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Abstract

How fires burn across British Columbia (BC), Canada is shaped by settler coloniality, timber capitalism, state forestry regimes, criminalization of burning, and Indigenous resistance. Despite the urgency of confronting the fire suppression paradox embedded in settler colonial fire management laws and practices, approaches to studying fire in Canada that foreground Indigenous law and de-center settler colonial governance is scarce. As political ecologists and geographers working and living in the context of unceded and ancestral lək̓ʷəŋən, W̱SÁNEĆ, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, səlilwətaɬ, and syilx territories, we engage with Indigenous feminist scholarship to expose how coloniality and gender intersect in attempts to erase Indigenous sovereignty to structure and naturalize provincial fire policy and its emplaced impacts on Indigenous legal orders. Our analysis contextualizes settler-colonial provincial fire management policy in the purview of Indigenous legal orders to foreground how racial-colonial and gendered politics are obscured when colonial fire and wildfire practices are naturalized. Revisiting key moments in the political development of fire suppression across so-called BC, we contend that the suppression paradox is embedded in and reproduces a colonial logic that widens existing social and economic gaps. These gaps are uniquely gendered, as settler coloniality operates upon patriarchal lines that have actively attempted to erase Indigenous women and Two-Spirit peoples, including the laws and legal authorities that they possess and practice. Considering the 1910 Fulton Commission, we highlight an example of how women and Indigenous people were excluded from the political decision-making structures that shaped colonial fire management practices in BC. These gendered and racialized exclusions bear directly on the exclusion of Indigenous women and gender-diverse folx, and Indigenous legal orders guided by matriarchal lines of fire knowledge.

Keywords

Political ecology fire wildfire British Columbia settler colonialism gender Canada

Introduction: grounding ourselves and our analysis

We write this paper across Coast Salish territories on which we were brought together: unceded and ancestral lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ, and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ territories. We were brought together for this work in a specific place: on unceded lək̓ʷəŋən territories in the colonial archives of what is often referred to as Victoria, BC, Canada. We met in a building that inhabits what used to be marshy lands that neighbour the vast fire-cultivated camas fields so synonymous with these territories. These fields in míqən (or Beacon Hill) were shaped intimately and for millennia by lək̓ʷəŋən fire practices and laws (Corntassel and Bryce, 2012: 157), the very practices that shaped the territories, and attracted the eye of land-hungry colonists; these were one of many lək̓ʷəŋən practices and laws that would shortly after be outlawed and punishable by the same colonists (Lutz, 2020; Turner, 1999). We also have a shared connection through a university campus which occupies unceded and ancestral syilx Okanagan Nation territory, lands that are synonymous and have a largely-symbiotic relationship with the inevitability of fire across the sage brush, Ponderosa Pine, and bunchgrass that animate the lands. Here, fire regenerates the land (tmxʷulaxʷ) for bears, berries, and humans alike (Armstrong, 2020: 43). Writing this paper together was an opportunity to lean into the convergences between Onyx's work on socio-legal and colonial geographies and Judith's multimedia historical research in fire-prone geographies (see Burr, 2022). We engaged across the similarities and differences grounding our research in justice-based, political ecological approaches to fire research in so-called British Columbia (BC), Canada. We are interested specifically in interrogating how a critical view of settler colonialism can reveal tensions in the often taken for granted practices of land management and fire itself as they impact the places we call home. Our convergence here implicates ourselves as occupants in settler colonial spaces, seeing our work as intimately entwined with coloniality as our everyday being in place, rather than looking to coloniality as a condition of the past, inevitable, or somehow occurring elsewhere (de Leeuw & Hunt, 2018).

While we were brought together through scholarly research, we also draw from our experiences and observations across so-called BC. While discussing this paper, we spoke about why the news of the Shovel Lake fires on unceded Dakelh territories in northern BC in 2018 (where Onyx lived at the time) went unnoticed by the more populated, southern parts of the province until air quality in Vancouver was impacted. Later that year, Onyx would hear from youth who were evacuated from their homes and communities during these fires of the fear that was hard to shake from their experiences; Dakelh knowledge holders would later share how fire is part of life in the interior and that the collective fear, intensity of the flames, and response to the fires were a broader symptom of colonialism. Indeed, Onyx had long had stories shared with them by community members about how fire had been used across Dakelh territories for industry's aims: whether that be intensive logging practices and the aerial spray of glyphosate that many attribute to the intensity of the flames in 2018 (English, 2019), or the use of fire by land hungry colonists less than a century ago to raze a Lheidli T’enneh village to make way for a railway that still has an industrial right-of-way (Hughes, 2011: 41). We also spoke about our relocations to syilx territories during ‘fire season’ in 2021, with flames running right up to the highway that connects the Okanagan to the coast, and how after weeks of orange-red skies due to smoke, rolling up the windows and turning on the air conditioning despite the flames on the side of the road brought temporary reprieve. In fall of 2021, Judith's research became centred on the difficult stories of fire-fighting and evacuation on Nlaka’pamux and Okanagan Indian Band territories from the massive Lytton and White Rock Lake fires (Burr, 2022); they listened to the ways past wildfires haunted the memories of those living through fresh waves of summer smoke and spreading flames. While writing this paper, we spoke about driving past Lytton, a town now made infamous by its tragic burning. How Onyx saw the hillside burning, helicopters dropping flame retardant, and bystanders watching when the land first ignited. And how, a mere month later, they would drive by again, the town would be gone, fences erected to prevent disaster tourism, the silence and stillness eerily deafening, and the sour smell of burning lingering in the air. We also spoke about fires we observed and stories people shared with us about the tragic burning in communities, houses, band offices, and hotels that are somehow seen as normalized, spaces that may be seen as less profitable, or those that burn without exception (or timely response from local fire services). In so-called BC as with many other settler colonial contexts, these spaces are too often inhabited by lower income communities, on reserve lands, and lead to the tragic loss of homes, livelihoods, memories, and lives (e.g., St Denis, 2022). While our experiences bring us into relation with our research, we also spoke about the privilege we have to ‘go elsewhere’—this feels particularly true while Onyx's email and phone is lighting up while writing these very words with notices and automated calls from the University of British Columbia Okanagan ordering “wildfire burning near UBCO Campus—Evacuate”.¹ In previous fire seasons, as in this very moment, we could leave when the eye-stinging-dryness of choking air quality burned for too long and when pleas for housing for those evacuated (especially pet friendly spaces often not permitted in evacuation centres) were put out over social media. We have vehicles, and these vehicles have working air conditioning and gas; we have the financial mobility and social networks that enabled us to go elsewhere. These are not the privileges afforded to many in so-called BC who are disproportionately impacted by fires, nor are they shared in the same way with First Nations whose territories, since time immemorial, are here, not ‘elsewhere.’

As white settlers of Irish and Scottish, and Italian-Finnish-English-American ancestries respectively who reside on and grew up in territories shaped by fire,² we ground ourselves in this way to, as settler and Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw (respectively) geographers de Leeuw and Hunt (2018: 10) suggest, “politicise [our]… situated position on stolen or colonized land and to reflect on how many geographies and positionalities … exist because of, or have profited from, colonial violence.” We do so to also bring forward our accountabilities to the places and scholarship from which we write. As Hul’qumi’num scholar Sarah Morales (2018: 156) attests: “in understanding the Coast Salish worldview, it becomes apparent that any research methodology developed to engage with Hul’qumi’num laws needs to both reinforce existing connections and also work to rebuild connections that have been broken due to our colonial histories.” We do not purport to understand Coast Salish law as Morales suggests. We do, however, seek to reveal how colonial legacies continue in their attempts to dispossess and foreground their inseparability from how fire governance and settler colonial land management regimes continue to bear these powers.

We understand settler coloniality as a structure and process that seeks to reorganize social relations, including along gendered lines. As Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw scholar Sarah Hunt/ Tłaliłila’ogwa explains:

While settler colonialism is understood by many to centre on land – specifically on territorial claims – socio-legal analysis reveals that settler colonial power seeks to rework not only relationships to land but all areas of social life. In particular, settler colonialism establishes authority, and naturalizes that authority, by reconfiguring Indigenous life across a range of sites and scales. (Hunt, 2021: 213–214)

Quechua scholar Sandy Grande reiterates the intersecting reconfigurations of coloniality when she states that the ‘problems’ created by and through coloniality have been “consciously and historically produced” by “multidimensional force[s] underwritten by Western Christianity, defined by White supremacy, and fueled by global capitalism” (Grande, 2004: 19). Building from our understanding of settler coloniality, the overarching questions that guide this paper are thus: How do racial-colonial and gendered politics unfold through fire and wildfire practices, linking past, present, and future in settler colonial British Columbia? Furthermore, how are these relationships to and with fire harnessed and naturalized in ways that perpetuate settler colonial dynamics and structures of power? Our use of the term naturalized here signals what Hunt refers to as power that seemingly ‘naturalizes that [settler] authority, by reconfiguring Indigenous life across a range of sites and scales’. In the context of the political ecologies of fire across so-called BC, naturalizing fire governance is self-perpetuated and reproduced by institutions (e.g., governments; insurance policies) and social relations (e.g., property; patriarchy) that ensure settler coloniality's singular and seeming inevitable future (see also Hunt, forthcoming; LaDuke and Cowen, 2020).

We offer this paper as a starting place for answering our expansive research questions. Our hope is that it will spark interest and encourage others to be in conversation with a lens critical of settler coloniality and fire. Our work thus builds upon burgeoning research on political ecologies of fire (e.g., Asiyanbi and Davidsen, 2023; Smith, 2021; González-Hidalgo et al., 2021; Neale et al., 2019; Eriksen and Waitt, 2016; see also Struzik, 2022) and research that interrogates Indigenous and settler relationships within fire contexts (e.g., Fache & Moizo, 2015; Marks-Block and Tripp, 2021; Norgaard, 2014; Vinyeta, 2022; Neale et al., 2019). Political ecology's aspiration, as González-Hidalgo et al. (2014: 1015) “[is] to politicize public debates and choices about desired socionatures” (see also Perrault, Bridge, McCarthy, 2015). We thus aim to build on political ecological critiques of fire by further interrogating how settler coloniality continues to naturalize its operations and social organization through responses to and relationships with fire.³ To do so, we take seriously what Athabascan scholar Dian Million (2018) reminds us: ‘ecological’ work always takes place on Indigenous lands. Our work thus builds upon pre-existing literatures on the political ecologies of fire, specifically in so-called BC, while foregrounding a critique of settler coloniality to de-stabilize its naturalization. To do so, we begin by contextualizing our research in critical political ecology and Indigenous ecology before we pivot to our engagement with BC archival analysis.

Contextualizing our research: intersectional readings of colonial fire paradigms

Our lives are shaped by fire. Whether that be through combustion engines compressing time and space as part of our everyday lives (Pyne, 2001, 2021), harnessing fire to mould urban environments (Clark and Yusoff, 2014; Pyne 2001, 2021), protesting conditions through acts of defiance and discontent as fire (Priegert, 2019; Shebib, 2013), enacting Indigenous legal orders and ceremony that centre fire as sacred and cosmological (Ignace and Ignace 2017: 193–210), or wildfires regenerating ecosystems (Dickson-Hoyle et al., 2021; Lake and Christianson, 2019), fire is an integral part of our social, political, cultural, economic, and physical landscapes.

Despite being ever present in many of our lives, relations to and governance over fire in settler colonies has long been predicated on fire suppression intent on controlling and making ‘best use’ of the land. Best use in such paradigms is deeply imbricated in Lockean concepts of property and the economy that can be yielded from particular landscapes (Bhandar, 2018: 47). As fire historian Pyne (1997) documents, fire became seen as unfit for landscapes and ‘irrational’ due to shifting understandings of forestry and economy in seventeenth century Europe. In her research into colonial era through to current fire practices in Belize, Smith (2021: 580) traces the colonial afterlives of fire suppression. She highlights how “particularly in colonial settings, where Europeans encountered highly flammable environments such as tropical savannas, fire came to represent environmental degradation”. Smith (2021: 580) outlines how “state forestry institutions in Europe and many European colonies criminalized fire use and pursued ideals of fire suppression” and that by the early twentieth century “influenced by European models, state-sponsored fire suppression was also instituted in the USA and its colonies…”. European responses to fire have long replicated a model of terra nullius that view certain landscapes as hostile and/or in need of control through institutions and social relations that reflect the ideologies core to colonial aims.

When cast through a critical light, it becomes clear that fire has been and is harnessed for political means and can reveal already existing social, economic, and cultural tensions. By revisiting South Catalonia's 2009 fire, for instance, González-Hidalgo et al. (2014: 1014) demonstrate how fire uncovers social tensions and how examining fires (and forests) can provide critical insight into social, cultural economic, and political dynamics with nature: “Fires do indeed relieve what society represses … and expose how it is organized”. Davis (1995) outlines how shifting political sentiments and policies influenced property regimes and profits in Los Angeles, California, had (and continue to have) disproportionately fatal effects on often lower-income, primarily racialized, immigrant communities against more affluent, property-owning, white residents.⁴

Writing about fire as it relates to gender, settler scholars have also demonstrated how gender impacts fire through laboured-expectations of fire suppression as both historically and contemporarily a highly masculinized (Pacholok, 2013; Eriksen and Waitt, 2016) and militarized (Struzik, 2022) practice. While these studies employ a binary perspective of gender, they highlight how fire itself–and combatting its desires (Clark and Yusoff, 2018)–is deeply masculinized. Building on increasing conversations within wildfire fighters on the need to look at gender within labour realms in Canada, Reimer and Eriksen's (2018: 722) findings from a 2016 gender and leadership survey with British Columbia Wildfire Service (BCWS) document and provide “clear insights into the ways that gender discrimination is functioning in leadership within wildland fire, and can be summed up in a belief that ‘femininity equals weakness’”. The authors include gender beyond a binary framing (2018: 718), while concluding that “…fostering gender diversity requires transforming leadership practice to include open engagement with gendered cultural norms”. Reimer and Eriksen (2018: 722) further conclude that “addressing gender discrimination requires cultural change with consideration for latent triggers of male resentment towards gender minorities” with “the current culture invalidat[ing] the voices of gender minorities – a revelation that indicates the status quo has subtle and built-in defensive mechanisms that make cultural change difficult”. While most gender-based studies of wildfires have focussed on the composition of crews, studies concerned with fire managers and fire knowledges are often dominated by men.⁵ For instance, Smith's (2021: 601–606) study drew from 71 interviews, with only four participants identifying as women. The work of Indigenous feminists, however, have long documented that fire knowledges was often held by women (e.g., Armstrong, 2009; Bryce and Corntassel, 2013).

Questioning colonial narratives and paradigms of fire, Indigenous histories and practices of burning have long pointed to Indigenous uses of fire and how these actions were demonised and criminalized by the ignorance of white settlers (Parminter, 1981; Turner, 1999; Pyne, 2007; Christianson, 2015; Neale 2018; Goode et al., 2022). Indigenous feminist scholars and writers have harnessed fire in both metaphoric and material senses to draw connections across the visceral and literal experience of fire as encountered by suppression, repression, and resistance to colonial authority, including re-organizing social relations (e.g., Chrystos, 1995; Whitehead, 2022; Hunt, forthcoming). Chrystos (1995) Fire Power, for instance, is a collection of poems that centre on desire, on transformation, loss, and the connections of lands and bodies. syilx scholar Jeannette Armstrong (2020: 43) speaks of syilx women's role as fire knowledge holders:

From personal observation in the Armstrong family, I can attest that my grandmother, Christine Armstrong, directed the men to set fires to forested areas in specific places close to the Penticton village. Her clear explanation of the importance of burning was that it took care of the land by feeding the soil and initiating new growth that would provide forage for the deer and increase the productivity and quality of berries for the birds, the bears, and ourselves.

Armstrong describes how syilx caretaking practices, including burning the land, were practiced as law, writing that they were “exercised by fishing and hunting chiefs and village subchiefs whose regulatory powers were law” (Armstrong 2020: 42). Speaking to syilx Okanagan knowledges specifically, Armstrong (2009: 43) also locates fire and embers as a cultural expression of regrowth and resurgence: “the Syilx Okanagan definition of captikʷɬ (oral stories) is imaged in the word as a live ember being splintered off as each storyteller carries the knowledge forward to ignite a new fire that will light up the dark”.

Although the framings of fire we share here are diverse, a common thread is how power dynamics—whether that be expressed through suppression (as is the case with forestry practices), neglect (as is the case with the impacts of fire on densely populated, low-income areas who experience infrastructural neglect), and possession of knowledges (as is the case of syilx fire knowledges and law)—shape who can use and relate to fire and how fire can be employed. Political ecologies of fire governance are increasingly examining select structures of power, knowledge, capital, risk, and culture behind enactments of fire management (see Asiyanbi and Davidsen 2023; Booth 2021; Eriksen, 2007; Iglesias et al., 2022; Marks-Block and Tripp, 2021; Neale et al., 2019; Norgaard, 2014; Vinyeta 2022). What we contend, however, is that the suppression paradox that proliferates the landscapes that we consider home is embedded in and reproduces a colonial logic that widens social and economic gaps that already exist within our communities. Indeed, these gaps are also uniquely gendered, as settler coloniality itself operates upon patriarchal lines that have actively attempted to erase Indigenous women and Two-Spirit peoples, including the laws and legal authorities that they possess and practice.

Theoretical framework: critical political and anti-colonial ecologies

In this section, we build from our intersectional analysis to expand our theoretical approach to examine the political structures and social re-organization behind fire that have led to gendered and racial-colonial dynamics that naturalize fire suppression through settler colonial fire governance. At the outset of our paper, we began from Hunt/Tłaliłialo’gwa's interrogation of settler colonialism.⁶ Hunt (2021: 213) explains how “…settler colonialism is marked by the reconfiguration of these [unceded Indigenous] lands through socio-legal imaginaries which dispossess the original [Indigenous] occupants via ongoing assaults on their worldviews, bodies, and ways of being”. Elsewhere, Hunt/Tłaliłialo’gwa (2021) connects her deconstruction of settler colonialism to its distinctly gendered and sexuality-targeting edges, and how processes of ‘reconfiguration’ through categorization sought to re-organize Indigenous peoples and thus, Indigenous lands.

The imposition and institutionalization of racialized gender roles have meant the loss of not only Two-Spirit traditions, but also the ways that men and women related to one another, and the spiritual, ceremonial, and cultural significance of what it means to be a “man” or a “woman” or a “Two-Spirit” within broader cultural systems. Gender, then, plays a central role in understanding and defining who we are as Indigenous peoples, and the forced disappearance of locally defined systems of gender is central to the settler project of Native disappearance. (Hunt, 2018: 25)

Drawing from the work of Dakota activist Zitkala-Ša's essay “Regardless of Sex or Age” penned 100 years ago in 1924, Métis scholar Natalie Clark (Clark, 2016: 49) points out that “Indigenous feminists remind us again and again in their writing that violence has always been gendered, aged, and linked to access to land”. Clark shares Zitkala-Ša's legal argument and how “greed for the girl's lands and rich oil property actuated the grafters and made them like beasts surrounding their prey” (Zitkala-Ša's as quoted in Clark, 2016: 49). Clark, who resides on Secwépemc territories that are intimately intertwined with fire (see Ignace and Ignace 2017), speaks to how:

…colonial processes were not only gendered, they also attacked the other intersectional ways of being within Indigenous communities, including the complimentary roles of women and also the sacredness of Two-Spirit Indigenous peoples (Driskill 2010) as well as the roles of children and youth within the community (Winnemucca 1883). (Clark, 2016: 50)

The attempted reorganization of socio-legal orders and land theft central to settler coloniality necessitates a perspective that reveals the gendered and colonial-racial aims of its reconfiguration. Recognizing this need, Clark (2016) proposes a framework of ‘Red intersectionality’. While recognizing the foundational work of Black Feminists to intersectional theory, notably Kimberlee Crenshaw (1991) and the Combahee River Collective ([1977] 2000), Clark's red intersectionality builds from Indigenous feminists who have long spoken to connections between gender, anti-colonialism, Indigenous sovereignty, and resistance, such as Zitkala-Ša's, Quechua scholar Sandy Grande's foundational Red Pedagogy (2004), Menominee poet and scholar Chrystos (1995),⁷ and Mohawk scholar Patricia Monture-Angus (1991).

“A Red intersectional perspective” Clark (2016: 51) explains:

…does not center the colonizer, nor replicate the erasure of Two-Spirit and trans peoples in our communities, but, instead, … attends to the many intersecting factors including gender, sexuality, and a commitment to activism and Indigenous sovereignty… it must be situated within a framework that holds onto tradition and intergenerational knowledge while making meaning of modern Indigenous struggles…it needs to flow from and be of service to Indigenous epistemology and worldview that recognizes the relationships between humans and all of nature as equal and important sources of knowing.

Our analysis here is shaped by Clark's proposition of a red intersectional lens, Sarah Morales (2018: 156) words early in this paper that any research engaging Indigenous (specifically, Hul’qumi’num) law must “reinforce existing connections and also work to rebuild connections that have been broken due to our colonial histories”, and our relational experiences and research with communities targeted by settler coloniality. Through these theoretical frameworks, we can see how Indigenous legal orders have been impacted by coloniality and, in the case of our work here, through colonial governance of fire. Our focus on law follows Hunt's (2021: 213) assertions and observations of settler colonial societies building power “on the ground in the places they seek to claim, through establishing legal processes by which settler colonists can actively acquire and control land and resources, as well as assert the lawful right to make these claims as settler subjects”. Core to settler assertions of authority and control are ideologies that frame land as ripe for colonial acquisition.⁸

Athabascan scholar Million critiques “the imaginary of the ‘pristine’ or the ‘ecological’ sans a human hand” and how such a framing “enter[s] a dangerous illusion about ‘land’” (Million, 2018: 25). We read Million's words as a rejection of Eurocentric ideas of human/nature divides and terra nullius on multiple fronts, including refuting the myth of forests as untouched ‘wilderness’, rather than shaped by millennia of Indigenous burning practices and legal orders (Armstrong, 2020; Corntassel & Bryce, 2013). Indeed, Indigenous scholars have demonstrated how norms in fire (and ecological) research prop up a human/nature binary and, in so doing, frame wilderness as the domain of whiteness (Goode, Beard and Oraftik, 2022; Kimmerer and Lake, 2001). Such framing has also served to position timber as capital, perpetuates the erasure of Indigenous self-determination, cements binary notions of (cis) gender and monogamous, heterosexuality, while reifying modes of thought and decision-making that perpetuate coloniality (Chrystros, 1995; Hunt, 2018). Framings of land in this way naturalizes settler coloniality and reproduces its futurity. Focusing on ‘ecology’ or ‘culture’ without attention to power, as Tłaliłila’ogwa/Hunt (forthcoming; 2023) reveals, stymies Indigenous law and further invisibilizes the authority of women/matriarchy (let alone gender non-confirming or Two-Spirit peoples) through and to the land (see also Armstrong, 2009). Hunt shows how: “today we see Indigenous women's authority reframed by the dual discourses of culture and ecology – our property symbols now reframed as art and material relations with land now called ‘traditional ecological knowledge’” (Hunt, 2023, np). We find Hunt's words particularly nascent when read alongside Boyd's (1999) foundational text on Indigenous fire practices in the Pacific Northwest. In the Epilogue of Indians, Fire, and the Land in the Pacific Northwest, Boyd reflects on 20-years since the book's first release. Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is upheld as a way to manage fire, but does not specifically mention Indigenous legal practices directing fire knowledges or link these knowledges to law, let alone look to gender. TEK is framed as a “body of wisdom and a suite of techniques concerning local species and environments” in addition to “a whole different way of looking at the world” (Boyd, 1999: 308). In the re-release of this book 20-years after it was first published, we find it disappointing that the editor did not take the opportunity to reflect on the shifts in literature—or in the increased expression and enaction of Indigenous fire burning practices—including increasing calls to frame Indigenous fire practices as expressions of land-based and legal orders, and/or engage with burgeoning work on gender in these realms.⁹

While providing a framework to interrogate existing work on fire governance, Hunt/Tłaliłila’ogwa speaks specifically to lək̓ʷəŋən (Coast Salish) women's roles in fire knowledges and law:

As lək̓ʷəŋən educator and kwetlal (camas) traditional manager Cheryl Bryce explains, the abundance of the rich landscapes settlers encountered upon arrival in Coast Salish territories was due to “a lot of hard work by her female ancestors who owned and managed the camas fields through seasonal burning, weeding and harvesting on a sustainable scale”. (Corntassel and Bryce 2012: 157; Hunt, 2023: np, emphasis in original)

These observations are in relation to the very territories on which this paper is being written and on which we, the authors, came together in the colonial archives. We now turn to the historical crafting of settler-colonial provincial law. We do so to begin tracing the contours of how racial-colonial and gendered politics unfold through fire and wildfire practices unfolded in so-called BC, and how these relationships to and with fire continue to be naturalized in ways that erase Indigenous legal systems.

Recasting the political ecologies of fire across British Columbia

Despite fire being imbricated in socio-ecological crises,¹⁰ approaches to studying fire in British Columbia that foreground Indigenous law and decentre settler coloniality are few. To this point, recent research on BC's fire governance asserts: “Fire governance is understudied in Canada” (Copes-Gerbitz et al., 2022: 2). In a recent literature review of social and historical dimensions of wildfire research, Sousa et al. (2022: 1116) found a “lack of attention to the sociopolitical and historical side of the issue”. To date, most fire ecology and pyrogeography research that goes beyond biophysical studies of fire behavior to consider the entwined political, social, and environmental dimensions of fire in BC center settler colonial laws and institutions. Increasingly, scholars are speaking to Indigenous law and suggesting the need to de-stabilize settler coloniality (for BC specific examples, see Copes-Gerbitz et al., 2021; Dickson-Hoyle and John, 2021; Hoffman et al., 2022; Nikolakis et al., 2020; Nikolakis and Roberts, 2021; Verhaeghe et al., 2019). These works begin to reveal how deeply seeded coloniality is in understandings of and relations to fire, in addition to the erase of Indigenous knowledges and laws (see Hunt, forthcoming; Morales, 2018). Yet, research on how settler coloniality naturalizes responses to fire currently does not look to its gendered edges.

How fires burn across BC is shaped by settler coloniality, timber capitalism, state forestry regimes, criminalization of burning, and Indigenous resistance. In this section, we are guided by a red intersectional lens as we revisit twentieth century institutional fire management narratives from the BC Forest Service. We begin to trace how colonial fire suppression in BC widened social and economic gaps that exist on racialized and gendered lines. We then consider BC fire policy in the context of lək̓ʷəŋən territories to convey how fire response continues to perpetuate colonial dynamics, while erasing Indigenous legal authorities.

Fire suppression and politicized exclusion: the fulton commission of 1910

The Bush Fire Act of 1874 was the first piece of settler-colonial legislation in BC to assert political authority over fire and police how fire could be harnessed. Such legislation emerged when settlers realised wildfires threatened to make timber unmarketable and could compromise the profitability of the lands seized by the Crown and enclosed by private interests. This law made anyone who left open fires burning during summer months or let a fire escape onto another's property liable to prosecution. The destructive “Great Fire” that swept through Vancouver on June 13, 1886 spurred the Legislative Assembly to strengthen the Bush Fire Act and apply it across the province (Parminter, 1981). As the fire suppression workforce increased and technologies of fire suppression proliferated during the middle of the twentieth century, the area burned by wildfires decreased and the ‘right to burn’ continued to be surveilled by the BC Forest Service (Copes-Gerbitz et al., 2022; Parminter 1981, 2020; Pyne 2007).

Building from the ethos of fire management in the Bush Fire Act, the 1909/1910 Royal Commission on Forestry (“The Fulton Commission”) led to the 1912 formation of the BC Forest Branch and entrenched fire control as a primary duty of forest management by the settler colonial state. It also established settler colonial forest science as the well of professional expertise that would direct the management of the province's timber commodities through fire control. Pyne (2007: 317) writes that the political influence of the Fulton commission “defined the pattern of forestry and fire protection in British Columbia until 1979”. To do so, the Commission looked to neighbouring US states and provinces in Canada to assess fire suppression tactics and penalization for those whose actions led to fire. The Commission was called when an exponential growth in provincial revenues from forests in the early 1900s occurred in tandem with increased threats to these revenues through an intense fire season; indeed, when the ‘industry's crop’ was threatened by the historic 1910 fire season, there was a stark shift in fire suppression (Fulton, 1909: 70).

The shift towards suppression speaks extensively to public (read: settler, property-owning, men, who were in 1909/1910 the only legally-permitted voting population in BC) perspectives of fire and the land:

At first forest fires are looked upon as a natural accompaniment to the routine of progress and development; indeed they may even seem desirable means of opening up new territory. Then, as the lumbering industry obtains the control of small areas of timber land, these fires appear as a vague menace to private interests; a menace, however, that arouses little anxiety since, when timber is destroyed, there is no difficulty in obtaining elsewhere in the immense unused forest the grant of fresh sources of supply.’ After this comes the time when men realise how limited is the amount of merchantable timber and how valuable it must soon become. The holding of timber lands becomes a profitable form of investment and in consequence most of the accessible forest passes into private control. At this stage fires cause direct injury to private interests by actual destruction of timber held; they damage a source of public revenue; and their prevalence deters investment and acts as a drag upon the rise in stumpage values. (Fulton, 1909: 59)

While we see fire initially proposed as a ‘natural accompaniment of the routine of progress and development’, itself a discourse that naturalized extraction and capitalism, we also see fire as a means to generate income through first harnessing a narrative of terra nullius by ‘opening new territory’. Through ‘opening up’ this territory to settlers and through Indigenous erasure and dispossession, colonial property regimes were created and wealth extracted byway of the lumber industry (Rossiter, 2007; see also Bhandar, 2018). Men's anxieties–a literal use of ‘men’ here–are stoked when fire threatens colonial land holdings. These anxieties exist still today with vast amounts of funding for wildfire suppression across the province stemming from the forestry industry as a necessary condition for their continued operations (e.g., Special Accounts Appropriation and Control Act, 2023: s. 5).

The threat of fire in the Fulton Commission speaks to themes of terra nullius and the frontier, key features of settler colonial land management that are linked to ‘best use’. As Hunt/ Tłaliłila’ogwa explains:

The key features of the frontier include imagining North America and other settler colonial lands as empty, unoccupied wilderness with rich resources freely available for the taking, or the rightful wealth owed to those representing the interest of civilization and progress. (Hunt, 2018: 214)

In addition to the Fulton Commission demonstrating a landscape of wealth under threat, at no point in the Commission does it appear that were women able to nor gave evidence. This absence speaks to the erasure of women–particularly Indigenous women when read alongside the discourse of terra nullius and given fire practices and legal authorities were often matriarchal–and uneven gendered impacts of that which is often taken for granted, in this case, the role of fire in threatening underlying settler interests in and capital holdings over Indigenous lands. These erasures of expertise / knowledges held by women in commissions such as the Fulton Commissions—which would become a foundational document for so-called BC's fire suppression model—also speak to gender-based violence as related to exploitation and the masculinization of fire suppression and forestry sectors (Pacholok, 2013; Reimer & Eriksen, 2018), including the erasure and exclusion of Indigenous women's knowledges, experiences, and legal authorities (Eriksen and Hankins, 2020; Hunt, forthcoming).

BC forest law in the context of lək̓ʷəŋən burning practices

Well before forestry revenues drove fire suppression paradigms, colonists cast their gaze onto what could be seen as appropriate use of fire on the territories on which we, the authors, came together to write this paper. In “Preparing Eden: Indigenous Land Use and European Settlement on Southern Vancouver Island” settler historian John Lutz highlights settler colonists’ remarks on lək̓ʷəŋən use of fire (see also Turner, 1999). Although Lutz demonstrates how lək̓ʷəŋən use of fire tended the land, particularly to nurture and encourage the growth of camas and harvesting areas for elk and deer, colonists viewed these practices as barbaric and demonstrative of (in their perspective) Indigenous peoples’ misuse of the land. Looking to the colonial archive, Lutz shares the views of Colony of Vancouver Island land surveyor Walter Grant who in 1849 writes:

…the frequency of the fires kindled promiscuously by the natives both in wood and prairie between the months of August and October. Their object is to clear away the thick fern and underwood in order that the roots and fruits on which they in a great measure subsist may grow more freely… (Lutz, 2020: 118)

Grant continues, raising his objections to the resulting smoke from burns and pledging economic sanctions against Indigenous peoples as a form of punishment during burn season: “I have endeavoured in the neighbourhood…to check these fires by giving neither potlache [presents] or employment to any Indians so long as fire was blazing in sight of my house.” (Lutz, 2020: 118).

Well into and throughout the twentieth century, First Nations were frequently blamed for wildfires and Indigenous burning practices (and Indigenous peoples) were viewed as a problem to be policed. As Christianson et al. (2022: 258, 270) write:

Indigenous fire practices were criminalized by settler governments, and a variety of colonial mechanisms interrupted Indigenous land use practices throughout much of North America…Fire bans on cultural burning implemented by settler administrations were consistent with a wider strategy that aimed to criminalize relationships between Indigenous Nations, land, and each other.

In re-reading Grant's excerpt, we see how fire is deemed appropriate and, importantly, who is perceived to appropriately use fire. These considerations can be read alongside Hunt/Tłaliłila’ogwa's work when she reiterates how “lək̓ʷəŋən educator and kwetlal (camas) traditional manager Cheryl Bryce explain[ed] the abundance of the rich landscapes settlers encountered upon arrival in Coast Salish territories” and how this landscape “was due to ‘a lot of hard work by her female ancestors who owned and managed the camas fields through seasonal burning, weeding and harvesting on a sustainable scale’ (Corntassel and Bryce, 2012, 157; Hunt, 2023, np, emphasis in original). Nowhere in Grant's text are their considerations of authorities over and to land beyond that of settler property, let alone gendered considerations. Rather, economic sanctions are used as a penalty against practicing First Nations law and ecologies. We also see the emergence of fire as a practice ‘elsewhere’, as a phenomenon that should only occur outside of particular ‘neighbourhoods’, to use Grant's language.

Closing and future considerations

Fire shapes our everyday lives in both visible and invisible ways; its impacts, however, are distributed unevenly. In so-called BC, Indigenous scholars, First Nations leadership, and Indigenous fire stewards are exposing the power-laden histories and contemporary manifestations of capitalist and setter coloniality's undergirding of fire governance (Ignace and Ignace, 2017; Lewis et al., 2018; Shackan Indian Band et al., 2019; Xwisten et al., 2019; Nikolakis et al. 2020). Such work has begun to show how settler states have sought to naturalize responses to fire, including who and how fire can be harnessed, related to, and practiced. Fire's presence is political, as is the attention that is paid to who, how, and in what manner it exists.

The naturalization of fire suppression is embedded in and reproduces a colonial logic that widens social and economic gaps along racialized and gendered lines, whether a result of willful neglect of residences deemed ‘unprofitable’ (St Denis, 2021; see also Davis, 1995), of attempted control of the ‘natural’ world as is the case of the creation of fire suppression tactics (Pyne, 1997), a tool of dispossession to raze Indigenous villages to make way for industry (Hughes, 2011: 41), or one of regeneration and law as is the case for Indigenous fire practices and ecologies (Lake and Christianson, 2019). By taking seriously our grounded relations in place and guided by the work of Indigenous feminist scholars who fuse bodily autonomy to theory, we have been guided by a red intersectional analysis to explore how settler colonial fire governance operates upon patriarchal lines that have actively attempted to erase Indigenous women and Two-Spirit peoples in so-called BC. Through historical texts and Indigenous feminist theory, we have demonstrated how fire has become a site of suppression when threatening capital and demonstrated how settler coloniality has sought to erase women and gender-diverse peoples from these histories. To this end, we suggest that histories of land governance that do not make these intersections visible can exacerbate injustices along pre-existing social categories, themselves held up and maintained by coloniality.

We thus return to the question with which we began: How do racial-colonial and gendered politics unfold through fire and wildfire practices, linking past, present, and future in settler colonial British Columbia? How are recurrent fire crises the outcome of power relations in the province working across scales to produce and maintain the current arrangement of political, economic, and ecological relations? We encourage others to consider these questions as they build analysis through work animated by Indigenous theorists and scholars guided by Nation-specific legal orders. Indeed, our hope is that this paper is one of many that can assess the co-constitution of gendered and racial-colonial dynamics in fire scholarship.

Highlights

Settler coloniality seeks land in part through reorganizing social relations, including along gendered lines, which have ongoing yet often naturalized impacts on fire governance.

The suppression paradox that proliferates fire governance is embedded in and reproduces a colonial logic that widens social and economic gaps that already exist within our communities.

Scholarship of Indigenous feminists who fuse bodily autonomy to theory demonstrate how fire governance operates upon patriarchal lines that have actively attempted to erase Indigenous women and Two-Spirit peoples in so-called BC, Canada.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank Paul Sylvestre for speaking with us about this paper early in its envisioning, and our colleague who was too humble to be named here yet presented extremely helpful and appreciated feedback on a first draft. Many thanks to UBC Okanagan's ‘Living with Wildfire’ research team, of which Onyx and Judith are members, for their ongoing support and encouragement with this work. We also thank our peer reviewers who provided invaluable insights and comments; thank you for your time and labour.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the UBC Okanagan's Hampton Fund Research Grant.

ORCID iDs

Onyx Sloan Morgan

Judith Burr

Notes

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The political ecologies of fire: Recasting fire geographies in British Columbia,Canada

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction: grounding ourselves and our analysis

Contextualizing our research: intersectional readings of colonial fire paradigms

Theoretical framework: critical political and anti-colonial ecologies

Recasting the political ecologies of fire across British Columbia

Fire suppression and politicized exclusion: the fulton commission of 1910

BC forest law in the context of lək̓ʷəŋən burning practices

Closing and future considerations

Highlights

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iDs

Notes

References