When surprise becomes the forecast |
It is impossible even to begin trying to summarize the climate shocks hitting communities around the world this week. There are simultaneous deadly heat domes at the scale of continents, floodwaters surging off the charts, raging fires and choking smoke.
We can’t even begin to gauge the most terrifying situations. The community of Namaygoosisagagun First Nation — known also as Collins First Nation — saved themselves, fleeing for their lives in their own boats as truly apocalyptic fire bore down on their homes in Northern Ontario.
People would later post videos and pictures taken from the back of the boats, images even a Hollywood director would have deemed over-the-top.
It shouldn’t need saying, but these communities are among those that have done the least to cause climate conflagrations. Nevertheless, as Brandi Morin writes: “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 … 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.”
Nor does the searing injustice end with the burning of their homes and communities: “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.”
The survivors were directed to evacuation centres in Thunder Bay, although those have quickly been overwhelmed. Another evacuated community — Gull Bay First Nation — told its members there aren’t any accommodations left in Thunder Bay. In contrast to the social media reassurances you may have seen from the Ford and Carney governments, Gull........