Making friends with fire

On a bright, mid-March morning Raymond Jamess booming voice resonates through the crisp, spring air as he rallies his team for the day two dozen men and women gathered in a field near the small community of Xwisten, also known as the Bridge River Indian Band.

Safety is the No. 1 thing for today, James explains to the group of community members, volunteer firefighters, and crew members from the B.C. Wildfire Service.

Watch each other's backs out there. The terrain, the footing, danger trees that might spur up on the account of the fire, burning roots, pine, fir. 

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. Its intended as a preventive measure to protect their community against the risk of an out-of-control wildfire during the hot and dry summer months this area of British Columbia, around 180 kilometres northeast of Vancouver, is known for.

Xwisten has been placed under evacuation order several times in the past few years, band officials say. The community was put under evacuation alert last August because of the Casper Creek fire, which grew to more than 100 square kilometres.

Let's get this done here so we can go to another community and keep doing this all around Lillooet, so that when fire does come around we don't have to worry about this kind of stuff anymore, James tells the crew as they wait to head into the forest to start the burn.

This use of fire is called prescribed burning, or cultural burning when it is harnessed by Indigenous communities to also meet ecological objectives, like restoring and enhancing traditional foods or medicinal plants. The land management practice was widely used by Indigenous peoples before colonization.

In 1874, British Columbia became the first province in Canada to ban the use of fire in this way. The Bush Fire Act outlawed cultural burning and its knowledge was almost lost.

James is in charge of small teams of firefighters that will carefully watch the flames' progression on the landscape, ensuring they stay within the prescribed area they plan to treat, which includes the land behind homes. 

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.

This is just the final turn on protecting the reserve and helping nature out like we used to back in the day," James tells CBC News.

The weather conditions on this day are ideal for a prescribed burn, explains Colleen Ross, a veteran wildland fire ecologist the community has hired to help plan and co-ordinate the operation. 

The relative humidity is 34 per cent, which is really good. If its anywhere around 45 or higher, the fire wouldnt consume or burn well. Then the temperature its 13 C. It might seem on the cool side, but with the relative humidity that low its ideal, Ross says.

After a successful test burn, the ignition teams are cleared to set fire to the forest floor with drip torches, while a helicopter takes to the sky to drop the small ignition balls onto land along a road that will act as a fire guard. 

Rosss smile beams in the mid-morning sunlight as she looks up at the smoke coming off the hillside where the helicopter has made a pass.

It looks really good. You can tell by the smoke. Nice and light, wispy, Ross says.

[The smoke] is getting up and over the mountains and it will drift off to where the communities arent. And that's what we want. That's the goal. It looks really good.

Ross is working alongside Xwistens burn boss, Bradley Jack. Together they monitor the progress of the burn and communicate with the teams over walkie-talkies. 

There's a lot of co-ordination. It takes time. Sometimes it takes two to three years to get a burn plan together, Jack says.

The community had wanted to burn some of this land before, but the weather conditions weren't right, according to Jack.

Located just north of Lillooet, B.C., in the Lower Bridge River Valley, Xwistens summers are among the hottest in the country, so removing all the dry vegetation and forest fuel is needed here, Jack says.

The last couple of years its been pretty hectic with wildfires, so this will let people be more at ease. There will be peace of mind, he says.

If we have a burn that is done in the spring thats controlled itll slow it down, at least, if there is a fire in the summertime.

With the changing climate in Canada, summers in B.C. are becoming hotter and drier, scientists say. Four of the five worst fire seasons in B.C. have occurred over the past six years. 

Last year was the worst year on record, with more than 28,000 square kilometres of forest and land in the province burned, along with hundreds of homes.

In the face of growing wildfire risk, experts say more communities should be paying attention to the work Indigenous communities like Xwisten are doing to protect themselves.

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. 

Indigenous communities are developing or co-developing 51 new burn plans.

But thats 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. 

I don't want to say we're accepting the worst case scenario, but if we aren't moving more toward that proactive mitigation, we're just doing the same thing over and over and over again and we're going to get the same outcomes, said Mathieu Bourbonnais, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbias Okanagan campus.

In a previous career, Bourbonnais was a professional firefighter with Albertas Wildfire Rappel Program and Parks Canada. Now, he studies wildfire dynamics at UBCs department of earth, environmental and geographic sciences.

Fire suppression will always be a part of it. We're always going to need to respond to some fires. But if we can create landscapes that are more resilient to fire, then maybe the impacts of a lot of those fires aren't going to be the same, he said.

In his mind, thats 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.

We can learn from other jurisdictions that are more along the road than we are. We have a long way to go to get to that, but we are starting to take those steps, Bourbonnais said.

Around 40 kilometres east of Xwisten, another First Nation is rediscovering its relationship with fire and cultural burning.

This spring, members of the Ashcroft Indian Band, along with local volunteer firefighters, are learning the basics of prescribed burning from Colleen Ross. 

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.

On this day in March, the trainees are learning how to apply fire to the land with drip torches and how to build a fire guard by stripping the land down to the soil to stop a fire from spreading.

"I like this, like how we're doing it on the rez, on the land, so we can learn from it and finally live longer without having that problem or having that worry, said band member Darius Kirkpatrick, 19, as he took a break from the exhausting work of digging the guard.

If we all stick to it, I don't think there will be a fire for quite some time. It makes me feel proud."

"It's pretty good that all of our relatives have done everything like this, and then we could do a lot more," said another young trainee from the community, 17-year-old Cimarone Wilson-Minnabarriet.

"If we do this more often, no big fire will come here again. Maybe little fires here and there, but pretty controllable," he said.

For some in the community, the thought of deliberately starting fires brings back feelings of anxiety from the not-so-distant past. 

In 2017, a catastrophic wildfire tore across the dry grasslands toward the Ashcroft Indian Band. A dozen homes were destroyed on the First Nation and some residents were displaced for more than a year. 

"Of course, it's always scary for everybody, a relapse, says Dennis Pittman, an Ashcroft band councillor.

If we can burn [the landscape] so it doesn't happen again, it's a real big deal."

Memories of 2017 are still fresh for Pittmans wife, Char, who says any fire here, even a controlled one, makes her feel uneasy.

I'm still unsure because a fire can get out of control, she says as she watches the firefighters training in her community.

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.

This preparation work is setting the stage for a more ambitious plan: The band is planning to conduct a 55-hectare (0.55-square-kilometre) cultural burn next year. 

Back in Xwisten, the hard work during the day-long cultural burn is paying off. 

Crews are monitoring the fire as it burns the forest floor behind homes in the community, clearing the land of so much forest fuel.

It's better to do it now than trying to fight this fire when the flames are four times as high and the trees are all getting scorched. So better to do it now while we have control and can take control of the fire there," says Raymond James.

The success of this operation has sparked ideas of sharing the knowledge gained from the experience with other communities. 

"It's very important because, as you see, the fire is coming a lot sooner. Times have changed and the weather has too," he says.

Its a way of taking back control of their land, he says, at a time when its more important than ever.