The upcoming summer season is on our doorstep.
Spring arrives with the subtle shifts of light and wind — even the sounds of nature shifting out of their quieter slumber.
In and amid the fluctuations of the seasons, I watch the shorelines, wondering about the over-wintering fires active underneath these beds of snow. These dormant fires will be a beginning, and what comes in the months ahead for our wildfire season is something I wake up wondering about most every morning.
In many other eras, in many Indigenous communities across Turtle Island, and around the world, we would be preparing for annual spring burns while there was still snow on the ground. From ducks and geese to muskrat, rat root and blueberries, spring and fall burnings increase productivity of many biomes. The quiet resurgences of Indigenous fire sciences is lighting beacons across the world, showing that colonial theory of knowledge regarding land management to be false.
The stories told about fire “fighting” and fire “suppression” have become a hollow mythos, standing in clear opposition to the current trend emerging regarding an honouring of Indigenous-based knowledges, which do not mirror the duality of western disconnection from the natural world, but rather an attunement, a delicate listening to, that honours our relations to her — the land-body we call Earth.
While we watch in horror as obvious colonial violences and regimes erupt around the world, we cannot grow numb to the subtler acts of colonialism ever present, still, in our own backyards, and subtler acts of colonial genocide include desperately inadequate policy and legislation for Indigenous peoples, communities, and ancestral territories. Those laws and policies often lead to displacement and the further erasure of Indigenous knowledges, so decimated by the same system of colonization that once criminalized Indigenous land-based practices like cultural burnings and leading to such extreme climate change disasters as the wildfires of Denendeh in the 2023 summer season.
My uncle, Walter Blondin, reminds me constantly that Dene laws and ways of being keep us connected to the Earth and her rhythms in a different way. He says, “There is something drastically wrong here, and we have our finger on it, because we live by the environment. We are the true humans on the planet that admire and also look at the power, and respect the power, and understand the consequences of not adhering to the laws that govern our very lives and surrounding.”
Indigenous knowledge stories offer insight into the extensive training, preparation and forms of accountability that would work in concert to hold leaders of the past accountable to a constituency that included the land, air, water, birds and rock nations — a constitutionality based on what is best for not only the human communities, but also the expansive networks of interdependent non-human nations, with whom we stand in relation to. For us to effectively respond to the current myriad ways climate change is showcasing disaster, we must also effectively stand in witness to our share historic past, and in this era of truth and reconciliation, not turn a blind eye to the policies and ideologies that led us here.
We are standing at the brink of change, but not necessarily disaster, and by addressing our disconnections, our ill relations, with the land, we can begin to align, once again, with Earth’s highest wisdoms. But if we continue to “suppress” or “fight,” or even “prevent” Earth in all her elemental wisdoms, we will suppress, fight and prevent our own evolution, our own enlightenment.