Thirty-Five First Nations Firefighters Were on the Line This Summer. The Training Was at Kab Lake.

KENORA – October 9, 2026 – When wildfires hit First Nations communities in the region this summer and the Ministry of Natural Resources was already stretched, 35 firefighters from a partnership between the Indigenous Police Chiefs of Ontario, the RCMP and Indigenous Services Canada were available to go.

They were trained at Kab Lake Lodge. Ashley Russell-Taylor, chief operations officer for the Indigenous Police Chiefs of Ontario, said the sessions ran between November 2025 and this October, four of them. She and people from IPCO, Indigenous Services Canada and the RCMP were back at Kab Lake in the first week of October watching a fall course aimed at the 2027 season.

Kai Liu, IPCO’s executive director, pointed at the Thunder Bay 59 fire outside Whitesand First Nation. That ground is a hunting area. “It is their food source, their berries, their medicine that got destroyed,” he said. The course is built around that, not just a treeline: traplines, harvesting spots, burial sites.

Thirty-five people is not a ministry crew. It is what was on hand when the provincial line was thin, trained out of a lodge rather than a base in Thunder Bay or Dryden. The fall session is for next year. This summer already showed what the gap looks like when the berries and the traplines burn and the extra hands are a partnership, not a standing crew.

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Keenan Hutka

Publisher of RL News. Covers Kenora, Northwestern Ontario, and Central Canada — local stories, national politics, and the war in Ukraine.

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