16-06-2025
Wildfires are devastating northern Saskatchewan – a place too often ignored by the rest of the country
Bill Waiser is the author of A World We Have Lost: Saskatchewan Before 1905, which won the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction.
The out-of-control wildfires raging across northern Saskatchewan have introduced Canadians to a part of the country they may have believed was largely empty. In fact, even people living in the southern part of Saskatchewan view it as the great unknown – or, as provincial cabinet minister Joe Phelps once called it, 'another country altogether.'
But northern Saskatchewan matters. It could even be argued that the history of the province has northern beginnings.
When the province was carved out of the North-West Territories in 1905, the northern boundary was set at the 60th parallel. That meant that more than half of the new province featured a heavy, mixed-wood forest and thousands of bodies of water, including several large lakes. Saskatchewan's geographical centre at Molanosa, an acronym for 'Montreal Lake, Northern Saskatchewan,' was about 160 kilometres north of the city of Prince Albert, well into the boreal forest.
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The Cree and Dene, who had lived in the region for millennia, were a resourceful, resilient people who adjusted to the arrival of the European fur trade in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The first contact between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples happened in northern Saskatchewan.
All major settlements in Saskatchewan were once in the north. Cumberland House, Reindeer Lake (Southend), Lac La Ronge, Pelican Narrows, Green Lake, Île-à-la-Crosse, Buffalo Narrows, La Loche, and Fond du Lac all began as fur-trade communities. Many Saskatchewan residents today would be hard-pressed to locate them on a map.
By the mid-19th century, a distinct society – one based on hunting and trapping and centred around water-based communities with a trading post and sometimes a mission – had taken shape in northern Saskatchewan. It was largely Indigenous in makeup. It was also separated from the prairie south. The major trade route ran east to west from Cumberland House up along the Churchill River through Île-à-la-Crosse and Portage La Loche to Fort Chipewyan and the Mackenzie River.
The region's isolation would become more pronounced in the early 1880s, when the Canadian Pacific Railway was built west from Winnipeg through Regina and Calgary. Settlement and development were largely restricted to the wheat farming on the southern prairies. Northern First Nation and Métis peoples, as vestiges of the old fur trade west, had no part in Saskatchewan's future.
That certainly appeared to be the case according to the 1906 western census: less than one per cent of Saskatchewan's population lived in the north. The Saskatchewan government's gaze consequently rarely extended to the north, where it gladly abdicated any meaningful presence in favour of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Hudson's Bay Company.
It wasn't until after the Second World War that northern Saskatchewan and its rich and diverse natural resources came to be part of provincial post-war development plans. The Great Depression had staggered Saskatchewan because of its overdependence on agriculture, and after the war, the government began to look for ways to diversify the economy to try to make it less vulnerable.
Northern forestry and mining were part of the new Saskatchewan in the latter half of the 20th century, but northern Indigenous peoples initially played little to no role in these resource industries. In effect, there were two northern societies: one that was white and well-off, and another that was Indigenous and poor. This colonialism extended to the provincial government. Saskatchewan may complain about a distant, insensitive Ottawa, but Regina acted much like an imperial government in the province's north.
Today, Indigenous peoples are playing an increasingly larger role in new economic development. At the same time, many continue to pursue a traditional lifestyle and practise their cultural traditions as best they can. Theirs is a unique way of life with its own rhythm, centred on the land and water. Indeed, some have never left their home community – at least, up until now, when wildfires have turned them into refugees.
People have complained about the wildfire smoke that has drifted southward and made outside activity difficult, if not dangerous. But spare a thought to the thousands who fled on short notice, forced to leave behind a world that has meant so much to them for generations. Thousands have begun to return, but others may not be back for some time, not knowing what the fires will have destroyed. And it will take longer to rebuild what they have lost.
That's why the largely Indigenous firefighting crews have battled so hard to save what they can. For Canadians, especially those living in Saskatchewan, this may be 'another country altogether' – but for so many displaced people, it's home.
