Cover artwork by Lux Meteora
Summary
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 before diving into this one.
Ongoing support for this podcast comes from listeners just like you. To keep this show going, join our community at patreon.com/futureecologies
Show Notes and Credits
This episode was produced by Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski, with the voices of Sam Draney, Darrel Peters, Sarah Dickson-Hoyle, and Marianne & Ron Ignace.
With music by Thumbug, Spencer W Stuart, and Sunfish Moon Light
And thanks to Lux Meteora, Aila Takenaka, Ava Stanely, and Sarah Dickson-Hoyle
This episode includes audio recorded by rogerforeman, Suso_Ramallo, jb_stems, Glen_Hoban, bennathanras, and burgersmoke, accessed through the Freesound Project, and protected by Creative Commons attribution licenses.
Citations
Dickson-Hoyle, S., et al. (2021) Walking on two legs: a pathway of Indigenous restoration and reconciliation in fire-adapted landscapes. Restoration Ecology (30) 4. https://doi.org/10.1111/rec.13566
Dickson-Hoyle, S., Char, J. (2021) Elephant Hill: Secwépemc leadership and lessons learned from the collective story of wildfire recovery. Secwepemcúl ̓ ecw Restoration and Stewardship Society.
Dickson-Hoyle, S., Char, J. (2021) Elephant Hill - Summary and Recommendations. Secwepemcúl ̓ ecw Restoration and Stewardship Society.
Hessburg, P., et al. (2021) Evidence for widespread changes in the structure, composition, and fire regimes of western North American forests. Ecological Applications (31) 8. https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2431
Hessburg, P., et al. (2021) Wildfire and climate change adaptation of western North American forests: a case for intentional management. Ecological Applications (31) 8. https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2431
Ignace, M. and Ignace, R. (2017) Secwépemc People, Land, and Laws: Yerí7 re Stsq'ey's-kucw. McGill-Queen's University Press.
Kwetásel’wet Wood, S. (2021) After the fire: the long road to recovery. The Narwhal
Prichard, S., et al. (2021) Adapting western North American forests to climate change and wildfires: 10 common questions. Ecological Applications (31) 8. https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2433
Turner, N., Ignace, M., and Ignace R. (2000) Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Wisdom of Aboriginal Peoples in British Columbia. Ecological Society of America (12)5 pp. 1275 - 1287.
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Future Ecologies is recorded and produced on the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the WSÁNEĆ, Penelakut, Hwlitsum, and Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul'qumi'num speaking peoples, otherwise known as Galiano Island, British columbia, as well as the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm) Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil-Waututh (Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh) Nations - otherwise known as Vancouver, British Columbia.
Transcription
Introduction Voiceover 00:04
You are listening to Season Five of Future Ecologies
Adam Huggins 00:16
Okay, shall we jump in right where we left off?
Mendel Skulski 00:20
Sure. Just for new listeners, my name is Mendel.
Adam Huggins 00:24
And I'm Adam.
Mendel Skulski 00:26
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.
Adam Huggins 00:37
Just one crisis after another, fires, floods, landslides, you name it.
Mendel Skulski 00:44
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.
Adam Huggins 01:01
That's On Fire — Under Water.
Mendel Skulski 01:04
Okay, I think that covers it for housekeeping.
Adam Huggins 01:07
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.
Mendel Skulski 01:32
Plants which kept distracting you from your conversation with Sam.
Adam Huggins 01:36
Indeed. And that's Sam Draney, of Skeetchestn Natural Resources. Also in the truck, Sarah Dickson-Hoyle from UBC.
Mendel Skulski 01:45
And also from Down Under.
Adam Huggins 01:47
As we were driving, Sam was telling me about how she became a fire watcher. It goes back to the 2017 Elephant Hill Fire
Mendel Skulski 01:56
Which you explored in detail in the last episode
Adam Huggins 02:00
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.
Mendel Skulski 02:24
What was that?
Adam Huggins 02:26
They were missing a technical person.
Sam Draney 02:28
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.
Mendel Skulski 02:56
Who's Darrel?
Adam Huggins 02:57
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.
Mendel Skulski 03:06
Convenient.
Adam Huggins 03:11
Amazing.
Adam Huggins 03:12
We get out at this open meadow surrounded by a mix of green and black trees, above a lake.
Sam Draney 03:20
This is Sedge Lake. So this up here is one of our potato plots. So the spring beauty — Indian potato.
Adam Huggins 03:29
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.
Mendel Skulski 03:39
Kind of like... crop trials?
Adam Huggins 03:42
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.
Mendel Skulski 03:49
You live and learn.
Adam Huggins 03:50
Anyway, pretty immediately, we're greeted by the man that we came here to see.
Sarah Dickson-Hoyle 03:55
Hi! Darrel, I'm Sarah.
Darrel Peters 03:57
Darrel.
Sarah Dickson-Hoyle 03:58
Nice to meet you.
Adam Huggins 03:59
Adam.
Darrel Peters 03:59
Nice to meet you.
Adam Huggins 04:00
Great to meet you.
Sam Draney 04:02
You know me.
Darrel Peters 04:03
Oh yeah.
Darrel Peters 04:08
My name is Darrel Peters. I'm from the Deadman's Creek Valley. People call it Skeetchestn now.
Mendel Skulski 04:15
Oh so you finally got someone to introduce themselves. I'm proud of you. So tell me more about Darrel.
Adam Huggins 04:23
Well, Darrel is kind of the do-it-all guy for a Skeetchestn Natural Resources — be it fisheries, forestry, ranching,
Darrel Peters 04:31
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.
Adam Huggins 04:55
So naturally, he was one of the folks that Skeetchestn sent out to track the Elephant Hill Fire In 2017, and Sam came along
Mendel Skulski 05:03
To run the iPad.
Adam Huggins 05:04
Yeah, to do the tech stuff.
Sam Draney 05:06
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.
Mendel Skulski 05:22
So what were they actually there to do?
Adam Huggins 05:26
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.
Sam Draney 05:32
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.
Darrel Peters 06:31
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...
Adam Huggins 07:00
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
Mendel Skulski 07:15
And probably too much detail for this conversation.
Adam Huggins 07:19
Yeah. And I think Sam summed it up really nicely.
Sam Draney 07:22
Just like actively using our traditional ecological knowledge to make calls, to help our community make choices.
Darrel Peters 07:31
Guardians of the land is who we are, because that's where we naturally come from.
Adam Huggins 07:41
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.
Sam Draney 07:55
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.
Mendel Skulski 09:12
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?
Adam Huggins 09:28
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.
Darrel Peters 09:45
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.
Adam Huggins 10:33
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.
Darrel Peters 10:52
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.
Adam Huggins 11:29
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.
Sam Draney 11:41
I was emotionally done after the last set of wildfires.
Adam Huggins 11:47
Is it okay to call that burnout? Is that all right?
Sam Draney 11:49
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.
Mendel Skulski 12:35
What kind of change is she talking about?
Adam Huggins 12:39
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.
Darrel Peters 12:48
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.
Mendel Skulski 13:14
That sounds devastating.
Adam Huggins 13:17
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.
Sam Draney 13:32
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.
Adam Huggins 14:00
And throughout this whole cycle of wildfire and recovery, they've been building their capacity to keep boots on the ground in their territory.
Darrel Peters 14:09
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.
Adam Huggins 14:22
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 lookout.
Darrel Peters 14:49
"Okay, you're on that area. I'm on this area. You 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.
Adam Huggins 15:03
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.
Darrel Peters 15:15
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.
Sam Draney 15:33
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?
Mendel Skulski 16:40
So how do you manage these areas, so they don't get back to the same state that they were before the fires?
Adam Huggins 16:49
Well... so you know how, the last episode, we were talking about kind of the immediate recovery efforts after the fire?
Mendel Skulski 16:59
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 17:00
Rebuilding fences, restoring fire guards and salvage harvesting.
Mendel Skulski 17:04
Sure, yeah.
Adam Huggins 17:05
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...
Mendel Skulski 17:22
Mmm. Cultural fire.
Adam Huggins 17:24
Exactly. Darrel started doing burns on the Skeetchestn reserve back in the early 2000s.
Darrel Peters 17:30
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.
Adam Huggins 17:52
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.
Darrel Peters 18:02
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.
Sam Draney 18:15
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.
Darrel Peters 19:37
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.
Adam Huggins 20:22
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.
Darrel Peters 20:39
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.
Mendel Skulski 21:24
So, no vacations for Darrel.
Adam Huggins 21:27
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.
Sam Draney 21:49
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.
Adam Huggins 23:41
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.
Mendel Skulski 23:57
Or, reintroduce. That's after the break.
Marianne Ignace 24:26
[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.
Adam Huggins 25:07
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.
Marianne Ignace 25:33
I'll turn it over to Ron now to introduce himself.
Ron Ignace 25:38
[Secwepemctsin] My name is Ron Ignace, and my Shuswap name is Stsmél’qen.
Adam Huggins 25:48
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.
Mendel Skulski 26:16
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?
Adam Huggins 26:25
Do people know what that is?
Mendel Skulski 26:26
The beginning.
Adam Huggins 26:27
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
Mendel Skulski 26:35
Huh!
Adam Huggins 26:36
About the concept of Walking on Two Legs. So naturally, I asked them about where this idea came from.
Ron Ignace 26:44
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.
Adam Huggins 27:52
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.
Ron Ignace 28:05
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.
Adam Huggins 28:28
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.
Adam Huggins 28:38
Okay?
Adam Huggins 28:39
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."
Mendel Skulski 28:51
Nancy Turner, we had her on the show — in season one.
Adam Huggins 28:54
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.
Mendel Skulski 29:08
Wow.
Adam Huggins 29:09
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.
Ron Ignace 29:19
We started studying our laws — we have Secwépemc laws, even our own constitution that goes back 5000 years and we have a transformer stories.
Adam Huggins 29:30
Mendel, are you familiar with transformers stories?
Mendel Skulski 29:33
Not the robot movies?
Adam Huggins 29:35
No, not the robot movies.
Mendel Skulski 29:37
Well, then, no, I am not.
Adam Huggins 29:39
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.
Ron Ignace 30:12
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.
Adam Huggins 30:32
But the morals of these stories are not always so easy to reconcile.
Ron Ignace 30:37
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.
Adam Huggins 31:02
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?
Mendel Skulski 31:16
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.
Adam Huggins 31:26
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.
Ron Ignace 31:45
But I learned that if I thought in Secwepemctsin, they couldn't beat me for what I thought.
Adam Huggins 31:52
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.
Mendel Skulski 32:04
What do you mean by that?
Ron Ignace 32:05
Our people were doing a similar thing, in a way, because our traditional beliefs — our religious and spiritual beliefs were under severe attack.
Adam Huggins 32:18
And Ron could remember his time as a child, sitting on a church pew, listening to his elders saying Shuswap prayers.
Ron Ignace 32:26
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.
Adam Huggins 32:44
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.
Mendel Skulski 33:05
Yeah, it's kind of a recurrent theme on this podcast.
Marianne Ignace 33:09
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.
Adam Huggins 33:36
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."
Ron Ignace 34:00
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.
Adam Huggins 34:24
And in addition to not having a moral compass, Western science doesn't hold a monopoly on science.
Ron Ignace 34:34
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.
Marianne Ignace 34:54
Four legs
Sarah Dickson-Hoyle 34:56
Now we've got six legs!
Mendel Skulski 35:00
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.
Adam Huggins 35:21
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
Mendel Skulski 35:49
Isn't taking stuff, kind of the meaning of being a settler.
Adam Huggins 35:54
I can see how I walked right into that.
Mendel Skulski 35:56
But did you get there on one or two legs?
Adam Huggins 36:01
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.
Mendel Skulski 36:16
Right. Yeah, you're, you're part of it. But you're an appendage.
Adam Huggins 36:21
Yeah, an appendage. And I'll just go out on a limb here.
Mendel Skulski 36:26
Pfff.
Adam Huggins 36:26
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.
Mendel Skulski 36:42
And you probably also want to understand the terrain that you're walking on.
Adam Huggins 36:49
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.
Marianne Ignace 37:13
We've experienced some really, really profound losses around what's happened to the land.
Adam Huggins 37:19
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...
Marianne Ignace 37:30
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.
Ron Ignace 38:04
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.
Adam Huggins 38:45
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.
Mendel Skulski 39:04
Right! Yeah, I'd heard about how many pickers went to Elephant Hill after the fire. It sounded like an absolute gold rush.
Mendel Skulski 39:12
Mm.
Mendel Skulski 39:12
I'd heard that Secwépemc actually set up a permit system to deal with the crowds of people that were out on the land.
Adam Huggins 39:19
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.
Ron Ignace 39:36
And as far as I understand Western law, wherever there's a vacuum if somebody occupies it, your law reigns.
Adam Huggins 39:46
So Ron thought that the Secwépemc might as well implement their own.
Ron Ignace 39:50
So we did that!
Adam Huggins 39:51
And it actually did make a huge difference. And in addition to the permit system, they also created designated campsites for the morel pickers.
Ron Ignace 40:00
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.
Mendel Skulski 40:12
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.
Adam Huggins 40:22
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.
Mendel Skulski 40:30
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.
Adam Huggins 40:59
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.
Mendel Skulski 41:25
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 41:26
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.
Mendel Skulski 41:41
So that means the real damage still hasn't been addressed.
Adam Huggins 41:47
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 42:00
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?
Mendel Skulski 42:48
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.
Adam Huggins 43:03
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.
Mendel Skulski 43:37
Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 43:43
Well, Adam, that's pretty bleak.
Adam Huggins 43:47
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 44:26
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.
Adam Huggins 44:46
Wow, just burning right along the creek.
Sarah Dickson-Hoyle 44:48
Yep. I think it was Joe's first time doing like a big burn. So yeah, Ron was showing him the ropes.
Mendel Skulski 44:56
That's so cool.
Adam Huggins 44:57
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 45:14
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.
Adam Huggins 45:25
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 45:35
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.
Adam Huggins 45:46
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 45:54
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.
Ron Ignace 46:07
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.
Adam Huggins 47:45
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.
Ron Ignace 48:02
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.
Adam Huggins 49:05
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.
Adam Huggins 49:27
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.
Adam Huggins 49:44
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
Adam Huggins 49:54
Finally, this independent, ad-free podcast was made possible by the support of our wonderful community on Patreon. to get early episode releases, bonus behind-the-scenes content, and our lovely Discord server, join us at patreon.com/future ecologies. If you can't support us financially, write us a review and keep sharing us with your friends. That's really how the show gets around. And we really appreciate all of you who take the time to recommend us to others. You know who you are.
Adam Huggins 50:25
Alright, until next time, thank you for listening