PLUS Executive Director Warren Mirko writes in the National Post:
Amid another brutal stretch of hot, dry weather across Canada, the so-called cultural burning practices of North America’s Indigenous peoples are in vogue. In fact, they’re being inflated to the point of being celebrated as an ethnically exclusive competency, supposedly distinct from western science.
Parks Canada’s online resources say cultural burning must be Indigenous-led, “so as not to misappropriate cultural practices,” while claiming that prescribed fire — the deliberate use of fire for land management — is a “colonial adaptation of cultural burning practised by many different Indigenous groups in Canada.”
In British Columbia, a video embedded in the government’s “Cultural and prescribed fire” website describes the preservation of Indigenous cultural burning as “sacred,” placing it beyond ordinary scrutiny, skepticism or criticism.
Read the full article at the National Post: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/wildfires-shouldnt-be-used-as-a-reconciliation-morality-play