UBC Forestry has been awarded US$790,000 from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation to study cultural and prescribed burning in partnership with four B.C. First Nations. Each of the four Nations—Lil'wat, Cheslatta Carrier, Stswecem’c Xget’tem and St̓uxwtéwst Nations—will tackle topics related to their land use and forest management priorities.
“The four different nations we’re working with all have this common goal of restoring cultural burning to the landscape as a way to do eco-cultural restoration,” said Tonya Smith, a UBC post-doctoral fellow and forestry instructor.
“In Lil’wat, our group will be working on creating a picture of where fire risk is currently happening in the territory, which areas are at highest risk of these and how those fires affect traditional plants.”
The three-year study is wide-ranging; UBC and Lil’wat Forestry Ventures (LFV) will analyze forest conditions, study fire regimes and develop land-use policies that support Indigenous sovereignty and challenge a more colonial approach to forest management.
Benefits of cultural burning
The benefits of traditional, controlled burning are numerous.
They reduce the intensity of wildfires by lowering the amount of available forest fuels; by taking small, dry vegetation from the forest floor and burning them off in a controlled setting, these burnings create breaks between trees that prevent wildfires from spreading easily.
Carefully considered burnings also promote biodiversity. Cultural burning aims to revitalize traditional lands and support cultural, spiritual, and ecological objectives. Case in point, some plants need fire to reproduce, as Jordon Gabriel, Lil’wat Forestry Ventures’ community relations and forestry manager, explained.
“Take the soapberry, for instance," he said. "Soapberry needs fire in the ecosystem for it to release and germinate. The fire brings it out.”
Soapberry is harvested by Indigenous communities across the province as food and medicine. But Gabriel said the berry is in shorter supply these days due to fire suppression policies and difficulty transplanting the flora. Allowing more cultural burning could provide the plant a better chance of reproducing, increasing its harvest yield.
“So the cultural fire does a lot of things,” said Gabriel. “Doing this type of work helps to make the community safe and keeps resources for all living beings that need this type of resource out there.”
With climate change driving record-breaking harmful forest fires, Smith said cultural and prescribed burning needs to be part of the solution.
“Because we're seeing these bigger, high-intensity fires across North America and across the world, people's awareness is really starting to change that we need sort of immediate action to deal with the effects of climate change on our forests," they told Pique.
“Cultural burning is a really important tool that's been missing, and now the world is starting to wake up to its importance.”
Scope of the project
The project will look at high-risk zones within Lil’wat Nation’s traditional territory, map historical fires—including wildfires and cultural burns—and examine how those fires have impacted the growth and development of plants. All of that will give the research team a map of high-risk areas and a better understanding of where to host future cultural burns.
“Because these fires take a lot of resources, there's a need to prioritize which areas are going to have cultural fires happening first,” said Smith. “So hopefully this research will also be able to inform some of that decision-making.
“Jordan and I have been going out and looking at areas where cultural burning has taken place, looking at what plants are coming back and identifying where areas might be burnt for the plants like the soapberry to thrive.”
The project will ramp up as the growing season gets started. Fortunately, the team is heading into the project with plenty of prior research and relationships to rely on. Smith and Gabriel first started working together in 2015, canvassing community members about the food and medicinal plants they were using. They say the resulting database will come in handy as the team ramps up to map out how burning affects some of those plants.
“Lil’wat Nation is one of the unique nations in this project, because there is a really comprehensive database on the culturally important food and medicinal plants in the territory that's already been established,” Smith said.
They expect the research findings to be incorporated into Lil’wat Nation’s land-use plan, which is currently undergoing an update.
Part of the work is about recovery. Gabriel told Pique that, after cultural burns were fully prohibited by the B.C. government and the Nation stopped the practice, critical knowledge was lost.
To re-establish that expertise, the team is looking to interviews with Lil’wat elders from the 1960s held by the Lil’wat Cultural Department and data generated by the BC Wildfire Service. Eventually, they'll go to the community to garner additional stories on past burns.
“We’re doing all these different types of research just to build up the cultural fire data, use it along with Western science, and work together to come out with the best strategy that we can for managing the forest and keep it safe for the communities," said Gabriel.
The project is being led by UBC Forestry professor Lori Daniels, who recently started collaborating with LFV, and associate professor Janette Bulkan, Smith's supervisor and a longtime partner of LFV.
Barriers to burning in B.C.
Cultural burning has had a challenging history in the province.
“Indigenous peoples have struggled, because these [burns] were made illegal," said Smith.
Successive colonial governments have worked to tamp down all fires for fear they would damage valuable timber. That approach extended to cultural burning through the Bush Fire Act in 1874, which focused on fire suppression through financial penalties for setting fire and prohibiting burning except by permit. The Act was expanded to apply to the entire province in 1887, and cultural burnings remain tightly regulated to this day.
“So by the mid-1920s, most areas of the province had extensive fire suppression going on,” said Smith. “It was a really industrialized system of putting out fires as soon as they were lit on the landscape.”
“And so all four Nations are sort of experiencing the legacy effect of that today, where they have a lot of un-managed stands that tend to be really thick with high risk of [fires].
A number of cultural burns have taken place in the last few years. In 2023, Ktunaxa Nation held a 1,200-hectare burn. In 2024, burns were held in Bridge River, Lil’wat Nation, and the Williams Lake Community Forest.
Smith and Gabriel are hopeful a slow resurgence of cultural burning around the province, paired with the public’s recognition of the human and economic cost of wildfires, means the provincial government is ready to acknowledge the practice as an essential tool in forest management.
“So it is starting to happen, but a lot more needs to be done,” said Gabriel. “For me and for the Nation, it's about getting our resources back.
“A lot of people still live off the land here. A lot of them are hunter gatherers. So, everybody relies on the forest for food and medicines and for their lives.”
Community engagement
The funding doesn’t just cover research into wildfire; Smith said there is room to partner with Lil’wat beyond the Nation’s forestry company.
“We're thinking about events in the future years—education and engagement around cultural burns with community members and maybe even with students from the local school,” they said. “This can be a community led or community involved process as well, that if people feel like they want to be involved, that there's capacity now for that.
“So that's really exciting.”
Read more about the project through UBC Forestry's press release.
