When the Wildfires Rage, Who Gets to Breathe First?

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When the Wildfires Rage, Who Gets to Breathe First?<br>Canada is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. It just approved three more pipelines anyway.

Brandi Morin<br>Jul 15, 2026

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Wildfire burns down Collins in Northern Ontario while someone flees in a boat. Source: Lyndon Tyler.<br>Tansi/Hello — thank you for being here!<br>I have 8,479 readers. 543 paying. That is amazing, but there’s still a big gap. And it’s the weight I carry every day.<br>These stories exist because I refuse to let them disappear. I have spent 15 years on the ground; I have built the trust and repertoire that barely exists anywhere else. Which is why you won’t find this kind of coverage, the way I do it, anywhere else.<br>I need you in this with me now more than any other time.<br>That’s what reconciliation looks like from where I’m standing.<br>Come step into the fire with me.<br>Become a paid subscriber, hiy hiy:

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I was scrolling Instagram on Tuesday when the images started stacking up — apocalyptic, biblical almost. Massive walls of fire. Smoke clouds swallowing the horizon in every direction. Photos taken from the backs of boats, by people fleeing for their lives across dark water lit orange from behind.<br>Northern Ontario. And of course — of course — it was an Indigenous community. Right now, 128 wildfires are burning across the region.<br>My heart cracked a little more when I saw what Nadya Kwandibens posted Tuesday night. She wasn’t there. She was watching her own hometown burn from afar, same as the rest of us scrolling — except this was Collins, Ontario, where her family is from, and she wrote that it was gone. She was waiting to hear where to direct help, with donations already being routed to a hotel in Thunder Bay. Nadya is Anishinaabe, from Namaygoosisagagun First Nation — the community also known as Collins — and she’s spent over two decades behind the camera as the founder of Red Works Photography, building a body of work that pushes back against colonial narratives and shows Indigenous life and strength on its own terms. This time, it wasn’t someone else’s disaster she was documenting from a distance. It was her own family’s front door, and she couldn’t even get there.<br>You feel so helpless watching this from afar. But here’s the thing that guts me more than the helplessness: this has become the norm. Every summer, for years running now, it’s Indigenous communities standing on the frontlines of a crisis none of us created alone but that we are absolutely paying for first.

A cartoon by the Globe and Mail published last week featuring Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, oil, pipelines and Ontario Premier Doug Ford.<br>Share<br>This Isn’t Bad Luck. It’s Design.

Indigenous peoples make up roughly five percent of this country’s population and account for more than 42 percent of all wildfire evacuation events in Canada. About 80 percent of majority-Indigenous communities sit in fire-prone boreal regions — because that’s where colonial reserve policy put them, on land nobody else wanted, land that now happens to be burning hotter and more often than almost anywhere else in the country. An estimated 60 percent of reserves sit directly in the wildland-urban interface, the exact zone fire agencies treat as highest-risk — and lowest-priority, when the water bombers and crews get allocated. When the smoke clears, it’s Indigenous evacuees who make up the overwhelming majority of people pushed into unfamiliar cities, cut off from land-based food, medicine, and each other. Some of these communities have now been forced out five, six, seven times in a couple of decades. Almost all of them are First Nations.<br>As Collins burned, the danger wasn’t only on the water. That same day, a CN Rail worker captured terrifying video from inside a train as wildfire closed in on the tracks near the community, flames visible just feet from the rail line. “We’re encased in flames,” the worker said, watching a wall of fire engulf the treeline outside the window. CN confirmed everyone aboard made it out safely.

And Collins isn’t an isolated tragedy. It’s the latest entry in a list that keeps growing. In 2016, “The Beast” tore through Fort McMurray, forcing nearly 90,000 people out in the largest single-day evacuation in Canadian history and destroying 2,400 homes and buildings. In 2021, Lytton, B.C. — a day after setting the national heat record at 49.6°C — was wiped off the map entirely, the first Canadian town swallowed whole by wildfire. In 2024, fire tore through Jasper, forcing 25,000 to flee and destroying a third of the townsite’s structures. In 2023, more than 1,000 people had to be evacuated by boat and plane from Fort Chipewyan, Alberta — home to the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, Mikisew Cree First Nation and the Fort Chipewyan Métis Nation — as wildfire closed in on a community already living downstream from the oil sands and grappling with a tailings pond leak into...