Indigenous-led Research Helps Restore Fire Stewardship and Biodiversity in the Saskatchewan River Delta
May 8, 2025
By Solomon Carriere and Michela Carriere
We live in kisiskāciwani-sīpiy maskēko askīy (Saskatchewan River Delta), known as the belly button of Canada. The fifth largest delta in the world, this vast area is home to moose, medicinal plants, and hundreds of species of migratory birds. The rich biodiversity here attracts a lot of researchers. We see new research groups arrive every year. Many have taken their findings, gotten good jobs at universities, and never set foot in the Delta again.
When we watch researchers come and go, it makes us wonder: who is a scientist? And who gets to say who is a scientist?
As Indigenous people living in the Delta year-round, we are surrounded by science—by questions asked and answered by our own people through careful observation. Too often western science doesn’t take this Indigenous science into account, but we are working to help change that.
Through the We Are Fire project, we started conducting our own research on the role of fire in restoring the Delta and the plants, animals, and people who rely on it. We combine Indigenous and western science, so the science can stay in our area and create benefits for our people.
We do this research because combining Indigenous and western scientific methods provides a fuller picture of the Delta. We also do it because western science shapes the rules for when and where fire can be used, and those rules don’t always reflect conditions on the ground.
For years, the rules prevented us from burning after March 31st, yet generations of oral history and decades of recent experience prove that we get the best results—more diversity of plants, more resilience to future fires—when we burn based on factors like snow levels, humidity, and plant life cycles instead of dates on a calendar.
Solomon likes to say that a Ph.D. is better when combined with BOG: boots on the ground. When boots on the ground walk through snow in March, then we know we can’t make a fire until it thaws. After a lot of pushing, we were finally able to burn in April 2024, based on the conditions that our people deemed appropriate. We had a large, safe burn and studied the results. But we shouldn’t always have to fight to do the right thing for the Delta.
Indigenous science can open up possibilities, but western science has to be receptive to it. We are forging partnerships with those who are. We are learning from colleagues at universities, and they are learning from us.
We all benefit. Especially the Delta.
What Happens When Fire Is Missing from the Land
Living in the Delta, we observe a lot of changes—it’s why we maintain that research should be conducted over long periods of time, not just a season or two. Some of the biggest changes we see come from the absence of cultural fire.
Indigenous Peoples have intricate systems for burning. Solomon’s father taught him methods for giving back to the land by burning unwanted weeds and restoring plants that muskrats and moose and elk and deer need, but Crown governments have interfered with the sovereignty of Indigenous Nations managing our own lands, and government policies have restricted us from burning.
That changes things on the land. Without fire, for instance, invasive phragmites grows unchecked. As the vegetation gets thicker and thicker, it closes out the sun and imperils other plants. Ducks and other animals don’t have space to move within it. When phragmites falls into lakes, it decays and takes oxygen out of the water. All that debris reduces water quality and puts a lot of stress on fish and aquatic plants. The muskrat populations decline. Moose can’t find the food quality they need and can’t produce more calves. The same goes for elk and deer.
The delta was one of the richest birding areas in Canada and home to many species. The Cree and Métis people of the area have relied on ducks and moose and medicine here, and they created a whole economy around it. But we are losing that. Everyone used to go duck hunt, now you can hardly travel through those grasses. There are many factors, but the absence of burns is a major contributor. As a result, our economic livelihood, language, and culture are at risk.
This is why we want to talk for the Delta. We want to bring back fire and try to help the Delta breathe again. We want to turn this around so the moose can eat, the ducks can fly, and we can all live.
Restoring Cultural Fire, Restoring the Land
Now we are doing in-depth research of burns to prove our point and speak the western language. Drawing on our knowledge of the land, Solomon’s 50 years of burning, and Michaela’s degrees in biology and horticulture, we conduct studies comparing areas we burned to areas we haven’t.
We do transect walks, count moose tracks to see how active they are before and after burns, film the areas, and log our observations—just like Michaela was trained in university. We collect pages and pages of data and have big fat reports to share with agencies.
We focus on several species, including willows, since they are a staple food for moose and have many medicinal uses, and mallard ducks, since they are a big part of the economy, a staple food source, and the Delta is a nesting ground and migratory pathway.
Here are some of our findings:
Muskrats grew bigger: When we harvested muskrats on the non-burned area, they were 700-900 grams. On the burned area, they were 1,600 to 1,800 grams. In just one season, you could tell how productive the burnt areas had become just by the size of the animals.
The places we burned become more open. There are more moose tracks going out to the lake because they have space to move and go to the edge of the lake, where they eat aquatic species. There is more activity around the lake, the water is clearer, and there are fewer algae blooms in the summer.
The areas that we burned are hard to burn again, which shows that burning mitigates fire in the future. In other words, burning promotes biodiversity AND helps with forest fire management.
We share all of these findings with our community. Working with partners in universities, we created a toolkit, book, poster, and website. The entire website we created, wearefire.ca, is translated in both Cree and English and offers all the data collected by community members and Indigenous and western scientists in both languages. It’s unique to hear a complete translation of scientific words.
We also host camps out in the Delta at one of the hunting lodges, where we gather groups of community members and government officials, and we teach them our process. We show our burn plans and the different methods we use from flint and steel to modern techniques.
Our research started pretty small, mainly focused on the muskrats at first. But it has gained momentum, and we are doing other research, and we are teaching other Indigenous communities about our methods. It’s not just going to be us; it’s going to be a whole network. And together we can share more knowledge about the land and help change the rules.
