Wildfires Have Threatened the Existence of This Tiny Northern Town. Here’s How It’s Fighting Back

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Published 6:30, NOVEMBER 27, 2025 A controlled fire burns along Highway 3 near Fort Providence, Northwest Territories. The landscape around the highway has been impacted by wildfires for nearly a decade.

Julian Canadien, a Dene man from Kakisa, Northwest Territories, is swarmed by black flies while he pulls weeds from the soil beneath his feet. The bugs don’t bother him much. He’s the only paid employee at the community garden, where his job is to prune and clear the rows of vegetables, water the produce, and churn the compost. And he likes his job.

“I’m outside all of the time,” he says, “and it’s fun to watch the vegetables grow.”

In the fall and winter, he heads out on the land for furs and food. He is a skilled trapper and hunter—pursuits that have sustained the Dene people in this region for centuries. The cultivation of plants, too, has been practised by Indigenous people in Northern Canada for generations. Foraging for berries and plant-based medicine, like rat root and spruce gum, is commonplace and has been part of the food system for as long as anyone can remember.

A view of Kakisa, Northwest Territories. The community sits at the mouth of Kakisa Lake and Kakisa River, roughly twelve kilometres from the Mackenzie Highway. But more recently, drought and wildfires have restricted access to traditional foods. In Kakisa, the water is so low that boats can’t make it from the mouth of the river to the lake for fish or beaver. Moose are difficult to find because they’re searching for a water source. Berries and medicines have been burned or clear-cut to make firebreaks.

That leaves the town with few options for local food. Kakisa is tiny: there are only about forty residents living in less than one square kilometre. The community typically relies on the towns of Fort Providence or Hay River, each about an hour’s drive away, for groceries, fuel, health care, police, and emergency services.

That distance isn’t usually a problem for many locals. But Kakisa’s remoteness makes it particularly vulnerable to wildfires. In 2014, a fire came within metres of the community, forcing residents to flee. The still-charred treetops poke out from the regrowing brush along the only road in or out of town.

“We just about lost the community,” says Lloyd Chicot, Kakisa’s long-serving leader and chief of the Ka’a’gee Tu First Nation. “People were crying and that kind of stuff; it was pretty moving to see.”

A fire break on the outskirts of Kakisa, Northwest Territories. The firebreaks reduce the chances of flames from wildfires encroaching on the community, and is also used by residents to plant fruits and vegetables. In 2023, another wildfire started nearby, but the strong winds pushed the blaze eastward, away from the community, burning roughly 430 square kilometres of land in less than one day. The fire reached the settlement of Enterprise instead and destroyed several buildings and homes. In each instance, Kakisa was spared but was cut off from the rest of the territory. Road access was limited and telecommunications shut down. Officers from the Environment and Climate Change department of the government of the Northwest Territories had to hand-deliver a typed evacuation order to Chicot. It is a situation that residents don’t want to be in again.

Even before disaster struck, Kakisa’s move toward sustainable food systems was in place. Before the 2014 wildfire, Chicot called Andrew Spring, Canada research chair in Northern sustainable food systems at Wilfrid Laurier University. Together, they applied for a federal climate change adaptation grant—money earmarked for Indigenous and remote communities to develop programs or resources for people whose traditional way of life is affected by climate-related events. One of their immediate priorities was to start growing food locally, so that the town would at least be able to sustain itself if it ever got cut off from nearby communities again.

Herbs grow in the greenhouse at Kakisa, Northwest Territories. Ramon Smikle, a third year health sciences student at Wilfred Laurier University, waters the community garden in Kakisa, Northwest Territories. Shortly after, the first garden boxes arrived in Kakisa. WLU students began coming in for summer internships to help start the garden and greenhouses and develop recycling and composting programs. Over the past decade, the project has expanded to some other communities in the Dehcho, an administrative region in western NWT.

Now, the Kakisa garden covers an area roughly equivalent to two adjacent tennis courts. Potatoes, lettuce, cabbage, beans, and carrots grow throughout the summer. Beside them are patches of strawberries and saskatoon berries. Tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers grow in two small greenhouses. The amount of food produced could easily feed the community for several days, perhaps weeks, in the event of an emergency.

Michael Grossetete inspects the produce growing in the greenhouse in Kakisa. I went to Kakisa for a week in early August to document some of WLU’s work. Visiting students held workshops with locals, residents from nearby communities, and staffers from Ecology North, a Yellowknife-based environmental nonprofit. I watched the group discuss the intricacies of growing tomatoes, composting, and even using firebreaks as spaces for transplanting berry bushes and setting up garden plots. Two community Elders, Lucy Simon and Leon Saint Pierre, walked through the greenhouses and tended to the cucumbers.

Similar scenes have sprung up in other Northern communities with garden or greenhouse projects, including Inuvik, NWT, and Naujaat and Gjoa Haven, Nunavut—all of which are either right on or north of the Arctic Circle. But there, as in Kakisa, the real challenge isn’t necessarily planting the seeds. It’s keeping the garden going.

Pepper plants grow in gardening boxes inside the greenhouse in Kakisa, Northwest Territories. Saskatoon berries ripen near the garden in Kakisa, Northwest Territories.

Trent Stokes, one of the workshop participants, works at Aurora College in nearby Fort Smith and manages the community garden there. He calls himself “a northern bush boy” but claims his greatest passion is growing food, which he says got him through struggles with addiction. What he says started as a plan to grow marijuana turned into a love for cultivating flowers and then vegetables.

Stokes’s recovery through agriculture is an uncommon story in Northern communities. The garden he manages is wedged between a former mission and a residential school. He prefers the term “food security” over “agriculture” because the latter can remind elders of the colonial razing of their land.

Trent Stokes shows his notebook, where he collects plants and details their composition and traditional medicinal uses. In Fort Providence, just fifty minutes by car from Kakisa, there is a large stone plaque remembering the children who attended Sacred Heart Residential School between 1867 and 1960. The area where the plaque stands was a burial site between 1868 and 1929. In 1948, the cemetery was ploughed over by the church and turned into a potato field. The stone memorial acknowledges this horrific part of local history.

For his part, Spring is aware of the optics of non-Indigenous academics from Southern Canada managing a garden in Kakisa. He’s also aware that community gardens in the North often fail after the people who start them leave town or run out of funding. Poor soil, small crop yields, lack of affordable infrastructure, a levelling interest in government support, and the unavailability of skilled labour pile on to the challenges of sustaining community gardens.

“If we were to leave, I don’t think that project would be sustainable,” he says. “It’s just another administrative burden on communities that are trying to keep their heads above water.”

Smikle picks cucumbers with Chloe Chicot-Palmer, a youth who lives in Kakisa. Smikle waters the Kakisa community garden. Saskatoon berries, picked by a participant at a gardening and agriculture workshop in Kakisa, Northwest Territories. The funding model is patchwork. Some money comes from the federal government, some from the territorial government, and some from other various grants. Which means the garden and recycling programs will last only as long as Spring and Chicot continue to reapply for funding every year or two.

Ruby Simba, the band manager for the Ka’a’gee Tu First Nation, says it’s been hard to train and retain workers for the available jobs in the community, let alone persuade residents to spend their free time tending the garden or harvesting from it. Though she finds the lack of interest frustrating, she concedes one factor might be that, to locals, some of the produce summer students have planted—squash and kale, for instance—is unfamiliar. And as long as the garden is mostly maintained by people from outside the community, “it’s not a community thing. So we have to somehow fix that.”

Smikle gives gardening advice to Jasmine Chicot-Palmer, a youth who lives in Kakisa. Chloe Chicot-Palmer stands at the doorway of the Kakisa community garden gazebo, a place to store gardening tools, pot plants, and hold workshops. The post Wildfires Have Threatened the Existence of This Tiny Northern Town. Here’s How It’s Fighting Back first appeared on The Walrus.