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The First Nations Firefighters Racing Toward Canada’s Biggest Blazes

These elite crews are often the first to arrive—and the last to leave

The Whitehorse warehouse buzzes with the activity of forty wildland firefighters, fresh off the front lines of an out-of-control wildfire that nearly swallowed the village of Fort Simpson, Northwest Territories, in late June. I weave through clusters of them, unpacking duffle bags after a two-week deployment, and duck under a clothesline weighed down by chainsaw chaps.

“It’s not usually this chaotic,” Colin Henry, the logistics manager, a man in his sixties wearing a sun-faded black ball cap, tells me apologetically, but the grin stretching across his face suggests that he thrives in this hive. “I call them my kids,” Henry says. “We’re like a family.”

This family is also one of the territory’s most specialized firefighting operations. Founded in 2018, and co-managed with local government, Yukon First Nations Wildfire (YFNW) partners with nine of the fourteen First Nations in the Yukon to recruit and train personnel to the highest national standard. YFNW oversees nine initial attack “Type 1” crews of three to four firefighters—the elite teams first dispatched to the most complex, unpredictable, and dangerous blazes. Under Yukon land claim agreements signed in 1993, every First Nation is entitled to a Type 1 crew. Type 2 and Type 3 crews, by comparison, handle lower risk incidents.

YFNW is in high demand. With 60 percent of First Nations communities located in or near the Wildland Urban Interface—where homes overlap with forested or wild landscapes—Indigenous peoples are increasingly vulnerable to wildfires. The growing frequency and intensity of these fires are driven by a number of factors, including climate change, forestry practices that favour spruce and pine, and decades of fire suppression. This has left vast swathes of the country old, dry, and highly flammable. Canada is effectively a tinderbox.

Communities across the country have been frustrated with government-led firefighting and evacuation resources arriving too little too late. Between 1980 and 2021, First Nations communities were included in 45 percent of all wildfire evacuations in Canada, despite representing under 5 percent of the population during this period. From 2016 to 2026, the number of First Nations communities facing short-term and long-term—more than sixty days—evacuations due to wildfires has more than tripled. In July, an extreme heat wave hit Ontario, igniting runaway wildfires in the northwestern part of the province and forcing some residents to flee by boat, including Namaygoosisagagun, or Collins First Nations.

All of this has fuelled the argument for a grassroots approach to equipping local crews. In 2018, YFNW launched the territory’s first Indigenous-led wildfire unit—a twenty-person crew capable of “sustained action,” the weeks-long campaigns required to contain major fires. A second unit was added a year later. Both are run solely by YFNW.

With wildfires increasingly threatening First Nations, “communities have taken it upon themselves to train their firefighters, their populations,” says chief operating officer Hyder Bos-Jabbar. The people with the most to lose, in other words,........

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