Purpose of Review Indigenous perspectives have often been overlooked in fire management in North America. With a focus on the boreal region of North America, this paper provides a review of the existing literature documenting Indigenous voices and the historical relationship of Indigenous peoples in northern North America to fire and landscapes that burn. Recent Findings Early research on the topic explored how Indigenous people used fire in the boreal forest, with most research coming out of case studies in northern Alberta. Emerging research in the last two decades has broadened the geographic focus to include case studies in Alaska, Ontario, Labrador, and other regions in North America. This broadening of focus has shown that the diversity of Indigenous peoples in North America is reflected in a diversity of relationships to fire and landscapes that burn. Of note is an emerging interest in Indigenous fire knowledge in the wake of settler colonialism. Summary Indigenous peoples in the boreal forest have applied fire on their landscapes to fulfill numerous objectives for thousands of years. More than a tool, Indigenous peoples in the boreal view fire as an agent, capable of movement, destruction and creation, acting on the landscape to create order, within a living, connected environment. Unfortunately, restrictions on the application of Indigenous fire knowledge and practice initiated during early colonial times remains a contemporary challenge as well.

Encounters with fire and landscapes that burn have the potential to be both disastrous and life-giving events. In Canadian national parks, where a century of fire suppression has ruled human encounters with fire adapted landscapes, fire managers and ecologists are eagerly returning fire to diverse ecosystems in the hopes of building healthier ecosystems and reducing the risk of larger wildfire events. Ongoing changes to park policy have made new relationships with fire possible on these federal lands. Prescribed burns, whereby fire is applied to the landscape by park managers, is one such emerging encounter made possible by these policy changes. By reconceptualizing the burn as a process constituted by encounters, in what Mary Louise Pratt would call a contact zone, we gain insight into how thinking and working with fire requires an attention to how humans and more-than-humans encounter one another and the institutional settings which narrate and often constrain these encounters. In the case of Parks Canada’s fire program, this tool of active management, and an alternative to full-suppression, illustrates how thinking and working with fire consists of a set of encounters which take place at both an institutional and embodied scale.

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