are not the answer.
As I walked across the ancient prehistoric site near Fort Vermilion and gazed towards the Caribou Mountains in the distance I envisioned a vast prairie – parkland centuries ago, with grazing herds of wood bison and elk, stretching for miles in either direction, in what is now Canada’s northern boreal forest.
Now only open fields or dense forests appear before me. But no flocks of feral goats. We haven’t got that desperate yet.
……………………….
References
Lewis, H.T., 1982. A Time for burning. Boreal Institute for Northern Studies. Edmonton, Alberta.
Lewis, Henry T., and Theresa A. Ferguson, 1988. Yards, Corridors, and Mosaics: How to Burn a Boreal Forest. Human Ecology 16:57-77.
Macoun, John, 1882. Manitoba and the great North-West. Guelph, Ontario. World Publishing Company.
Poletto, Christina Livia, 2019. Postglacial Human and Environment Landscapes of Northeastern Alberta: An Analysis of Late Holocene Sediment Record from Sharkbite Lake, Alberta. M. A. Thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta.
Pyne, Stephen J., 2007. Awful Splendour: A Fire History of Canada. University of British Columbia Press.
Ramsey, Elizabeth, 2015. Ecology or Economy. A History of Forest Fire Management in Alberta. Alberta History:16-20.