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Short abstract:

Western Canada’s increasingly devastating wildfires burn in the wake of settler colonial occupation and cultivation of the land. Kinship provides an unexpected register of response in which those histories demand revisitation, their ongoing presence is faced, and alternative futures are imagined.

Long 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 understanding, 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 full temporal and spatial scope of the ecological disasters that mark the climate crisis, and a repertoire of ethics, discourses and practices that Canadians repurpose in response. Kinship shares vast scales of time and space with the climate crisis: changes in the climate can only be observed across generations and global geographies, and family is an intergenerational undertaking, continuously reworking its histories to generate alternative futures, routinely stretched across the globe in its mobilities and imaginations. Kinship practice has played a crucial role in the settlement of Canada as a settler colony, too: wildfire burns in the wake of settler family practices of claiming, cultivating, dwelling on and conserving the land, its devastation in direct proportion to the dispossession, occupation and domination that enabled those undertakings. 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 Canadians pursue experimental responses – confronting them with the uncomfortable truths of their settler colonial pasts, and opening creative potential for decolonial futures.