'The Land Misses Us': Indigenous Stewardship Making a Real Difference in Canada's Forests
Canada's wildfire seasons have grown increasingly severe, with millions of hectares burning each year and entire communities forced to evacuate. But tucked away in British Columbia, a different approach to land management is quietly demonstrating that the answers to some of our most pressing environmental challenges may have been here all along.
The XAXE TEṈEW̱ Sacred Land Society is leading an Indigenous land restoration and stewardship program that does far more than preserve cultural history — it actively reduces wildfire risk and improves the overall health of the ecosystems it touches.
A Relationship With the Land, Not Just Ownership
At the heart of the program is a philosophy fundamentally different from conventional forestry. Where modern resource management often treats land as a commodity to be extracted from, Indigenous stewardship frameworks understand the relationship between people and land as reciprocal and ongoing.
The name says it all: the land misses us. When Indigenous peoples were removed from their territories through colonization, the landscapes they had tended for generations began to change — and not for the better. Overgrown underbrush, disrupted fire cycles, and degraded ecosystems are in part the legacy of that separation.
By returning to traditional practices — controlled burns, selective harvesting, invasive species removal, and the protection of culturally significant trees and plants — stewardship programs are helping restore that balance.
What the Research Shows
This isn't just philosophy. Research from the University of British Columbia backs it up. Studies show that lands managed under Indigenous stewardship frameworks are measurably healthier: more biodiverse, more resilient to drought, and significantly less prone to the catastrophic fire conditions that have devastated so many communities across the country.
Traditional controlled burns, in particular, reduce the accumulation of dry fuel that turns ordinary fires into uncontrollable infernos. These low-intensity burns were once a regular feature of many Indigenous land management systems — and their suppression over the past century is widely recognized as a contributing factor to today's wildfire crisis.
For a country where wildfire smoke now regularly darkens skies from Vancouver to Halifax — and yes, even Ottawa — this research carries national weight.
Cultural Preservation Is Environmental Protection
The stewardship program also protects irreplaceable cultural heritage. Old-growth trees carry generations of ecological memory. Medicinal plants, ceremonial sites, and traditional harvesting areas are all embedded in landscapes that have been shaped by Indigenous presence over thousands of years.
When those landscapes are degraded or destroyed, the cultural knowledge tied to them is lost too. Stewardship is, in this sense, an act of cultural survival as much as environmental restoration.
A Model for Canada
As federal and provincial governments grapple with how to manage an increasingly volatile natural environment, the evidence from programs like XAXE TEṈEW̱'s is hard to ignore. Integrating Indigenous land stewardship into national forest management strategies isn't just an act of reconciliation — it's smart environmental policy.
For Canadians watching the annual wildfire maps expand, that's a lesson worth taking seriously.
Source: CBC News — 'The land misses us': How Indigenous land stewardship protects cultural history and forests
