Paper Short Abstract:

Amidst western Canada’s increasingly devastating wildfires, kinship offers unique means of grasping and responding to the climate crisis. Emergent forms of care that kin-based elemental intimacies suggest are unsettled by settler-colonial histories – but inspire decolonial alternatives in turn.

Paper Abstract:

In 2023, Canada experienced its worst-ever wildfire season: over 18.5 million hectares of forest burned. As the scale, devastation, and potential long-term effects of wildfire begin to outstrip the imagination, different frameworks for relating and responding to it become imperative.

Taking inspiration from the etymology of 'ecology' – from the Greek 'oikos', for house – this paper suggests that kinship offers rare means of grasping the otherwise-ungraspable phenomena of the climate crisis, and a repertoire of ethics, stories, and practices of care that Canadians repurpose in re-learning how to live with wildfire. Kinship shares vast scales of time and space with the climate crisis: family is an intergenerational undertaking, continuously reworking its histories to generate alternative futures, routinely stretched across global geographies in its mobilities and imaginations. Kinship encompasses competing obligations of care that entangle past and future generations with the land that nourishes them; and it situates crises of global magnitude in everyday practice and our most intimate relations (Reece 2022). Kinship practice has played a crucial role in the settlement of Canada as a settler colony, too: the ways settler and migrant families have claimed, worked, and dwelled on the land have driven the climate crisis, unsettling the inventive potentials of kin-based elemental intimacies. But as wildfire demands and enables new ways of seeing, knowing, and relating to and through the land, it is often in the register of kinship that experimental responses are pursued – opening new possibilities for decolonizing these historical relations in turn.