"Determined to burn off the entire country": Prospectors, Caribou, and the Denesuline in Northern Saskatchewan, 1900-1940

If winter and summer in southern Saskatchewan are known for snow and dust respectively, in the north ice and fire are the harbingers of these very separate seasons. In fact, often shortly after the spring ice breakup, fires ravage a significant portion of northern Saskatchewan every summer. But even if so immediately destructive, at least outwardly, fire has always had a significant and meaningful place in the northern ecosystem. Recent studies of the historic effects of fire on the boreal forest suggest that, at least on average, fires burned any given area in the forest of the collective provincial north about once every sixty or seventy years, with some areas experiencing fire only once every two hundred years or more. The historic frequency and extent of fires in the boreal forest has shaped plant communities and, as a result, animal and human communities in the area as well. It was, and remains, a fire-dependant ecosystem. ¹ While modern (post-World War II) fire suppression efforts readily and actively acknowledge that fire is an integral part of the northern forest, concern over human safety, individual property, and forest resources, namely timber for pulp and lumber, has caused the province to aggressively combat, or at least carefully manage and monitor, many fires in the northern forest.

I experienced these fire suppression efforts firsthand a few years ago. While canoeing the Churchill River system in north-central Saskatchewan looking for the original benchmarks placed by federal geological surveyors in the early twentieth century, a colleague and I made our way through the quickly gathering smoke on Besnard Lake. Given the direction and velocity of the wind, we placed the nearby fire producing the smoke through which we were paddling not more than ten or fifteen miles to the west. We knew the provincial water bombers were working the fire because the spotter planes leading the larger tankers on the best approach were audible overhead. Then in the coolness of the May morning we listened nervously as somewhere overhead in the smoke the sound of the larger, throaty engines of a water bomber grew louder. Suddenly, the engines of the still invisible airplane slowed to an idle. Seconds later, a very large yellow shape appeared about one hundred meters above and gracefully skidded onto the lake in front of us, coasting along and gathering up water for the next run over the nearby blaze. Quickly throttling up, the large Canadair CL215 labored up into the smoke to again douse the fire. We learned later that a large fire was growing east of Pinehouse Lake. A massive effort was aimed mainly at protecting the small community of Pinehouse, located on the western shore midway up the lake. A few weeks later, with nearly continuous efforts from the air and ground, the fire was controlled and Þnally extinguished.

Years earlier, before the advent of water bombers or other concerted and well-organized efforts on the ground, such a fire likely would have burned itself out only after many weeks or even months of repeated cycles of smoldering and flaring. Relief often came only with cooling temperatures in late August, or at the very latest, with the first October snowfall. Although fire remains an important part of the northern ecosystem, the frequency and severity of fire in the boreal forest has certainly increased dramatically in the twentieth century--a direct result of new human activity in the region. While the historic use of fire in aboriginal communities is well documented, fire was rarely used to modify significant parts of the northern environment.² When historic aboriginal communities employed fire as a tool, it was used cautiously and selectively with the intent of modifying certain, limited areas of the environment. Fires were set to control or manage, among other things, the forest proximate to...