FIRST NATIONS FIGHT FOR SEAT AT PLANNING TABLE
Traditional First Nations practices to reduce fire risk were suppressed
On provincial maps, B.C.'s flood defences appear solid and uniform. Bold red lines delineate the dikes that neatly separate the Fraser River from its floodplain and keep the river flowing in its channel during high water.
For the most part, the lines trace the riverbank. But in a few places they falter or swoop inland, leaving pockets of land unprotected.
One of those places is Shxwhá: y Village, which lies in a marshy area outside the dikes in Chilliwack, adjacent to the river. Several Katzie First Nation communities in Langley and Pitt Meadows are between the river and dikes, as well as parts of Kwantlen First Nation.
“It is a great insult,” said Shxwhá: y Chief Robert Gladstone. “I won't say there isn't still anger about it.”
The chief's home is on the reserve's highest point. During the 1948 Fraser River flood, it would have been under two metres of water.
But Gladstone is committed to building bridges — or, in this case, dikes. In 2019, Shxwhá: y Village, working with the Skwah First Nation and City of Chilliwack, secured $45 million from the federal government for a $60-million project to build a six-kilometre dike along the Fraser River, as well as a flood gate and pump station.
“I don't think we've gotten there yet, but we're building these templates for how to work together on these issues,” he said.
“With the federal and provincial governments, we don't have that joint decision-making power, but I think with the City of Chilliwack we are working government to government. We've come a long way.”
But there is still a long way to go.
B.C. First Nations are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, which could bring more intense and frequent flooding and wildfires, with many reserves and treaty lands located close to water or forest, yet minimally protected.
“First Nations jurisdiction must be recognized in all areas, including emergency management,” the B.C. Assembly of First Nations regional chief, Terry Teegee, said after November's floods. “We are the most at risk during these catastrophic climate events, which are sadly no longer isolated incidents but ongoing repercussions of climate change.”
In the past, First Nations were excluded or forgotten in discussions around risk, in part due to complicated jurisdictional issues and institutional racism, said Lilia Yumagulova, a resilience scholar who wrote her University of B.C. PhD thesis on flood management in Metro Vancouver. “Any discussion needs to be placed in the context of the colonial harm that was done when people were displaced and given land that, in many cases, was not desirable to settlers.”
A 2015 study by the Fraser Basin council found 61 reserves and other parcels of treaty lands in the Lower Mainland could be inundated in either a major Fraser River flood or a coastal storm surge flood. A University of Waterloo study released earlier this year found 81 per cent of the 985 Indigenous land reserves in Canada face flood risk, with the highest number of “hot spots” located in B.C.
Progress to reduce risk has been slow.
A Lower Mainland flood strategy expected from the Fraser Council in 2019 is three years overdue, in part because early versions did not adequately consult with First Nations, causing some to step back from the process.
Indigenous communities face some of the same challenges as local governments, which are tasked with costly mitigation work but lack the money to pay for it.
“First Nations communities do not have the same type of operating budgets that municipalities have and existing staff are usually stretched to the limit while they fill multiple roles within the administration,” said Katzie Chief Grace George, whose community includes 85 homes outside the dikes. “We lack the capacity, both financially and with staffing, to participate meaningfully.”
George said First Nations communities need support to be “just as prepared as any other municipality.”
There are similar challenges with wildfire mitigation.
In the past two decades, slightly more than 50 B.C. First Nations, a quarter of those in the province, have completed work such as forest thinning to reduce wildfire risk on 49 square kilometres, an area 12 times the size of Stanley Park, according to statistics compiled by Postmedia from the province, the Crown agency Forest Enhancement Society of B.C. and independent reports.
That's less than one per cent of the 11,000 square kilometres identified by government as requiring wildfire risk reduction in and around B.C. communities, including First Nations.
The situation underscores the findings of a four-month Postmedia investigation that shows B.C. faces a colossal undertaking to harden communities to climate change, with the cost estimated at more than $13 billion.
Yumagulov said Indigenous communities must no longer be viewed as just “stakeholders” in discussions about mitigating the risks associated with climate change, but as “rights holders.”
The distinction may provide a way forward.
GOVERNMENT TO GOVERNMENT
The first time Tyrone McNeil, chief of the Sto:lo tribal council, heard about a Lower Mainland regional flood strategy was at a media event in 2016.
It was a bad start for a process that should have included First Nations rights and interests from the beginning, he said. “We realized then that we may have to develop our own process to ensure our rights are represented.”
Unsatisfied with the lack of consultation with First Nations, the tribal council asked the federal government for funding to create the Emergency Planning Secretariat, which works to support a Coast Salish-led flood management strategy. The group has made improvements to emergency response and been involved in meetings with upper levels of government to find solutions that protect people and the environment.
McNeil, secretariat chair, said he'd like to see an agreement among the federal and provincial governments and the 31 Coast Salish communities on flood mitigation on the lower Fraser River.
“We need to look at this at the regional level,” McNeil said. “One community building a dike won't do anything.”
Semá:th First Nation Coun. Murray Ned, a member of the secretariat leadership team,
said local governments also have a role to play. He pointed to a memorandum of understanding among the Semá:th, provincial government and City of Abbotsford to consult on dike upgrades. It came after the city conducted “contentious” bank stabilization work close to traditional fishing sites.
“That pushed us to say that we can't be destroying our fish habitat this way anymore.”
While the process is working, Ned said the federal government and climate scientists need to be at the table. “The basic foundation is there, but we need to close these gaps.”
TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE
The Okanagan Indian Band sits on the northwest shores of Okanagan Lake with forested slopes and mountain ridges behind it.
Last summer, a major fire swept over the mountain ridges and down to the lake edges in places, including through the First Nation's land. More than 110 buildings were destroyed, including homes.
The band faces twin threats: In 2017, there was damage to homes from flooding, and then more damage and evacuations the next year when heavy rain on the snowpack caused creeks to burst their banks.
The community was also affected by debris flows from the heavy, concentrated rain deluge in November that also caused flooding in Abbotsford, Merritt and Princeton.
The First Nation is worried about what might happen this spring, a concern heightened by the huge amount of badly burned forest in the mountain ridges above its community.
Speaking to Postmedia in his community in mid-March, Okanagan Chief Byron Louis said there needs to be a shift in how forests are viewed, not just as a timber resource, but as natural capital, where the health of a watershed and the forest's resilience to wildfire are paramount.
We “have to stop looking at this province and the environment as basically a free for all — that there's another bonanza, another frontier, just over the hill,” he said.
Like other communities, the Okanagan Indian Band said it cannot do work needed to increase resilience without funding from higher levels of government. It has secured some grant money from the province in the past to carry out forest thinning and underbrush clearing to reduce wildfire spread and intensity, but only enough to do about a third of a square kilometre.
“It's pretty irrelevant in the big scheme of things,” said Colleen Marchand, the First Nation's territorial steward manager. “There isn't enough funding for what we need to do to ultimately protect our community from a major wildfire like that.”
Louis said the Interior landscape has changed, making it more susceptible to intense fire and spread. That's because wildfires have been put out for the better part of a century, with First Nations prevented from using a traditional practice, now commonly called prescribed burning, to remove fuels in the understory of the forest. In the past, not only did the intentionally lit fires reduce the harm that wildfires could cause, but it also kept forests open to increase game such as deer.
Louis noted forests with large trees spaced well apart interspaced with grassland — something that looked more like a park — has been replaced with dense forests with large amounts of underbrush and fuel on the floor.
The First Nation has applied for funding from the province for prescribed burns but has been turned down because it “doesn't fit into (the province's) criteria,” he said.
When B.C. Premier John Horgan and Forests Minister Katrine Conroy visited his communities at the end of wildfire season, Louis showed them an area where one of the band's elders has carried out understorey burns for decades.
It was clear the wildfire had burned hotter and more intensely in adjacent areas that had not been subject to the traditional burns, he said.
“Traditional knowledge is something that is overlooked.”