For centuries, fires passed through the forests in Canada’s T’exelc territory, leaving a subtle record in their wake.
Tree trunks have rings marking each year of their growth. A tree that survives a fire is left with a dark scar in that year’s ring, creating a kind of timestamp.
When forest ecologist Lori Daniels and her team examined tree rings in B.C.’s central Cariboo region, they found a striking pattern: for generations, trees showed signs of a fire roughly every 10 years.
Then, suddenly, the dark rings stopped.
The break coincided with the smallpox epidemic that decimated the T’exelc population and other First Nations in the mid-1800s.
“What we discovered was this: these fire regimes and these landscapes were absolutely shaped for millennia by Indigenous people,” said Daniels, a University of British Columbia professor of forest and conservation sciences.
For generations, the T’exelc people and other Indigenous groups used low, frequent burns to create open, diverse forests rich in food and plant species. Known as cultural burning, these fires also made landscapes more resistant to large, uncontrolled fires.
But in the decades after the epidemic, forced relocation and bans on Indigenous cultural burns disrupted this practice. Dense, homogeneous forests took over — the kind forest researchers now say are primed to become catastrophic blazes.
As Canada races to get a handle on wildfire mitigation, it is now looking to bring Indigenous cultural burns back to the land as one way to reduce fire risk.
“We need to invest in proactive fire — prescribed fire and cultural fire together,” said Mathieu Bourbonnais, who leads Canada’s first Prescribed Fire Training Program at the University of British Columbia.
But experts stress that Indigenous cultural burning is a distinct practice, and needs to be restored with care.
“[C]ultural burning is really about sustaining the whole community and territory, rather than just meeting a single fire management target,” said Bourbonnais.
Fire suppression
Canada’s wildfires are scorching more land than they did in previous decades.
In 2024, fires burned 5.3-million hectares, an area about the size of Nova Scotia, and nearly double the 25-year average. The year before, fires burned more than six times the 25-year average.
Warmer, drier conditions contribute to this trend. But Canada’s own land management practices and Indigenous laws are to blame as well.
In British Columbia, for example, Indigenous peoples historically used fire to help cultivate forest gardens, encouraging useful plants to grow within the forest’s natural layers.
“Indigenous cultural stewardship of the land and the use of burning as part of that stewardship really created the landscapes that Europeans arrived at,” said Daniels, who is also director of the UBC’s Tree Ring Lab, which uses tree rings to reconstruct the history of forests and fires.
“We think of them as ‘empty landscapes’ that were there for the taking. In truth, they were carefully managed and stewarded.”
One common stewardship strategy was low-intensity, controlled burning of forests and grasslands.
The practice helped maintain forest health, as some plant species depend on fire to regenerate. Jack pine, for example, only releases its seeds after a fire.
Such fires also consume grasses, shrubs, dead wood and other vegetation before they can accumulate as fuel for larger fires. They also create a patchwork of forests and open areas of different ages, creating natural fire breaks that can slow the spread of future fires.
However, colonial governments came to see forests primarily as timber resources, and fire as a threat to timber, homes and livelihoods. They increasingly sought to eliminate Indigenous burning, according to Parks Canada.
British Columbia was the first province to ban cultural burning in 1874, with the passage of its Bush Fire Act. Other provinces and territories eventually followed suit.
By the early 20th century, fire exclusion — the restricting of intentional burning — and fire suppression — the putting out wildfires when they occur — had become entrenched in government land management. In national parks, Indigenous burning was banned and fire wardens were instructed to extinguish wildfires.
The effect has made Canada more prone to out-of-control fires.
“We’ve tried to suppress fires for a long time under the assumption that that’s good, but that’s going against a natural cycle,” said Kent Moore, a physicist and climate scientist at the University of Toronto.
“When you suppress the fires, they just eventually get bigger.”
Many governments today now use prescribed burns to change the conditions under which the next fire burns.
“If the fuel is reduced, it’s easier to put [the fire] out,” Moore said.
Prescribed burning is essentially fuel management, says Australian fire manager Alen Slijepcevic, who has helped shape Australia’s approach to prescribed burning since the country’s catastrophic Black Summers in 2019 and 2020.
Portugal took a similar turn after its own wildfire crisis in 2017, when extreme fires killed 117 people and exposed the limits of a suppression-heavy strategy.
The country has since shifted more resources toward prevention, including landscape mosaics, incentives for landowners to manage vegetation, and prescribed burning.
Bringing fire back
Canada is now increasingly trying to bring controlled fires back to its lands, both through prescribed burns and Indigenous cultural burns.
In February, UBC Okanagan announced Canada’s first national Prescribed Fire Training Program, backed by $8 million from the Weston Family Foundation.
The program is building a national network of prescribed-fire expertise and partnerships with wildfire agencies and practitioners across Canada.
It also aims to support Indigenous-led fire stewardship and cultural fire practices. Its advisory committee includes representatives from the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, Thunderbird Collective and National Indigenous Fire Safety Council.
The program is currently developing courses and beginning regional training pilots, says Bourbonnais, who leads the program. Potential participants will include Indigenous nations, private landowners, foresters, biologists and farmers.
In 2025, the B.C. government also carried out 76 cultural and prescribed fire projects, 23 of which were led or co-led by First Nations. The province had 144 burns planned for 2026.
The federal agency Parks Canada has also reintroduced prescribed fire in national parks and is exploring how it can work alongside Indigenous groups.
Cultural burning
But experts say that mitigating wildfires is not the only reason to bring Indigenous cultural burns back.
“Prescribed fire takes a very Western science [and] operational background … focused on incident command systems, using accelerants [diesel or gas] to light the fire,” said Bourbonnais, who is also a former wildland firefighter.
Indigenous cultural burning, by contrast, can pursue multiple ecological, cultural and community goals at once.
Indigenous cultural burns are typically low-intensity, low-to-the-ground fires that creep through grass and understory. They are often hand-lit and carefully tended — “fire you can walk beside,” says Amy Cardinal Christianson, a Métis fire scientist and Indigenous fire steward who has conducted cultural burns.
Government prescribed burns, by contrast, can cover larger areas using tools such as helitorches, which Slijepcevic, the Australian fire manager, describes as launching “flaming ping-pong balls” from a helicopter.
Christianson says prescribed burns can be guided by a “turn it black” mindset: burning an entire unit to meet a specific fuel-reduction target.
Cultural burning is “a much more holistic practice,” she said.
“In the springs, we would go really early — as soon as the snow was off those areas — and burn [meadows],” said Christianson, who has also worked at Parks Canada and as a policy advisor to the federal government.
The spring burn produces earlier, greener spring shoots, which feed rabbits, deer, moose and other hoofed mammals, while supporting medicinal plants.
“You get really healthy berries coming up [after a burn] and the bears are attracted to that,” Christianson said, describing burns designed to increase berry supply for both wildlife and people. The practice can prevent bear attacks by restoring food sources deep in wildlands.
Some west coast First Nations burn along riverbanks to keep waterways open for migrating salmon. In hot periods, Christianson says, they may also use fire to create “good smoke” that cools the water, helping fish spawn.
Canada needs both
Experts say Canada needs both Western-science-backed prescribed burns and Indigenous cultural burns to bring good fire back.
“Prescribed fire brings the Western operational tools; cultural burning brings the deep Indigenous knowledge of medicines, foods, hunting grounds and communities,” said Bourbonnais.
Christianson agrees. In many places, she says, decades of fire exclusion have left forests carrying too much fuel for cultural burns to be safely reintroduced.
“Both are equally important,” she said. “Right now, because of fire [suppression], our forests are so unhealthy in many places that we’re going to need those higher‑risk prescribed fires to reset things before it’s even safe for cultural burners to go in and do their work.”
Once those fuel loads are reduced, she said, “cultural burners can come in, when it’s a much lower-risk environment, and steward that landscape.”
Strong collaboration is key to successful implementation.
“We just have to be really careful that we don’t appropriate [Indigenous peoples’] knowledge … in yet another way,” said Daniels.
“The importance of doing this work respectfully and co‑developing and collaborating on these projects, I think, is probably the biggest lesson in my career.”
That principle is built into Canada’s first Prescribed Fire Training Program.
The program works with Indigenous fire stewards, Bourbonnais says, not to teach cultural burning — “that’s not our space” — but to provide Western tools and expertise where invited.
“The Venn diagram can overlap in spaces,” Bourbonnais said. “The way it’s done, though, is very different.”
Christianson wrote a letter supporting the program, she said, because she knows and trusts Bourbonnais. What reassures her is the program directs people toward Indigenous organizations rather than attempting to do that work itself.
“It truly can be reconciliation,” said Daniels. “But we have to be willing to relinquish some of the power to the Indigenous knowledge holders and treat them as equals.”
