[Witness speaks in Secwepemctsin]
Thank you for honouring me to do a presentation here.
I am Chief Ron Ignace, from the Skeetchestn community, which is part of the Shuswap Nation. My fellow Shuswap chiefs were up on the screen there.
I also want to recognize the owners of this land here that I am on and thank them for giving us the opportunity to talk together.
One of the questions I saw you asking was, what went well during the fire? For us, nothing. My fellow chiefs up there, I believe I heard them say they were invisible. So were we.
I found out by accident, 10 days down the road, that the local authorities had asked the RCMP to go and give a fire emergency notice around all the non-native communities surrounding our reserve, but we were left out of the loop.
I happened to go down to our gas station. There were six RCMP in the store. They were sitting there and I said, “What have we done wrong here?” They said, “Oh no, we are going out and giving notices of fire alerts.” I said, “When did that happen?” They said, “Oh, it's been a few days now.” I immediately turned and went up to our band office. I notified them that there was an alert going on around there, and we decided that.... We were angry because we weren't notified. We weren't brought into the loop. We were invisible, just as the other Shuswap communities were invisible.
We are still invisible today. John Horgan has called in two west coast native people to advise him on the fire in the interior. I have nothing against our west coast people. They are my brothers and sisters. Nonetheless, they weren't anywhere near the fire. We were best able to advise them.
So we took matters into our own hands. We were fortunate that the fire started over in Ashcroft reserve and went to Cache Creek, in that direction, before it came to us, and we had time to prepare.
We took every opportunity. To begin, we set up our own incident commander pre-op program and got organized. We organized all the various departments of our community. Our finance department kept track of all the finances, all the expenditures, and the hours of work that people were doing—community workers, carpenters, truck drivers—to begin amassing all the vehicles and machinery that we needed, the Cats. We even loaded up four-by-four trucks so we could do guerrilla warfare, mobilize and fight the fire with the trucks.
When the sparks were coming down on our non-native communities up the valley, we drove our trucks up there. We put out the fires like that. We engaged all the communities around us, whether they were native or non-native, to come to our meetings. We talked about the fire, planning how we could fight the fire together. We were fortunate.
Once we found out that there was this imminent danger forthcoming, we began—I'll put it in a nice way—reaching out to the RCMP. We began reaching out to the Red Cross, to FNESS, and to the incident commander. There was a big firefighting camp situated in Cache Creek, with 300 firefighters. I went there and introduced myself to the incident commander. I began talking to him and explaining what was happening to us here. We developed relationships. We had our own emergency operation centre established, which we moved out of the danger of the fire, but we maintained our incident commander.
I and 32 other people stayed behind in the community, once we decided to evacuate the community.
I, along with our social workers, our personnel, went to the evacuation centre in Kamloops. I met with all the people in there, introduced them, and told them that our people were coming so they would be aware of them. I told them that we had elders, that we wanted to keep our people together and not scattered all over, and that if there were hotel rooms required for the elders, we would much appreciate that. We developed a great rapport.
The problem was not with those people. We developed a great rapport and a great working relationship once we built two-way bridges. The problem was with the federal and provincial governments. They had signed a MOU, an emergency operation agreement between the federal and provincial governments and the First Nations Leadership Council of B.C.
The First Nations Leadership Council of B.C. is our provincial organization. They're not statutory decision-makers. We are. We make decisions about ourselves. They're just a lobby group for us. But here they were expected to make decisions about things that they knew nothing about. We didn't exist as a result of that. They existed in an ethereal world, so to speak.
I went reaching out, and I found out that the Cache Creek fire camp needed a place to move to. They were looking for a place because the school was starting up in September. I told them to come to my community, my reserve lands, on the highway. We have 5,000 acres of highway frontage land; that's flat land. I invited them over. They came and set up camp on our reserve. I figured, “Wow, we have a good fire insurance here.”
When they came, I, my councillors, and our tribal chair went down there, and we had a welcoming ceremony for them, an honouring ceremony. We did smudging. We did an honour song for them, a welcome song for them. As we finished smudging, I turned around and there was a whole line of firefighters wanting to be smudged as well. We told them about the history of the land, the importance of the land, and the significance of the land.
When I first got there, there were 300 firefighters, individually, looking to fight a fire they knew nothing about. After we finished, I tell you, the atmosphere was transformative. There were 300 firefighters that were fighting like a firefighting team that had a vision and a mission to accomplish. They invited us in. They said, “Come in and work with us.” We did.
One of our guys was with the natural resources department, and we would send him out to the mountains every day to track with GPS exactly where the fire was. They had infrared mapping that gave them an approximation of where the fires were. We would tell them exactly where to put the firebreaks. We built firebreaks all around our reserve. It's about an eight kilometre stretch of reserve boundary. We put in a firebreak of about 12 kilometres, plus others that we put in. We brought in Cats and dozers. We had to straighten and make roads wider so that the larger equipment could get through.
It was amazing. The incident commander came to check out what we were doing. He couldn't believe how organized we were and what equipment and machinery we had. They brought in the people who put fire sprinklers on your house. They came in, and within one day they had all the fire sprinklers on every house, on all our buildings. It was through that type of opening up of relations that we were able to accomplish that.
Mega fires are now a new normal. This fire that we had here is just the beginning. The mother of all fires has yet to come—I tell you that. Climate change adds fuel to wildfire flames. As was told, up there our traditional food sources have already been severely impacted. There are few Secwepemc alternatives to our traditional foods. I'm telling the provincial forestry department that they have to stop managing their fire for fibre. They have to begin managing it for water, and we are going to start using our traditional knowledge of how to manage the forest with fire.
I'm going out to look for Smokey the bear and put his hide up on a wall, because he has it all wrong.