These Northern Sask. students were displaced by wildfires — now they are helping restore their forests
CBC
An approaching wildfire had displaced students from the Clearwater River Dene Nation in Northern Saskatchewan — but now they are leading the charge in restoring nearby forests.
Twenty-one students from the Clearwater River Dene School have helped plant 9,000 tree seedlings in the forests surrounding their community. This came weeks after a mandatory evacuation order was issued for their community.
The tree planting initiative is part of a community-driven project called Beading a New World: Collective Climate Accountability and Adaptation Project.
The project is funded by Environment and Climate Change Canada. It aims to establish Indigenous communities as equal treaty partners in Canada's transition to a low-carbon, sustainable and decolonial society.
"We want to come up with solutions that are custom for us, that work for our First Nation community so we are trying to train and give the kids the tools to help them adapt [to climate change]," Dënë Cheecham-Uhrich, principal investigator of the project, said.
It is the third year the students participated in the project, but for Grade 11 student Ava Haynes this year's tree planting came with urgency.
"I've seen a burnt forest fire area, but just seeing it so close to the highway driving into town, you could bike to it, just seeing it so close to town was very real," Haynes said.
"If those firefighters had given up for an hour or even less than that everything would've been gone."
Haynes described the tree planting project as a spirit lifter for the community.
"The trees are going to continue to get bigger and you can go back and look at it and say the year the fire decimated this, we also helped fix it," Haynes said.
"We helped bring back the ecosystem that was destroyed by the fires."'
All the First Nation communities that were evacuated in the province have now returned back home, according to Indigenous Services Canada's latest updates.
Despite communities returning, smoke from the wildfires burning in the province has prompted Environment Canada special air quality statements across Northern and Central Saskatchewan.
The wildfires in Northern Saskatchewan almost cancelled the tree planting initiative this year.