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

But recently, drought and wildfires have limited access to traditional foods. At Kakisa, the water level is so low that boats cannot get from the river mouth to the lake for fish or beaver. Moose are hard to find because they are looking for a water source. Berries and medicines were burned or cut down to make firebreaks.

This leaves the city with few local food options. Kakisa is tiny, with only about forty inhabitants living in an area of less than one square kilometer. The community typically relies on the towns of Fort Providence or Hay River, each about an hour away, for food, fuel, medical care, police and emergency services.

This distance is usually not a problem for many local residents. But Kakisa's remote location makes it particularly vulnerable to wildfires. In 2014, a fire occurred just meters from the village, forcing residents to flee. Still charred treetops poke out from the growing bushes along the only road leading into or out of town.

“We've almost lost a community,” says Lloyd Chicot, a longtime Kakisa leader and chief of Ka'agi Tu First Nation. “People were crying and stuff like that, it was very touching to see.”

Fire on the outskirts of Kakis, Northwest Territories. Fire breaks reduce the potential for wildfires to enter a community and are also used by residents to plant fruits and vegetables.

In 2023, another wildfire started nearby, but strong winds pushed the flames east, away from the population center, burning approximately 430 square kilometers of land in less than one day. Instead, the fire reached the village of Enterprise and destroyed several buildings and homes. In each case, Kakisa was spared but cut off from the rest of the territory. Road access was limited and telecommunications were cut off. Officers from the Northwest Territories government's Department of Environment and Climate Change had to personally deliver a printed evacuation order to Chicot. It's a situation residents don't want to find themselves in again.

Elong before the disaster As a result, Kakisa began a movement towards sustainable food systems. Before the 2014 wildfire, Chicot called Andrew Spring, Canada Research Director for Sustainable Northern 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 ways of life are impacted by climate-related events. One of their first priorities was to start growing food locally so that the city could at least feed itself if it were ever cut off from surrounding communities again.

Photo of potted plants from above — Herbs grow in a greenhouse in Kakis, Northwest Territories.

Photo of a man watering a garden with a hose. — Herbs grow in a greenhouse in Kakis, Northwest Territories.

Soon after, the first garden boxes arrived in Kakisa. WLU students began coming for summer internships to help establish gardens and greenhouses and develop recycling and composting programs. Over the past decade, the project has spread to several other communities in Dekhcho, an administrative region in the western NWT.

Kakis's garden now occupies an area approximately equal to two neighboring tennis courts. Potatoes, lettuce, cabbage, beans and carrots grow throughout the summer. Next to them grow beds of strawberries and Iranian berries. Tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers are grown in two small greenhouses. In the event of an emergency, the amount of food produced could easily feed the population for days, perhaps weeks.

Photo of a man walking through a greenhouse.

Michael Grossetete inspects produce grown in a greenhouse in Kakis.

In early August, I went to Kakisa for a week to document some of WLU's work. The visiting students conducted workshops with local residents, residents of nearby communities and staff from Ecology North, a Yellowknife-based environmental non-profit. I watched as the group discussed the intricacies of growing tomatoes, composting, and even using firebreaks as places to replant berry bushes and develop garden plots. Two community elders, Lucy Simon and Leon St. Pierre, walked through the greenhouses and tended the cucumbers.

Similar scenes have emerged in other northern communities with garden or greenhouse projects, including Inuvik, NWT, and Naujaat and Gjoa Haven, Nunavut, all of which are either just above or north of the Arctic Circle. But here, as in Kakis, the real task is not necessarily sowing the seeds. This keeps the garden running.

Leafy green plants growing from brown soil.

Pepper plants grow in garden boxes in a greenhouse in Kakisa, Northwest Territories.

Photo of isatun berries on a plant branch.

Saskatoon berries ripen near an orchard in Kakisa, Northwest Territories.

TStokes rental, One of the workshop participants works at Aurora College in nearby Fort Smith and runs a community garden there. He calls himself a “northern bush boy” but says his greatest passion is growing food, which he says has helped him overcome his battle with addiction. What he says started as a plan to grow marijuana turned into a love of growing flowers and then vegetables.

Stokes' recovery through agriculture is an unusual story in northern communities. The garden he manages is located between the former mission and the boarding school. He prefers the term “food security” to “agriculture” because the latter can remind elders of the colonial destruction of their lands.

Photo of an open notebook with writing on the left page and plants on the right page.

Trent Stokes shows off his notebook in which 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 commemorating the children who attended Sacred Heart Boarding School between 1867 and 1960. The place where the plaque stands was a burial site between 1868 and 1929. In 1948, the cemetery was plowed by the church and turned into a potato field. The stone memorial acknowledges this horrifying piece of local history.

For his part, Spring is familiar with the views of the non-Indigenous scientists from Southern Canada who run the garden at Kakisa. He also knows that community gardens in the North often fail after the people who create them leave town or run out of funding. Poor soil, low yields, lack of accessible infrastructure, equal interest in government support and lack of skilled labor add to the challenges of maintaining community gardens.

“If we had left, I don’t think this project would have been sustainable,” he says. “It’s just another administrative burden for communities that are trying to stay afloat.”

Photo of two people working in a garden in a greenhouse. — Smichael picks cucumbers with Chloe Chicot-Palmer, a girl who lives in Kakis.

Photo of hands holding picked Saskatoon berries.

Saskatoon berries collected by a participant at a gardening and agriculture workshop in Kakisa, Northwest Territories.

The funding model is patchwork. Some of the money comes from the federal government, some from the territory government, and some from other various grants. This means the gardening and recycling programs will only continue as long as Spring and Chicot continue to reapply for funding every year or two.

Ruby Simba, band chief of the Kaagi Tu First Nation, says it has been difficult to train and retain workers for available jobs in the community, let alone convince residents to spend their free time tending or harvesting their gardens. While she's frustrated by the lack of interest, she admits one factor may be that some of the produce the summer students plant – such as squash and cabbage – is unfamiliar to locals. And since the garden is largely maintained by people outside the community, “it's not the community's business. So we have to fix it somehow.”