The Kaska Land Guardians and Their Future Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area.

The Narwhal | 2019 | Words by Sarah Cox

The guardians are the Kaska’s eyes and ears on the ground, keeping an eye on land use in the ancestral territory of the Kaska Dena people and using traditional knowledge and science to monitor everything from wildlife health to water quality.

Porter pulls up his 18-foot aluminum boat on a rocky shore in front of the smoke. It’s just upstream from the banks of the Red River where his family used to arrive, laden with beaver pelts, in two 30-foot rafts his father had lashed together from freshly cut spruce. 

From the rivers’ confluence, the family would follow an ancestral trail back to Lower Post, a traditional riverside meeting place that is home to the Daylu Dena Council, representing one of B.C.’s three Kaska Dena communities.

Only steps away from the boat, hidden by a fringe of trees, is a half-burned hunting camp. 

Pockets of flames pop up here and there. Spruce trees stand tall and surprisingly green above their scorched trucks, ready to topple in a wind without most of their roots. The warm air mists with grit and ash. 

Tanya Ball taps a cell phone app, used by the land guardians to monitor land use and flag environmental concerns, to mark the fire’s GPS coordinates. She takes photographs to send to BC Wildfire Services.

“It’s been smouldering for a while and all of these trees are danger trees now,” observes Ball.