Meet the Fire Watchers of Skeetchestn: the people keeping their community safe during nearby wildfires, and working to bring good fire back to the land. Join us for this conclusion to our visit to Secwépemc territories as we discuss a way to bring different knowledge systems together: a synthesis of western science and Indigenous understanding.

This is the 5th instalment in our series of indeterminate length, "On Fire". While you don't need to listen to them in order, you may want to at least catch up Part 4 (Under Water) before diving into this one.

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You are listening to Season Five of

Future Ecologies

Okay, shall we jump in right where we left off?

Sure. Just for new listeners, my name is

Mendel.

And I'm Adam.

And this episode is a continuation of the last

one — about what post disaster recovery looks like when there

is no post to the disaster.

Just one crisis after another, fires, floods,

landslides, you name it.

So this is Part Five of our series "On Fire".

Don't worry. You don't need to go all the way back to the

beginning to understand what's going on here. But if you

haven't already, you may want to listen to the previous episode

to get oriented.

That's On Fire — Under Water.

Okay, I think that covers it for housekeeping.

Yeah. So when we left off, I was in a truck

climbing these awful dirt roads through the 2021 Sparks Lake

fire footprint, right outside of the Skeetchestn Indian Band's

reserve. The landscape had been burned two years previously. So

the trees were all just charred little sticks. And there was a

rich understory of wildflowers and medicinal plants that were

coming back up.

Plants which kept distracting you from your

conversation with Sam.

Indeed. And that's Sam Draney, of Skeetchestn

Natural Resources. Also in the truck, Sarah Dickson-Hoyle from

UBC.

And also from Down Under.

As we were driving, Sam was telling me

about how she became a fire watcher. It goes back to the

2017 Elephant Hill Fire

Which you explored in detail in the last

episode

And at the time, folks in Skeetchestn felt like

they weren't getting up to date reports about the progress of

the fire from BC Wildfire, which is not good when your community

is right next to an out of control mega fire. So they

decided to send out a team of their own to track the fire and

report back to the community. And this is where our story

picks up. There was just one problem.

What was that?

They were missing a technical person.

So I got to go out as the tech, run the iPad, take

the pictures, take the track. And then they never pried me

back off of that fire. I was on it — like "no, you need me I

have to run the iPad." That's where the team between me and

Darrel really developed. He's got the cultural mindset. He's a

hunter, he grew up on the land his whole life. He knows every

road, every gully — how the wind works in every gully.

Who's Darrel?

Darrel is the man that we've driven all the way

out into the bush to see. And can you believe it? We're just

arriving right now.

Convenient.

Amazing.

We get out at this open meadow surrounded by a mix of green and

black trees, above a lake.

This is Sedge Lake. So this up here is one of our

potato plots. So the spring beauty — Indian potato.

Just up the hill, there are some guys with a

little excavator installing fence posts around the patch

that Sam is pointing to. They're protecting a number of different

experimental plots.

Kind of like... crop trials?

Yeah, but for native plants. And man, I really

wish I knew that you could install fence posts with an

excavator. Would have saved me a lot of back pain.

You live and learn.

Anyway, pretty immediately, we're greeted by

the man that we came here to see.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: Hi! Darrel, I'm Sarah.

Darrel.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: Nice to meet you.

Adam.

Nice to meet you.

Great to meet you.

You know me.

Oh yeah.

My name is Darrel Peters. I'm from the Deadman's Creek Valley.

People call it Skeetchestn now.

Oh so you finally got someone to introduce

themselves. I'm proud of you. So tell me more about Darrel.

Well, Darrel is kind of the do-it-all guy for a

Skeetchestn Natural Resources — be it fisheries, forestry,

ranching,

No matter what comes up, I'm always involved.

That's what I do for the band — territorial patrol, going

through all our whole territory and going into the overlap to

the other bands and seeing who's doing the work and who's doing

the ranching in the areas, who's doing the mining, and that's how

I got to know everybody all in a great big circle.

So naturally, he was one of the folks that

Skeetchestn sent out to track the Elephant Hill Fire In 2017,

and Sam came along

To run the iPad.

Yeah, to do the tech stuff.

And I followed Darrel on the fires. I was just

right there behind him, especially on Elephant Hill. I

felt like a little baby deer — just following behind, was so

excited. Learning so much, and just like continued learning.

So what were they actually there to do?

they were there to be boots on the ground and eyes

on the fire, because they felt like they were being left out of

the loop.

We felt like we weren't getting up to date

information on what was happening, where the fire was

going. So we were actually going out and actively GPSing the edge

of the fire. So we knew how close it was getting to reserve

so we could make a call on when we were going to evacuate, what

are we going to do to protect ourselves. Because in any of the

recent fires, we weren't going to back down, we weren't going

to leave. We weren't going to leave our homes to be protected

by somebody else that maybe doesn't have the same values,

let alone our own values out on the land in us, you know, being

out and using it actively. So I was able to map the fire daily —

map the fire line, show the data we were collecting in a way

people can understand it. And just really latched on to Darrel

and Elephant Hill and didn't let go. But that's where fire

watch... that's what it is for me is just actively watching the

fire.

Going to the head of it — taking our GPS points

and watching what fuel it's taking up and which wind

direction and knowing the time of day of where things are

going, how your weather is, in effect. That's what I've learned

from my grandmother. And watch, and listen and record in your

mind of where things are going how long it takes. Because when

you have different fuel loads, the fire travels at different

time lengths, and that's when it crawls up into the trees. That's

why you see some of the trees...

I'll just chime in here to say that Darrel spoke in

great detail and at length about the many different factors that

he's considering when he's watching a fire, and making

judgments about how it's going to move where it's gonna go.

It's so much knowledge

And probably too much detail for this

conversation.

Yeah. And I think Sam summed it up really nicely.

Just like actively using our traditional ecological

knowledge to make calls, to help our community make choices.

Guardians of the land is who we are, because

that's where we naturally come from.

And as I was standing there listening to Sam

and Darrel, go back and forth. I couldn't help but imagine how I

would feel watching a fire that was barreling towards my

community. So I asked them about it.

It's a huge mix of emotions. I connect very

spiritually to fire. Elephant Hill was a learning experience

for me. I fell in love with fire on that. The way it moves, the

way it acts. I always connected it to a woman's spirit. She puts

on a performance, she dances. Then she goes to sleep at night.

Sparks Lake again, really spiritual connection. I

understood what it was doing. I agreed with what it was doing.

It was reclaiming our land for us. It was restarting the

succession. Tremont, that's a different monster. It was

robotic. It was mismanaged. That was a mass amount of burns that

kept awakening a fire that, to me, was trying to go to sleep.

It was tired. But the back burns just kept going wrong. They

weren't taking input from Skeetchestn or the ranchers, and

we've all been on the land our whole lives. And they were just

lighting stuff up that didn't need to get lit up. So you go

from understanding what's happening to just feeling empty

on the inside, because what we live on is now gone.

Hold on, I'm a little confused. What, what made

the Tremont fire. So different from Sparks Lake and Elephant

Hill? Weren't Sparks Lake and Tremont burning around the same

time, just on two different sides of the Thompson River?

Yeah. From my understanding from Sam and

Darrel, there were a number of things. But a big part was that

a different set of folks from BC Wildfire were in charge of the

response on Tremont than at Sparks Lake. And at first they

didn't even want Skeetchestn involved.

The head guy didn't want us to go work in

there or be part of it. And I was like "Well, this is our

territory. This is our home. This is our place and you're

telling me that I cannot go there." I just went back to the

traditional rule of "this is our land our home, our

jurisdiction." He was First Nations too, and I just told

him, I said, "Well, you're First Nations. You should know where

your territory starts and ends, right?" And he said "yes." I

said, "Well, that's what I'm doing too. I'm overriding what

you want just for the government table, back to my traditional

rule — to be the keeper of the land. to look after stuff." So

that's when they let us back on the fire.

But from their telling, once they got back onto

the fire after this delay, they were run ragged just trying to

deal with what they perceive to be mistakes that BC Wildfire was

making in their response. For example, back burns lit at the

wrong time of day, in the wrong place, or even the wrong side of

the mountain.

And it was like, me and Sam are just

checkerboarding all over the areas. It was like "you go be

lookout over there, I'll take this fire over here, get control

here. You go scout for me and other areas to see what had to

be looked after in the proper manner." And once they let us do

that, then we started getting control on the fire and keeping

it away from the people's houses. And we started saving a

lot and capitalizing in areas. That's when everything got

better for us, was when they actually started listening to

our information and what we wanted to bring to the table.

And eventually, of course, the 2021 Tremont and

Sparks Lake fires burnt themselves out. But they took a

huge toll on the land, and on everyone who was involved with

the response.

I was emotionally done after the last set of

wildfires.

Is it okay to call that burnout? Is that all right?

It is. It was burnout. I still am. I took a

six month leave, and I just tried to completely check out.

But in that six months, I did a lot of soul searching. There's

nowhere else I'd rather be. I could have ran and been on the

pipeline, or been bartending or whatever. But this is where I'm

meant to be. This is my journey. I feel like I'm meant to be a

warrior for the land. And I can imagine how some of the other

community members feel. There's just been a huge change within

our own community, it feels like since the fires. I just hope it

changes for the better soon.

What kind of change is she talking about?

The kind of change when most of your territory and

your economic base have just gone up in smoke in the span of

a few years.

Since the fires came through, it just kind of

burnt us out of house and home again. And now we're restarting

of where we were 20 years ago, 30 years ago. Seeing it from

that aspect to this aspect now is a big change for me. And like

growing up here and having it all green, and now it's just

burnt to match sticks.

That sounds devastating.

But the thing about fire watching is that they

see the damage, and the loss, and the changes. But afterwards,

at least in some places, they also see the regeneration.

I call plants my friends. So after Sparks Lake

and Tremont, when I finally was allowed to go back into the

bush, I went out with the girl I was training and I was I was so

excited to see my friends. Where I didn't even do much work that

day. I was like "We gotta harvest, we've got to spend time

with them. We need to get reacquainted and see how they're

doing." And you know, I still have that same view that every

spring I get out and get to go see my friends again.

And throughout this whole cycle of wildfire and

recovery, they've been building their capacity to keep boots on

the ground in their territory.

Before we only used to be just a small, tiny

crew of three or four people like this getting out to do a

whole bunch of work. And now it's like 22 to 30 of us.

So for example, with the Skeetchestn Natural

Resource Department, in addition to the cultural heritage and the

archaeological work, the ecological studies that they do,

they've got a territorial patrol that keeps an eye on the land.

Before and after the fires, there's a huge amount of

pressure on their territory from hunters, recreation, ranching,

fishing. And so Darrel and Sam and their team are always on the

"Okay, you're on that area. I'm on this area. You

lookout.

watch that side. I watch this side. Soon as we switch sides,

you watch that side. I watch this side. And these are the key

things we look for." So that's how we look after each other.

And then even though there's still lots of

room for improvement, it sounds like there is a lot more

conversation and collaboration across the region, than there

had been in the past — before the mega fires.

Because we all have good points, and when you

get them all aligned you can accomplish a lot of good things.

But when you're not aligned, the things just get jumped around,

you blame each other, and oh, they didn't do this, they didn't

do that. Well, maybe we should have better communication to get

things in order.

Now with these mass burns, people have had to really

think about, oh, what's my partner doing? Or what's my

neighbor doing. And I've seen more people coming to sit

together at one table, and learning more. We're learning

more from each other to move forward, in hopefully a good way

— to where we don't have to ask. We are still here, we are still

stewards, we are still practicing the traditional

ecological knowledge that's been gifted to us. But we're open to

that collaboration. And we hope that people are open to that

from us, because we're still here, we're always going to be

here. Like I said to every ministry guy on the fire. We're

always here. We're always watching. And now the stress is,

how do you manage these areas so that they aren't put back to the

same state as they were before the fire?

So how do you manage these areas, so they

don't get back to the same state that they were before the fires?

Well... so you know how, the last episode, we

were talking about kind of the immediate recovery efforts after

the fire?

Yeah.

Rebuilding fences, restoring fire guards and

salvage harvesting.

Sure, yeah.

That's really just the tip of the iceberg in terms

of what this land needed after the fires. And Sam and Darrel,

and Skeetchestn Natural Resources are dreaming much

bigger. This might not surprise you at all. But one of the most

important tools that they've been using is...

Mmm. Cultural fire.

Exactly. Darrel started doing burns on the

Skeetchestn reserve back in the early 2000s.

As soon as they said "You're gonna get charged

for burning", I was like, No, I want to start this and started

as a precedence, so that I have my traditional rights the way my

grandmother and them did, through generation to

generation. And that's why I really, really wanted to bring

fire back to the land, because that's our key. And that's the

one that always saved us.

And this actually surprised me a little bit to

hear, but at first, even Skeetchestn folks were a little

bit nervous about Darrel's burns — because it had been so long.

When I first did a few prescribed burns closer to

the communities, people were scared, didn't have the proper

education, and they didn't believe in what we were doing.

And I was like, I'm only trying to make things better here for

us.

That just shows how recent cultural burning is back

to our community. Because like, I've only learned from Darrel.

I've only got to practice and do this under Darrel, where I've

got the confidence to start doing it on my own — in my own

hay fields, where I'm now restrained by my property line.

I'm not at Darrel's level to be trusted to go out and do

community burns, although I'm right there beside him. But even

him talking about doing cultural burns and band members still

being afraid. When I interviewed my kyé7e about cultural burning,

she's 92 years old. She never practiced cultural burning in

her lifetime. She lost that to residential school. Because we

were stopped by legislation. We were thrown in jail. You know,

our right was taken away from us by Smokey the Bear. To where

even harvesting in a Provincial Park terrifies my kyé7e, because

she was chased out by park rangers. So do you think she's

going to try to put fire to the ground? I'm trying to practice

my rights and title. I'm trying to better the land. But

economics, safety, you know, having to jump through

government hoops — because we have to ask to practice. It's

not recognized yet.

The reason why I really take key to the fire now

and know it to a T, is because my family — my first family —

was taken on me from a house fire. I don't have the brothers

and sisters and everything that I used to have, and now it's

just kind of like... now I have to respect the fire. Oh, okay,

this could take you and your other families, and the family

and the generations to come. So this is what you have to learn.

And I've learned it to where... how to start it, watch it, fight

fire with fire on the land, knowing your wind direction, and

fuel loads, and to keep it in the areas that you want and the

boundaries you give it.

So for now, they're burning just on the

reserve, and occasionally also to improve range on adjacent

Crown land when asked. But there's a lot more work to be

done to bring fire, cultural fire, good fire, back to the

whole territory.

That's why I'm so drawn to fire to look after the

land and the people and to rejuvenate the lands, so that it

brings better vegetation for the animals. So it's a big

lifecycle. If I quit looking after that, it's going to quit

looking after me. So that's why I put my time and all my

efforts. I'm supposed to be going out to the lake and have

fun with everybody. But no, I'm up in the mountains working all

the time. And it's like, yeah, I gotta go camping. Yeah, you're

going camping, to go to work to get away from everything. Sure.

I don't take that time off. If I do take that time off, then I'm

losing my connection for what I do, to go sit on the lake. I'd

rather have that time up here.

So, no vacations for Darrel.

Definitely no vacations for Derrel. And I took

this as a bit of a cue to let him get back to work with his

crew. We packed ourselves into Sam's truck to head back down to

the valley. And along the way, she had some final thoughts to

share with me about what it means to work out on the land.

It's a lot of reclaiming that knowledge that

we've lost. We have lost a lot of elders and you know, with the

residential school, a lot of them had shut down. And I never

realized that 'til really recently. But they just like

shut down. And they were so insecure with their own culture

because they were told "No, that's bad." When you're scared

to do it, you're scared to pass that on. But in my generation,

I'm noticing a huge thirst for that knowledge. We want to

reclaim our culture. We want to relearn it but we don't have

unfortunately that direction above us. Because of the the

traumas, and the intergenerational trauma has

been passed down to us. So we're healing still. When I started my

journey to being sober, I really reconnected to the land and seen

its value on my journey physically, emotionally,

spiritually, mentally. And I seen how sick it was. And anyone

that is pursuing sobriety, I always tell them, you know, you

need to go get reconnected with the land. But when this is what

they have to reconnect with, it doesn't really build them up.

And I had to say that to a lot of people during the fires

because you know, we were hurt. We all ran away to the hills

when we were down. We all go hunting. We all go berry picking

with our kyé7es, or Aunties, or moms. So when we got to sit

there and watch it burn off, it hurt a lot of us mentally and

emotionally. You know, I just had to like the only thing I

think it was like it's a phoenix. This had to happen.

She's taking back what is her's, but she's gonna give us

something better. And it's our turn to take care of it better

than we have before.

Sarah and I said our goodbyes to Sam and her new

puppy. And then we headed up Deadman's Creek towards the last

stop on our visit when we come back I have two more voices to

introduce.

Or, reintroduce. That's after the break.

[Secwepemctsin] Hello, my name is Marianne

Ignace. My Secwépemc name is [Secwepemctsin]. It was given to

me by my husband Ron's auntie, the late Mona Jules. And the

name that you see on my email signatures is Gulḵiihlgad.

That's my adoptive name among Haida people where I I started

out my research and living in North AmericanIndigenous

communities many, many years ago.

It's hard to overstate Marianne's

credentials. She's the director of the Indigenous Languages

program at Simon Fraser University in the Department of

Linguistics and Indigenous Studies. She works across BC,

the Yukon, and even Southeast Alaska on language documentation

and revitalization. Naturally, that work requires Marianne to

be a fluent ethnobotanist and ethnoecologist. And this is her

husband.

I'll turn it over to Ron now to introduce

himself.

[Secwepemctsin] My name is Ron Ignace, and my

Shuswap name is Stsmél’qen.

Ron was the elected chief of the Skeetchestn

Indian Band for over 30 years. In the past, he served as the

chairman of the Shuswap Nation Tribal Council, and President of

its Cultural Society. And since 2021, he served as the very

first Commissioner of Indigenous Languages in Canada. For

decades, he and Marianne have co-authored books and papers,

and overseen an academic partnership between Simon Fraser

University and this Secwépemc nation.

Holy smokes. This is a... this is a real

power couple. And these are the same folks that we met in the

cold open in the last episode, right?

Do people know what that is?

The beginning.

Yes, in fact, and the reason that I knew I had to

talk to them was because of a paper that they'd recently

published with Sarah Dickson-Hoyle

Huh!

About the concept of Walking on Two Legs. So

naturally, I asked them about where this idea came from.

We, as Indigenous peoples now, are compelled to

live in two worlds, basically, you know. My great grandmother

told me, you know, to go out and study the white man's world and

come back and help your people. When I was going to university,

there was the notion that we, as Indian people, had no history,

simply because we lived in a circle. Because if you put your

finger in one part of a circle, and you go all the way around,

you wind up back where you were, right? They were saying,

Indigenous people don't occupy time and space, and thereby

don't have history. And I looked at European history — European

history is linear. It's one big long line from the day that

Christ was born to where we are now sitting together here today.

And I went back and I studied our stories, our stsptekwll, our

traditional stories. Our elders told us that's our university.

That's our school. There had to be a synthesis. I couldn't

accept that fact, because of listening to our stories, I knew

that we had history.

And thinking back, Ron realized that even though

his people's traditional stories tell about life in terms of

cycles, that doesn't necessarily mean that things are going in a

circle.

If you listen more carefully, it's a spiral. And we

interact with nature. In the process of dialectical

relationship with nature — nature transforms us, and we

transform nature — within nature, not outside of nature.

So that way, we evolve and have history, occupy time and space.

So I'm sitting there with Ron and Marianne in

their kitchen, and Ron is telling me this story. And I'm

thinking to myself, like, I feel like I've seen this image of the

spiral before.

Okay?

So I asked them about it. And they were like, "well, yeah, we,

we made an illustration of that spiral. And we put it in a book

that we were writing. And then we put it in a paper that we co

authored with Nancy Turner."

Nancy Turner, we had her on the show — in season

one.

Yeah, she's an ethnobotanist rockstar. I read

this paper that they wrote all those years ago. And I swear to

God, it's been shaping the way that I think about Indigenous

knowledge ever since. Like, that spiral is lodged in my brain.

Wow.

And I'm sure I'm not alone. Anyway, Ron and

Marianne would keep returning to those traditional stories in

their work as a wellspring of ideas.

We started studying our laws — we have Secwépemc

laws, even our own constitution that goes back 5000 years and we

have a transformer stories.

Mendel, are you familiar with transformers

stories?

Not the robot movies?

No, not the robot movies.

Well, then, no, I am not.

Okay. Well, to summarize briefly, if I can...

many First Nations have stories of a time when the world was

unrecognizable to us today — full of monsters and animals

that spoke and walked as humans do. Then came the transformers,

supernatural beings who change and rearranged things to make

them the way that they are today, more or less. On the

coast, Raven is often a key transformer. Whereas in the

interior, Coyote takes on that role.

Transformers utilize the knowledge that they were

given from the elders to transform cannibalistic type of

animals, transformer animals that caused us harm, and

reciprocal accountability and responsibility is all embedded

in those stories.

But the morals of these stories are not always so

easy to reconcile.

We have a coyote story that tells us not to copy

other people's ways, that it causes great harm and grief if

we just adopt them and take them on unquestionably. And yet,

there's another story in which West Coast transformers come up

after they've met up with coyote and admonished that we should be

working together to help each other and to look after each

other's interests.

To Ron, these stories at first felt

contradictory. Like, how are we supposed to maintain our own

ways and identity, but at the same time, interact with, and

learn from, and help other people who have a very different

worldview?

Right, like there's this one story that

tells us not to adopt other people's ways. And then this

other story tells us that we need to work together and learn

from other people.

Yeah, and at the same time, here he was studying

his traditional stories, and studying in the academy. So in

some ways, he was already embodying that contradiction.

And then, he thought back to residential school, how he and

his fellow students would be punished for speaking their

language.

But I learned that if I thought in Secwepemctsin,

they couldn't beat me for what I thought.

And thinking back on those difficult times, he and

Marianne realized that, in a similar way, his elders had been

hiding their own religion in the church.

What do you mean by that?

Our people were doing a similar thing, in a way,

because our traditional beliefs — our religious and spiritual

beliefs were under severe attack.

And Ron could remember his time as a child,

sitting on a church pew, listening to his elders saying

Shuswap prayers.

It dawned on me that a portion of our spiritual

belief that we had that was being condemned by the priests,

were actually being sung and performed in the church without

the priest knowing that because they didn't know the language.

So clearly, one system of knowledge and beliefs

could survive, even when embedded or hidden within

another system of knowledge or beliefs. But you know, how

there's a lot of discussion right now about integrating

Indigenous knowledge into the academy, and into land

management. And I guess into just about everything else.

Yeah, it's kind of a recurrent theme on this

podcast.

Many people have used the terms to

"integrate" Indigenous knowledge into western sciences. But guess

who loses out in the process of that — it tends to be indigenous

knowledge becoming a footnote, or an afterthought, as opposed

to having our own validity and purpose and ways of doing things

that can make change in the world.

So Ron, and Marianne, get to thinking, Well,

if you can embed Indigenous knowledge into a Western way of

thinking, then why not do the reverse? Why not flip that model

on its head and say, "let's stand on one leg of Indigenous

knowledge, and on one leg of Western science, but we're going

to walk with an Indigenous heart and mind."

And so that's where I began thinking about the

strategy of Walking on Two Legs, bringing the two knowledges

together without losing yourself, but maintaining

control over western knowledge. Because to me, Western science,

by and large is a rogue science that if you don't manage it and

control it, it goes rabid on you.

And in addition to not having a moral compass,

Western science doesn't hold a monopoly on science.

Yeah, our elders did scientific experiments and they

were not afraid. And in so doing they reached out to other forms

of knowledge, and were utilizing — in their own way — walking on

two legs. And by bringing in Sarah we were walking on, on...

on her legs.

Four legs

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: Now we've got six legs!

So cute. And, you know, I was actually just

thinking that what Sam and Darrel and Sarah are doing out

on the land is kind of exactly this, right, like, utilizing

some of the tools and trappings of Western science, but moving

very deliberately from a place of Secwépemc values.

Yeah, they're doing it on the land. And

they're doing it in the paper that they wrote, this metaphor

of walking on two legs, definitely emerges directly from

what's going on in Secwépemc territory and thought. It's a

concept by and for Indigenous people who are making use of

Western science, while also reclaiming their own knowledges.

But as a settler, I also took something from the metaphor

Isn't taking stuff, kind of the meaning of

being a settler.

I can see how I walked right into that.

But did you get there on one or two legs?

Okay. What I meant to say was that, as a settler

working with Indigenous people, the idea of walking on two legs

says to me, that it's probably good to remember that I'm not

the protagonist of the story that's unfolding.

Right. Yeah, you're, you're part of it. But

you're an appendage.

Yeah, an appendage. And I'll just go out

on a limb here.

Pfff.

And suggest that, as an appendage, you really

don't want to get out of step with the folks that you're

working with. A step behind, okay. A step ahead, maybe. But

definitely just one step at a time, walking in the same

direction.

And you probably also want to understand the

terrain that you're walking on.

Yeah. And in that spirit, I'd actually like to

zoom out for a moment, and just take in the cumulative impacts

that I observed during my short time in Secwépemc territory.

Like many families, Ron and Marianne were forced to evacuate

their homes in both 2017 and 2021. And they've seen the

destruction of their territory in real time.

We've experienced some really, really

profound losses around what's happened to the land.

For example, Marianne told me that, if you

look at the totality of Skeetchestn traditional

territory, all of the lands where Ron's ancestors lived

since time immemorial...

45 or so percent of that has been logged

off. Another 40% has been seriously harmed by the two

wildfires in succession. It really means, in the end, 15 or

so percent of that part of Secwépemc territory is still in

the kind of shape that we want it to be in. And that to me is

really, really scary. And we've we've got to do something about

it to leave a legacy for our children and grandchildren.

Not only is it the forest devasted — when they come

by after the forest, and they say "oh, we got to take these...

harvest these trees, you know, these burnt trees." Which then

they go in and rip up the land and further impact the land. And

then once those machinery leave, then the second pounding that

comes along, is the cattle grazing. And what they do is

they compact the soil and the soil turns rock hard, and my

medicine plants can't grow, and what's left the cows eat. So

we're really good at compounding destruction on the land, you

know.

And then on top of that, you add pressure from

non-Indigenous hunters, from off-road recreational vehicle

use, from mining, from agriculture. And famously after

wildfires, morel mushrooms come up by the ton, and a wave of

morel pickers is sure to follow.

Right! Yeah, I'd heard about how many pickers

went to Elephant Hill after the fire. It sounded like an

absolute gold rush.

Mm.

I'd heard that Secwépemc actually set up a permit system

to deal with the crowds of people that were out on the

land.

Yeah, that permitting system was actually

Ron's doing as chief in partnership with neighboring

Secwépemc nations. And they felt such a system was called for

because, legally in BC, harvesting in the understory is

completely unregulated.

And as far as I understand Western law, wherever

there's a vacuum if somebody occupies it, your law reigns.

So Ron thought that the Secwépemc might as well

implement their own.

So we did that!

And it actually did make a huge difference. And

in addition to the permit system, they also created

designated campsites for the morel pickers.

We took off, what is it 13,000 litres of human waste

of the mountain, and 15,000 pounds of garbage that would

have been strewn from one end of the mountain to the other.

Wow. Okay, so... so this was a real innovation in

land use, and it was kind of put in place and guided by community

interests.

Yeah, I think it's actually a great model for how

it can be possible to manage the demands on a complex land base

like this one.

The image I'm getting in my head is, you know,

it's really just a landscape that's under incredible human

pressure. And then, of course, you add in the climate crisis,

and these wildfires, and the floods, the landslides. These

communities keep getting hit. And then they're forced to

salvage whatever they can, in the aftermath... which puts

additional pressure on a landscape that's already so

heavily impacted.

And this is happening every year, all across

this territory, and across this country, this continent, and the

planet as a whole. I mean, what we're seeing unfold in and

around Skeetchestn is a reality that just hasn't come for most

of us yet. But is on its way, in one form or another. And, you

know, you do those immediate things, right? You do the

immediate recovery efforts.

Yeah.

But a lot of that's really just

rehabilitation, right, to physical infrastructure, maybe

to community infrastructure. But not to the natural

infrastructure, not to the ecology, not to the psychic

infrastructure.

So that means the real damage still hasn't

been addressed.

Yeah, exactly. It's a lot to process. So I

stepped outside with Sarah. And I asked her directly — what does

post disaster recovery really mean, in a place like this?

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: I don't know if the disaster is over

here. You know, if you're in Vancouver, maybe the disaster is

over, the smoke is gone. If you're in BC Wildfire, you're

maybe looking at the next disaster. But again, for people

who live here, you know, Sam was saying every year when there's

floods, the land has been taken back by the river. People often

say "natural disasters." There's nothing natural about this. You

know, it's a hazard event, it's a fire, it's a flood. Maybe

these are natural processes. But a disaster is a disaster when it

impacts things that we care about — when it impacts people

and impacts values on the land. And those impacts, the scope and

scale of those impacts is not natural. It's due to decisions

that have been made over decades, if not centuries. What

got us to this point that it became such a disaster? And why

is it continuing?

Well, it's continuing because we keep

burning fossil fuels. And we keep pushing the land to its

absolute limits. We're living in the disaster.

I mean, the folks that teach us and certainly are.

And for the most part, the media attention and the funding that

descended on these communities in the immediate aftermath of

the fires has departed — about as quickly as it arrived. So we

go on with our lives thinking maybe that time heals all

wounds. But some of these wounds run really deep. And they're

certainly not beyond our ability to help heal. It just seems so

clear that we are not investing enough in dealing with the full

spectrum of impacts. And with the fundamental drivers have

those impacts.

Yeah.

Well, Adam, that's pretty bleak.

Honestly, that's the way that I've been feeling

lately. And that was my experience up there. I'm not

going to sugarcoat it. But I am holding on to this image that

Sam placed in my mind — of the Phoenix, rising from the ashes

after the fires. I can see it personified in Secwépemc people

asserting their rights to lead the recovery and restoration of

their lands. And as I was standing in Ron and Marianne's

backyard, staring out over a Deadman's Creek, Sarah pointed

out this beautiful green bend on the edge of the water.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: So they actually burned all of this —

Ron and his son, Joe, burned all of these flats this spring. They

always burn in kind of early spring. So that really green

grass down here, and across the other side of the river. They

lit this whole thing on fire in mid-March sometime — when

there's still kind of snow up on the hill slopes. Yeah, it's come

back pretty good.

Wow, just burning right along the creek.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: Yep. I think it was Joe's first time

doing like a big burn. So yeah, Ron was showing him the ropes.

That's so cool.

Yeah, I mean, it was just gorgeous. And you'd

never know that they burned it earlier that year. And then

Sarah pointed over to this little rise of land right next

to the house. There is this line, as clear as day where the

burned area stops and the unburned area begins.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: You can see these bright green colors of

crested wheatgrass and brome — these introduced pasture

grasses. And there's this really striking line as you look up to

this dry hillside.

And on the burn side of the line, there's native

bunch grass prairie with these cultural keystone species and

wildflowers. I mean, it's just extraordinary.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: And if you come here, maybe a few months

earlier, you know just after they burned, it would have been

the sea of beautiful yellow bells — this beautiful yellow

Lily, which is a cultural keystone plant for the

Secwépemc.

And on the side that they don't burn, introduced

pasture grasses and weeds. It was just an incredible and

unmistakable difference.

Sarah Dickson-Hoyle: So yeah, it's really, really striking.

I've never seen a line like this. And this has really been

maintained by the burning that Ron has been doing every year,

for the past, you know, 10, 15 years.

What I heard and was taught from my great

grandparents, we had gardens down here in the valley bottom

that we tilled and planted, and weeded. But we also had other

gardens in the mountain said we we went and tended to and looked

after. And when we got back here and moved to this place, I

remember that we got to know that the wind at certain times

would blow up the valley, and at certain times a day it would

switch and blow down. And so I said, we're going to try to

experiment here — use fire to see if we can heal our land.

Because for a long time, I had a whole host of knapweed and such

invasive species here. And at first there, you know, I was

paying the kids 10 cents a knapweed. "You go out and pull

the knapweed, I'll pay you 10 cents." I almost went broke!

Then I reduced it to five cents. And then finally I said, "No,

we're gonna go back the old traditional way, and we're going

to use fire." And we did, for what, about 15 years. I would

set a fire out here in one end, time a day, and switch it around

and start a fire in another part. And the wind would bring

them together and put it out. And one day we went out behind

the house and Marianne came rushing back in, said "Hey!

There's ts̓ewéw̓ye growing out here!" And we found that also

qweq̓wile, which is a storied plant. Those are two keystone

plants that hadn't grown on this mound for 100 years.

And standing there, staring at that solid

line between restoration on one side, and neglect on the other.

It was as good a reminder as I've ever had that

transformation is always possible.

We have one great word that I like to say to

people, and give them an idea of what our thought processes are.

And that word is tult7. That was one of the first few words that

coyote uttered when he came down. And the definition of that

word is the ability for one to utilize their energy to

transform matter. And that word ripples through all our

transformer stories coming down. And we've learned a lot of ways

in how to live on the land to deploying that, you know. We

understood from the beginning of our time, I believe, that how

the whole universe worked was from energy into matter and

matter back into energy. And we learned from that, and we're

keeping that tradition, and revive it, revitalize our

traditional knowledge of ways of living. And hopefully to create

a better life for our children and our people.

This episode of Future Ecologies was produced

and hosted by Mendel Skulski and myself, Adam Huggins. It

features the voices of Sam Draney, Darrel Peters, Marianne

Ignace, Ron Ignace, and Sarah Dickson-Hoyle, with music by

Thumbug, Spencer W. Stuart, and Sunfish Moon Light.

Big thanks to Lux Meteora for the cover artwork, which is a

lovely diptych for both episodes in this mini series. Thanks also

to Aila Takenaka and Ava Stanley, who interned with us

for this episode, and to Sarah Dickson-Hoyle for inviting me to

visit the interior.

You can find links, citations and a transcript for this

episode, plus photos from my road trip to Cache Creek and

Skeetchestn at futureecologies.net

Finally, this independent, ad-free podcast was made

possible by the support of our wonderful community on Patreon.

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Alright, until next time, thank you for listening