Jeewa Liske was four months pregnant in August 2023 when she had to flee wildfire smoke in Yellowknife and make a difficult 20-hour drive to safety.
“I was wanting to leave just ’cause it was so smoky and it was so hard to breathe,” Liske, now 23, recalled of the day the city issued an evacuation order. She said she was barely able to see the sides of the road as she and three friends drove to Edmonton.
When they arrived, Liske was torn between staying to be close to family in nearby Leduc, or living with her mother-in-law in Lkwungen territory on Vancouver Island. After about five days in Alberta, she flew to Victoria. Her anxiety was compounded by being separated from her spouse, a crew boss working to fight the fires in the Northwest Territories.
Leaving her home meant she also struggled to get prenatal checkups, which she said was stressful. “I was crying a lot. The hormones just made my emotions 10 times worse.”
Eventually, she says birth workers in N.W.T. connected her with a Victoria midwife and she was relieved to learn her pregnancy was progressing normally.
Liske’s experience is just one example of how Indigenous people in Canada are disproportionately impacted by wildfires, which researchers say are becoming more frequent and more intense due to climate change.
As a result, they say Indigenous people are particularly vulnerable to being displaced from their communities, and that can take an immense toll on their mental health. Psychologists who’ve studied disaster recovery and counselled those affected say it’s normal to feel fearful and stressed during wildfire evacuation and there are ways to improve evacuations for Indigenous people.
Suzanne Stewart, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, says Indigenous communities impacted by wildfires disproportionately experience adverse mental health outcomes partly because they often live in affected areas.
That’s on top of cultural trauma from being displaced, she said, noting that a relationship with the land is integral to the identity and well-being of Indigenous people.
Mental health toll can linger long after wildfire evacuees return home
“I’ve seen Indigenous individuals and communities spend months staying in temporary quarters in motel rooms hundreds of miles from their home with really no say in when they can return,” said Stewart, who has provided counselling and mental health supports to Indigenous people.
“Evacuations, in the moment, are emergencies,” she said. “Those often cause anxiety.”
Stewart says the immediate needs of those being evacuated include mental supports such as validating people’s feelings, as well as addressing emotional and spiritual needs. Even something as basic as accommodations can have an impact, which she saw when her own family faced evacuations from N.W.T. in 2023.
“Many people were evacuated to Alberta and had to stay in places that they wouldn’t have chosen to stay if they’d had the resources to make their own decisions.”
After Liske’s evacuation from Yellowknife, she ended up staying in Victoria for six weeks with her Dene mother-in-law, Katłįà Lafferty, along with Lafferty’s mother and another family member.
Lafferty says she was concerned about how they would get her mother, who has a bad hip, out of her N.W.T. home as the wildfire approached, and they had to convince her to come to Victoria.
“If you’re getting put up in an evacuation site somewhere that you don’t know and you’re not with family, it’s really scary,” she said.
‘I just want to get home’: wildfire evacuees face hardship and uncertainty
The 2023 Yellowknife evacuations were one of the examples data co-ordinator Elisa Binon cited in her report on internal displacements — the forced movement of people within countries following disaster, violence or war.
Binon, who works with the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, recorded more than 190,000 internal displacements in Canada in 2023 due to disasters like wildfires. Of these, First Nations, Inuit and Métis accounted for about 30,000 displacements, a disproportionate trend that continued in 2024, she said.
The report also noted Indigenous Peoples living on reserves made up just five per cent of Canada’s population but represented more than 16 per cent of internal displacements due to disasters in 2023, mainly from wildfires.
That’s because Indigenous people have been historically marginalized, Binon says, noting they have often already been relocated from traditional lands to remote regions more susceptible to natural disasters.
“Being in disaster-prone areas means there’s more forest, which is kindling for wildfires,” she said.
Stewart says evacuations can reawaken past trauma from forced relocation due to the First Nations reserve system. Internal displacements can also impact a person’s sense of autonomy, Binon says, particularly when they are long lasting and send people far from home.
She notes that some Indigenous people are leaving their rural homes for cities for the first time in their lives, which adds to the challenges of being displaced.
Wildfire evacuees from northwest Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan arrive in Niagara Falls
In late May this year, Manitoba wildfires forced the evacuation of more than 21,000 people, many from northern First Nations. With hotels in the province scarce, some evacuees were relocated as far away as Niagara Falls, Ont.
Many First Nations leaders urged the province to do more to relocate people closer to home, and the premier now says he’s considering using emergency powers to make more area hotels available.
Because wildfire related evacuations of Indigenous communities are likely to continue due to climate change, Binon suggests there are ways to improve how they’re handled. They include:
What Canada can learn from how B.C. First Nations prevent wildfire disasters
Binon also says governments are increasingly turning to the Indigenous practice of cultural burns — controlled, slow fires — to reduce wildfire risk and enhance biodiversity.
She says such “informed and inclusive policies” support recovery and reduce the risk of internal displacement.
Liske now lives in Dettah, N.W.T., with her family. Her mother-in-law, Lafferty, is in Victoria but recently visited Yellowknife.
“Whenever there’s a blue sky, I’m thankful,” said Lafferty. “We’re not breathing in smoke.”
Both say when they see smoky skies, it brings a sense of dread related to the 2023 fires, but also this wildfire season. Liske’s spouse, who is also Lafferty’s son, is currently fighting wildfires in Saskatchewan.
