King, Lucas

Wildland fire management emerges in Treaty #3 territory near the end of colonial administration and increasingly takes on characteristics of modernity following World War 2 as the State exerts increasing control over fire on the landscape. While wildland fire management in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries mainly focused on regulation and criminalization of Indigenous fire technologies, following World War 2 the use of modern technologies for surveillance and suppression of wildland fire become increasingly effective. Fire sciences also emerge in this period and an iron triangle of the state, industry and knowledge production become the dominant conceptual framing of human relations with fire favouring industrial and settler values of fire suppression. The outcome, as we now know, is a fire prone landscape, more susceptible to catastrophic fire at a time when fire frequency and intensity are increasing due to anthropogenic climate change. However, new approaches in Canada call for a whole of society approach to respond to the increased frequency and intensity of wildland fire. This has opened opportunities for a new fire science and management that includes Indigenous science, ways of thinking about and being in relation to fire. More than the instrumental use of Indigenous knowledges and technologies of fire this will require a decolonial process. A decolonial process includes, as a first step, an excavation of colonial history of wildland fire and how science and management become hegemonic during the period of modernity. In this paper, we trace the process by which western wildland fire science and management emerge in Treaty #3 territory and repress Anishinaabe knowledges and technologies of fire. We then turn to recognize the ongoing Anishinaabe constitutionality of their relations with fire during the colonial and modern periods of wildland fire science and management. We conclude by introducing some on-going efforts of the territorial planning unit of Grand Council Treaty #3 to strengthen constitutive processes through which Anishinaabe in Treaty #3 territory can dream right relations with fire as part of a decolonial future.