Highlighting Canadian Indigenous communities at Wildfire Risk

Image credit: David Lipnowski/The Canadian Press

This article was written by Amina Zafar and published by the CBC on 6.15.2025 and adapted for this post.

Read the original article here.

Indigenous people fleeing wildfires face immense mental health burdens. Experts say they shouldn't have to:

Jeewa Liske was four months pregnant in August 2023 when she had to flee wildfire smoke in Yellowknife and make a difficult 20-hour drive to safety.

"I was wanting to leave just 'cause it was so smoky and it was so hard to breathe," Liske, now 23, recalled of the day the city issued an evacuation order. She said she was barely able to see the sides of the road as she and three friends drove to Edmonton. 

When they arrived, Liske was torn between staying to be close to family in nearby Leduc, or living with her mother-in-law in Lkwungen territory on Vancouver Island. After about five days in Alberta, she flew to Victoria. Her anxiety was compounded by being separated from her spouse, a crew boss working to fight the fires in the Northwest Territories.

Leaving her home meant she also struggled to get prenatal checkups, which she said was stressful. "I was crying a lot. The hormones just made my emotions 10 times worse."

Eventually, she says birth workers in N.W.T. connected her with a Victoria midwife and she was relieved to learn her pregnancy was progressing normally.

Liske's experience is just one example of how Indigenous people in Canada are disproportionately impacted by wildfires, which researchers say are becoming more frequent and more intense due to climate change.

As a result, they say Indigenous people are particularly vulnerable to being displaced from their communities, and that can take an immense toll on their mental health. Psychologists who've studied disaster recovery and counselled those affected say it's normal to feel fearful and stressed during wildfire evacuation and there are ways to improve evacuations for Indigenous people.

Suzanne Stewart, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, says Indigenous communities impacted by wildfires disproportionately experience adverse mental health outcomes partly because they often live in affected areas.

That's on top of cultural trauma from being displaced, she said, noting that a relationship with the land is integral to the identity and well-being of Indigenous people.

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The 2023 Yellowknife evacuations were one of the examples data co-ordinator Elisa Binon cited in her report on internal displacements — the forced movement of people within countries following disaster, violence or war.

Binon, who works with the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, recorded more than 190,000 internal displacements in Canada in 2023 due to disasters like wildfires. Of these, First Nations, Inuit and Métis accounted for about 30,000 displacements, a disproportionate trend that continued in 2024, she said.

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Because wildfire related evacuations of Indigenous communities are likely to continue due to climate change, Binon suggests there are ways to improve how they're handled. They include:

1. Allocating resources to ensure specific needs of Indigenous evacuees are met, such as having interpreters available for elders at reception centres.

2. Forming and following Indigenous-based disaster plans, such as the Dene First Nation's 2023 offer to help the Northwest Territories government identify vulnerable people and communicate evacuation plans with them.

3. Continuing Indigenous Services Canada's 2024 partnership with First Nation communities to prepare for and respond to natural disasters.

   
   

Binon also says governments are increasingly turning to the Indigenous practice of cultural burns — controlled, slow fires — to reduce wildfire risk and enhance biodiversity. She says such "informed and inclusive policies" support recovery and reduce the risk of internal displacement. Liske now lives in Dettah, N.W.T., with her family. Her mother-in-law, Lafferty, is in Victoria but recently visited Yellowknife. "Whenever there's a blue sky, I'm thankful," said Lafferty. "We're not breathing in smoke." Both say when they see smoky skies, it brings a sense of dread related to the 2023 fires, but also this wildfire season. Liske's spouse, who is also Lafferty's son, is currently fighting wildfires in Saskatchewan.