‘People who were evacuated have the anger to change’

Luke James, who worked behind the scenes with fire crews before having to flee Fort Smith last summer, believes 2023’s fires and evacuations can drive change.

Luke attributes a lot of who he is to being raised in the North.

“I grew up on the land – with the land,” he said of Fort Smith. “There’s not an area in town that you can go to where you can’t see a section of the forest.”

With a mostly Indigenous population, Cree, Chipewyan, English and French were all languages he was accustomed to hearing. He never lost his connection to Fort Smith, even when he moved to Victoria, British Columbia when he was 17, often going back north for the summer.

In Victoria  he found a second home amongst friends. A queer settler, Luke loves comic books and storytelling of all kinds.

In 2023, Luke took a break from his studies at the University of Victoria to return to Fort Smith and work as a Parks Canada interpreter, but he managed to take a piece of southern Canada back with him. 

Here is Luke James’s account, as told to Haida Davies-McDermott.

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After about six years of begging, I finally got one of my best friends, Mabel, to come up and stay for most of the year.

It was just the two of us living in my childhood home. We were renting it from my mom. We were really, really connected in the community. A lot of what I was doing outside of work was showing Mabel the North and introducing them to my family and friends, introducing them to the places I grew up in, and showing them all the wonderful things that you can do in the snow and taking them ice fishing. I really wanted to show them the northern experience.

My job was mainly interpretative coordination based out of the visitor centre.

A lot of it is storytelling. I really, really enjoyed that part of the job. I got to work a lot with kids in schools. I would go in and teach them about beavers, snakes, all sorts of reptiles, amphibians, and different animals that we had in Wood Buffalo National Park, the park I worked for.

Because this fire started in Wood Buffalo National Park, it was something I was intimately aware of. People wanted to go to Pine Lake, and I had to say, “No, I’m sorry, the area is currently closed down due to a wildfire.” I briefly spent two weeks deployed on the Wood Buffalo Complex fires as a logistics officer. I was in charge of feeding the 200 firefighters and people who are working behind the scenes. I was super stressed because not only was I getting the updates, but I was physically seeing the planes fly and seeing the people get off the choppers covered in soot, covered in ash. 

The original fire started May 6. We’d been on evacuation notice for about a month. August 12 was when the evacuation alert went out. I was at work. They sent me home. They were like, “If you’re not done packing, go home because we’re on alert now. What the fuck are you doing?”

I didn’t consider the severity of it. I lived there my whole life. I’d been on evacuation alert tons of summers before. I was telling Mabel all the time, “Don’t worry about it. I could show you areas of forest that are burnt and have grown back. It’s not a big deal.” I remember one time when I was a kid, and we literally packed the car, and then they were like, “Just kidding. You’re good. You guys can stay.”

Even when we got the alert, I went home and started packing my things under the same expectation that, “Oh, I’m going to pack the car, and then they’re going to tell me it’s fine.” We lollygagged that day. We watched some television. We relaxed. We took our time. 

Then the next day, the evacuation order went out at noon. Ten hours is what they give you. We spent that whole afternoon frantically packing and we were ready to leave by 7pm. I was so stressed leaving because it’s my mom’s house. I don’t want there to be any dishes in the sink because, if it doesn’t burn, I don’t want her to come home to a mouldy kitchen, so we cleaned till 8pm. And then something else came up, and we ended up not getting out of town till 9pm. 

We got out of town and drove three hours to Hay River. We couldn’t see out the rear window for the most part because we packed everything floor to ceiling. I did leave a lot of stuff behind but, thankfully, we were able to get all of Mabel’s stuff out.

We were driving through where the wildfire had jumped the highway and was still burning. There were sections of the road on the side where the grass was simmering and burning, or we could see one lone tree on fire. If you squinted your eyes and looked through, there are always these flashes of light in the distance. Screaming red skies.

The orange sky was the worst one because your phone filters it out when you try to take a photo of it. You’re sitting there, and you’re trying to take a photo of it, and your phone’s telling you it’s not there. The sky is red, angry and apocalyptic, and your phone doesn’t want to take a photo of it. That was so surreal because I can’t even share what I’m in.

We got to Hay River, which is the next town over, at midnight. We stayed with family friends, the Dawsons, there. They had been evacuated to Fort Smith the summer previous, and we’d hosted them. It was just like, “This is so serendipitous.”

We left the next morning because we might as well go all the way to Edmonton. Outside of Hay River, there’s Alexandra Falls. We’re evacuating, but I’m going to make this a good experience for Mabel. We’re going to go to the waterfall because I really wanted to not traumatize my best friend, who I’d basically forced to move up there. We met up with friends that were leaving Hay River, Jenna and Izzy, who were travelling together with Jenna’s husky, Kita. That was actually a really nice afternoon. Our last little breath of like, “This is all fine,” before the next week of real torture. Five hours after we left, Hay River was also evacuated due to a separate fire. I think that was when I clicked in, “Oh, wait, things are bad.” 

We spent the first few days hopping from community to community, staying at shelters that they had for evacuees and trying to stay with our group: stay with people that we recognize, stay with people that we knew. 

We moved to Peace River. We booked a hotel for two people originally. Then we found out we were going to be meeting up with Izzy, Jenna, and Kita. It’s one bed for the four of us and the dog. Mabel and I had slept in a bed the night before at the Dawsons, whereas Izzy and Jenna had slept in a tent at the evacuation site in Hay River. We gave them the bed, and Mabel and I slept on the floor with Kita. 

The next morning, we got out, we went to the evacuation site in Peace River and they told us, “We can’t take you. Go to Grande Prairie.” We drove four or five hours to Grande Prairie. We spent four hours in line waiting at this evacuation site. It was a big church, and everybody we knew was flocking there. We got people’s numbers that we didn’t have, and we spent that time making sure that everyone was OK.

Most of the evacuation centres gave you little food vouchers. Grande Prairie gave us free coupons to Smitty’s. We were all, at this point in time, a little feral. We had started being like, “It’s not an evacuation. It’s an e-vacation,” and just trying to make the best out of a bad situation. We came in with that energy.

As we were leaving, we ran into some other evacuees who were coming in, and we stopped and we talked with them. The waitress walked up to us as we were talking with them. We were basically saying stuff like, “Yes, my house might be burning down, but at least there’s a Starbucks.” Her face just dropped, and her jaw dropped. I remember we all just looked at each other, like, “Are we bad people for making these jokes?”

The next day, we got a letter. They told us, “Hey, if you’re in Grande Prairie and you have a car, leave. We need to make room for more people.” In the next town, Leduc, they were saying, “We’re out of hotels in Leduc, but the Leduc government is going to pay for a hotel for you in Edmonton.” 

Until the evacuation, these were just places that I passed through on my way home. That’s all I thought of them before, checkpoints on the way to Fort Smith. I didn’t really consider them living, breathing entities. When a community offers its hand, when it reaches out and it says, “Hey, here, I’m here to help you,” it shows solidarity, that they are not only empathizing with you but willing to take on your weight.

Edmonton was not taking evacuees. They were not offering support. Leduc, High Level, all these other smaller communities had offered immediate support to evacuees. As they realized more people were coming, communities opened up. Edmonton was not. You hit Edmonton, and the wave stopped. We were staying in Edmonton on Leduc’s dime. 

I think that they could have opened up public spaces and community events. They have a zoo. They have the mall. They have all sorts of infrastructure. Edmonton should have done more in terms of offering the evacuees anything, like even a coupon for Galaxyland for families with children. We stayed there five days before we decided that we really needed to get moving. 

I didn’t really stop evacuating until August 24. We got to Victoria, I started training for my next job. I went right from evacuation brain to training brain. The rest of the community stayed evacuated until September 18. Five whole weeks. I haven’t really had a lot of time to even process a lot of stuff. There’s no acknowledgment of what that really means, to forcibly have to flee someplace that you love and hold dear. There were days where you would be inside and you couldn’t breathe without tasting ash. There were days that ash literally fell from the sky. 

It’s going to be a while before I fully realize what the long-term effects were. A lot of the effects that I can recognize right now are personal. I feel a lot closer with Mabel, who not only came up to the North to experience a life that I wanted to show them but who went through this trauma with me. We supported each other through it. I feel a lot closer even to my community, because I know that we overcame that together. I don’t think I would have recovered if Fort Smith had not survived. I think that if we’d lost even one neighbourhood, I don’t think I would be able to function right now.

I’m going to have a different attitude to forest fires now. I’ve always been very blasé about them because I’m from the North. “We can handle them.” Now, having been through that experience, I’m going to be more wary, especially about how fast they can get out of control. If these past five years have shown us anything in how bad fires are going to get, it’s only going to get worse.

What brings me hope for the future is I know so many people who are part of that evacuation who have that righteous anger: the anger to change, the anger to make things better. That anger can be channelled. Most people are recognizing these oppressive systems and these destructive habits of big corporations. I think that really we’re going to work towards a better future. I don’t necessarily know that we’ll be around to see that better future, but I know we’re working towards it.

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This testimony was co-created by members of the Climate Disaster Project. The project is an international teaching newsroom that works with disaster-affected communities to document and investigate their stories. For more information, please visit www.climatedisasterproject.com.

From Tuesday: Walking the path to recovery a year on from the Enterprise wildfire

From Wednesday: ‘People never imagined a climate disaster in Yellowknife’

From Friday: ‘I’m emotional talking about the little kindnesses’

From Saturday: The panic of deciding when and how to leave in a wildfire