In recent years, First Nations like Xwisten have been reclaiming their heritage by bringing back burns to their land with the help of modern day equipment, technology and, in some cases, provincial firefighters.
More First Nations in B.C. are rediscovering the cultural use of controlled burning to protect communities from wildfires
The assembled team is about to deliberately set fire to the dry grass, shrubs and fallen branches on the forest floor in order to burn the landscape under their watch, as they coax and corral the flames to consume as much dry tinder as possible.If successful, they will have greatly reduced the amount of hazardous fire fuel in and around Xwisten by the end of the day.
As a member of the volunteer fire department in Xwisten, James has experience conducting smaller prescribed burns. But he said it's nothing on the scale of this operation, which will involve the use of a helicopter to drop Ping-Pong ball-size plastic spheres filled with chemicals that set the forest on fire from the air.
Community members from Xwisten have been forced to flee their homes multiple times in recent years because of wildfires. “The last couple of years it’s been pretty hectic with wildfires, so this will let people be more at ease. There will be peace of mind,” he says. According to the B.C. government, there are 61 cultural or prescribed burns planned for this year to treat a total of 47 square kilometres of forested land. But that’s nowhere near the amount of prescribed burning seen in some other jurisdictions. The U.S. state of New Jersey is 40 times smaller than British Columbia, but treated five times as much land with prescribed burning last year as B.C. did.
In his mind, that’s shifting from doing a few dozen prescribed burns each year — or “postage stamp treatments,” as he called the current approach — to a program-based model where communities and governments have plans across large areas, and tens of thousands of hectares in a specific area are treated with prescribed burns each year.
“One of the things I learned from fire is it can be your friend and it can be your enemy,” Ross explained during a seminar last month. “You need to embrace it. You need to respect it and to do that you need to play with it.” “If we all stick to it, I don't think there will be a fire for quite some time. It makes me feel proud."
“But having said that, with all the people that are here today that are going to be here to control the fire, I guess I can live with it,” she adds with a laugh.
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