From the Ashes of Kenow

“When disaster strikes, it’s all we see. The despair and horror come from seeing the end of what we thought we knew and loved, and the certain knowledge that there can be no going back. What is unknowable, in that awful moment, is what might come next; what possibilities await beneath the ashes. But they are there, and after the flames burn down and the last wisps of smoke dissipate into the winds, the world will still be with us and it will have lost none of its magic. None. Some of its magic, in fact, will have been set free.”—Kevin Van Tighem

While I Draw Breath

By Kevin Van Tighem

HIGH RIVER, ALBERTA Canada—(Hubris)—January/February 2025―There is a pinch point in the Rocky Mountains chain that geologists call the Lewis Overthrust. It extends across the US-Canada border and includes two of our oldest mountain national parks: Glacier, in Montana, and Waterton Lakes, in Canada. The subterranean paroxysms that gave rise to those western mountains were so powerful here that they pushed slabs of mountain rock over the top of each other, like overlapping dominos, until that shifting rock had buried whole ranges of mountains and foothills. Drive up to the Lewis Overthrust from the east and the effect can be startling: the prairie ends, and the mountains are there. No transition.

That orthographic pinch point lies east of a flattening in the landscape: the Columbia plateau. Those two geologies combine to create the perfect storms. Storm after storm; westerly winds sweep inland from the Pacific Ocean and, finding little resistance through the Columbia plateau, pile up against that skinny bit of mountains before spilling over the top and sweeping down to the prairies. It’s a continental-scale Bernoulli effect that yields relentless winds on the eastern side of the mountains, with gusts that regularly exceed 80 mph. Anywhere else, that would be called hurricane-force. In the lee of the Lewis Overthrust, it’s called a chinook. When we lived in Waterton, it sometimes blew our children down the street. Fortunately, it blew them to school. Getting home could be a bit of a problem. They wore ski goggles in winter, and sometimes crawled.

On August 29, 2017, during an intense summer thunderstorm, lightning struck a tree in southwestern British Columbia, about five miles west of the Continental Divide, on Kenow Mountain. The tree burst into flame, and the fire spread. The forest had been primed by drought and heat . . . and after the storm blew through, a chinook wind developed. By September 11, when gusts of over 90 mph drove the fire across the Continental Divide, fire crews didn’t stand a chance. They had set irrigation sprinklers up to protect the park townsite, but when that roaring inferno arrived, all they could do was get out of the way and watch the fire storm burn through.

The town was saved, but almost half of the 195 square mile park burned. And it wasn’t just the trees and grassland that burned; the fire was so intense that it burned the very soil, right down to the rocks and gravel. It was an utter disaster. It could have been worse, but the turbulent wind created back eddies that stalled the advance of the fire until a change in the weather settled it down and enabled the fire crews to get back in and start mopping it up. Everywhere, there were dead and wounded animals. The place ached with loss; all its life and stories and meaning seemed gone with the smoke. News stories reported that the park was destroyed.

I visited the national park three weeks later. It was burned to the very mountain tops, a bleak place of blackened tree trunks, grey ash and silence. And in the charred prairie along the park road: brilliant green spikes of emerging grass. They didn’t look defiant, but they looked determined. They knew the place was meant to be alive. Theirs was a piece of a deeper wisdom than ours.

In the ensuing decade, it has indeed come alive. Many of the burned trees have fallen and as many more still stand, their boles now riddled with holes drilled by woodpeckers that have been attracted by all the wood-boring insects thriving in their new homes, homes created by flame. Absent the stifling shade of closed coniferous forest canopies, the understory has erupted in greenery. When I worked in Waterton in the 1990s, I knew of three small patches of wild hollyhock; now those green pillars of floral beauty seem to be everywhere. In summer, the flower mosaic has to be seen to be believed. Bighorn sheep feed on green slopes where encroaching forest had previously been shrinking their ranges. Eagles still wheel above the summits; the bull trout still return to spawn. It isn’t the glorious place it was. But it’s becoming the glorious place it’s now meant to be. It wasn’t a disaster; it was a turn of the circle.

Immediately after the fire, teams of archaeologists descended on the park. The archaeologists, including two young Siksikaitsitapi (Blackfoot) researchers, saw the fire’s aftermath as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to find evidence of previous human occupation. With the vegetation and duff burned away, old campsites, structures, and artifacts lay exposed in the ashes. Crews hastened to inventory the park’s archaeology before it could be obscured again by vegetation. They found camps and remains everywhere—a startling record of more than 12,000 years of continuous occupation by Niitsitapi. The archaeologists had to revise their story; this was not a place the Blackfeet visited occasionally or travelled through to trade or hunt; it was a center of their existence. The Siksikaitsitapi were not just a prairie people—they were mountain people. But that had almost been forgotten.

The researchers decided to examine the mountaintops. They found 17 different vision quest sites.

Mike Bruised Head, a Kainai knowledge keeper, was deeply troubled. These Itaksiistsimoo’pi were meant to be places of fasting and visions. But almost nobody visited them anymore. There was little point. The mountains no longer had their original Indigenous names. A vision quest begins with an invocation of the mountain’s spirits, and that requires that the seeker pray to the mountain by its name. The names seemed to have vanished, to be replaced with names that had no relevance—like Mount Vimy, named after a battlefield in faraway France. In consultation with elders and other knowledge-keepers, Mike Bruised Head determined that its name is Sakiimaapi. One by one, he has been working to find the original names of those sacred mountains and restore Niitsitapi relationships with the place.  The park’s new interpretation centre uses those original names, and the interpretive signs sprouting up across the recovering landscape tell the deeper story of meaning that has emerged from those ashes.

This year, Parks Canada and the Blackfoot Confederacy announced a new Indigenous Guardians program that employs Siksikaitsitapi people to monitor and protect sacred lands. In doing so, the guardians will rediscover themselves while offering new relationships and learnings to park visitors who are, themselves, in search of deeper meaning and connection.

Barely a decade after disaster, the park is experiencing both an ecological rebirth and a renewal of its names, meanings and cultural relevance. It isn’t the place it was. It’s becoming something far, far better.

When disaster strikes, it’s all we see. The despair and horror come from seeing the end of what we thought we knew and loved, and the certain knowledge that there can be no going back. What is unknowable, in that awful moment, is what might come next; what possibilities await beneath the ashes. But they are there, and after the flames burn down and the last wisps of smoke dissipate into the winds, the world will still be with us and it will have lost none of its magic. None. Some of its magic, in fact, will have been set free.

One of the most common trees in the wind-whipped landscape along the Lewis Overthrust is the lodgepole pine. It forms dense stands that, as they mature, grow a dense, connected canopy that shades the ground below. By the time a lodgepole pine forest has grown old, its thirsty roots and crowded canopy have suppressed or killed many of the other plants that were there when the trees were young and small. And that’s OK; snowshoe hares, squirrels, and crossbills like those dense old forests. But there is a sense of suppressed sameness to a landscape dominated by those pines.

Fortunately, they burn. The older and denser they are, the better they burn. That’s one reason the Kenow fire was so intense; not only was it wind-driven but it was fueled by aging pine forests full of tree resin and crowded fuels. Those trees are dead now, and the other kinds of plants whose growth they once suppressed will have their time in the sun again for a few decades.

But lodgepole pine is a paradox: it exists to be killed by fire, yet it relies on fire for its very existence. Its cones are like rocks, sealed tight by resin, their seeds securely stored inside. Fire burns off the resin coating and twists the cone scales open, releasing the seeds. The dead lodgepole pine forests of Waterton Lakes National Parks, today, are full of live lodgepole pines: young ones, reaching their baby fingers joyfully into the sun beneath mountains that are rediscovering their ancient names, amid a coming together of Treaty People—both the Niitsitapi people who were always here and the more recently arrived who hike the trails as tourists—that offers new hope of deep, real sorts of reconciliation. Not just between peoples, but between people and place.

And this is what emerged out of disaster, unimaginable in the moment.

And there are other kinds of disasters. Sometimes an election’s outcome can feel like a disaster.

When those disasters beset us, it can be worth reflecting on the Kenow fire and the certain truth that magic sometimes is just waiting for its moment, even if we can’t see to the other side of the flame and smoke. Things that happen are never just events; they are teachings that are given to us by a living world that gives us life and meaning. Fires burn out; new things emerge. Sometimes better things. This is a truth given to us.

Think like a forest. Listen to the teachings of the world. It is always the end of things; it is always the beginning of things. The names of our mountains outlive the battlefields after which some might try to name them. It will be OK. It might, eventually, even be better. Nature knows that; we should too.

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