Listening to Fire Knowledges: Sharing Fire Histories through Scholarly Podcasting in and around the Okanagan Valley

Abstract

In the summer of 2023, out-of-control wildfires threatened the health and well-being of communities across (so-called) Canadian landscapes, including in the Okanagan Valley in the dry southern interior of British Columbia. The Okanagan has been shaped by fire for millennia, and the wildfires this region experiences today are shaped in significant part by a fire deficit that was created through patterns of settler-colonial governance, capitalism, and fire suppression, including the policing of Syilx Okanagan and Secwépemc fire stewardship practices. Wildfires will continue to burn in a future of even more fire-conducive climatic conditions, and this can be a difficult reality to accept for concerned residents of fire-prone geographies. In these contexts, researchers and creators are taking up calls for both interdisciplinary problem-solving and for more public engagement to open up new spaces of collective possibility for how communities can imagine life with fire.

The academic podcast “Listening to Fire Knowledges in and around the Okanagan Valley” speaks into this space of public engagement and possibility. This work of public, digital fire scholarship centers on fourteen oral history and expert interviews to bring different forms of fire expertise together – in their situated, uneven, emotional, and analytic realities. It joins other academic and non-academic contributions to the fire arts and humanities to offer the histories and challenges that Indigenous cultural burning practitioners and fire scholars have long grappled with to a wider audience. Understanding the complex, power-laden history of fire in place can help transform how we live in fire-prone geographies.