Thank you.

Good evening. My name is Dane de Souza. I'm a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta. My Métis family names are Sutherland and Sinclair from the Selkirk area of the Red River valley.

I'm a wildland firefighter. I worked six years as a helitack wildfire fighter out of the Rocky Mountain House district in Alberta. I'm a wildfire researcher and expert on indigenous fire stewardship.

I thank you for this opportunity to address you tonight.

I'm going to get right to it. The cause of Jasper, Lytton, Fort McMurray and Slave Lake is not climate change. The intensity and prevalence of fires like these are exacerbated by climate change; however, their cause is directly tied to the colonial suppression of indigenous fire stewardship and fire on the land in general.

To illustrate, indigenous fire stewardship in what is currently Canada is a landscape-based science developed over more than 20,000 years to manage the landscape-based phenomenon of wildfires. Fourteen thousand years ago, the Laurentide glacier spread from the Rocky Mountains to Hudson Bay. As it receded inch by inch, my ancestors were there applying fire to the land. We can track human migration across the planet by tracking the impacts we have had on the natural environment, like the extinction of megafauna.

Applying fire to the land has been and is a key component of how we, as human beings, have influenced our natural environment. As species of trees have grown to repopulate the landscapes formed by glacial recession, my ancestors were there every single inch of the way, applying fire to the landscape to engineer the ecological conditions necessary to sustain themselves.

Within the genetics of every blade of grass, every tree and every animal on this continent is the memory of these fires. There are countless reasons for which the land would be burned, ranging from influencing the migration of animals, to reinvigorating the growth of plants to provide medicines and sustenance, to influencing the makeup of the landscape to provide materials and mobility throughout the forest.

In my research, I have interviewed the last of the traditional fire stewards left in the wake of Canada's cultural genocide. Each of them speaks of a turning point in the 1980s, in which Canada could effectively enforce the suppression of indigenous fire stewardship, which was passed into law in the 1900s.

If you were to look at the graphs of fire intensity, frequency and prevalence in the boreal forest, they all follow a similar pattern. In the 1990s, there's a steady increase. In the 2000s, it steepens. Now, it's virtually vertical, in comparison. This is not a coincidence. Indigenous fire has set the rhythm of forest cycles throughout the boreal, having created landscapes that can tolerate fire and increase resilience. By removing indigenous fire from the land, we have created the conditions that result in the exact scenarios we're here to discuss today.

I've had the pleasure of working with the Mountain Legacy Project, which compares photos of modern-day national parks like Banff and Jasper with glass slides taken over 100 years ago. There's a striking difference between these landscapes in the composition of the forest. One hundred years ago, Jasper was speckled with small fields, prairies, glens and forests at different stages of the growth cycle—a landscape mosaic. More recently, these forests are dense, conifer-rich oceans of trees.

Picture the boreal forest as an ocean and fire as a wave that passes through that ocean, gaining force and energy until it becomes a force that is absolutely unstoppable. There's no house, no infrastructure and no response that can withstand this amount of energy, which is beyond that of an atomic bomb.

Now, picture that exact same ocean. Over here is an island that was burnt five years ago to reinvigorate traditional medicines. Then over here is an archipelago of underbrush that was cleared six years ago to create mobility through portages. Over here is a nice little island for ungulates that was burnt five years ago. As that wave comes through that ocean of trees, it crashes upon the shores of those pockets and loses its energy, so by the time it reaches communities, it can be dealt with.

The solution at hand is at the intersection of climate action and truth and reconciliation. By employing wildfire practitioners year-round to carry out landscape-level burns with decentralized decision-making, we can return good fire to land. These benefits are not only that we can prevent another conversation like this and save lives, but we can increase biodiversity and optimize carbon cycling, ecological health and resilience in the face of climate change.

Last year, wildfires in Canada put more carbon into the atmosphere than the entire global airline industry. These wildfires are unnatural and their impact on the ability of the forest to sequester and store carbon has detriments that threaten the existence of humanity.

By following models similar to those championed by the Banff wildfire management program, we can action these solutions. This model requires that wildfire management is carried out by landscape-level decision-makers and practitioners who are highly experienced and committed to fire stewardship in collaboration with local communities and indigenous knowledge-keepers.

To be quite frank, I find it sickening that we're here talking about Jasper, not Lytton and not Paddle Prairie. We're admonishing those who responded to these fires while gutting wildfire programs every year and bleeding vital years of experience. We're not here talking about the wildland firefighters who lost their lives in the past years.

Here are your solutions: Invest in indigenous fire stewardship, work with communities at a landscape level to put good fire on the land to meet needs beyond resiliency and honour the lives of those firefighters who have lost their lives by treating this as an occupation as opposed to a cost variable on a forestry budget that is to be slashed for political gain.

Thank you.