In conversation with Candis Callison and Rick Harp.
In October 2025, Candis Callison and Rick Harp co-convened Beyond Fires and Floods: Indigenous Narratives in an Era of Extremes (BFF), a gathering that brought together Indigenous narrators on Musqueam Lands. Callison is a professor, coauthor of Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities, and author of How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts. Harp is a journalist and host/producer of Media Indigena.
Over three days at the University of British Columbia, attendees and panellists composed of storytellers, researchers, and journalists discussed what it means to look at climate change as a symptom of a larger problem and how Indigenous narratives are integral to climate change conversations. Climate change, Indigenous experiences, and journalism are connected. Their intersection begs for the acknowledgement of the historical themes influencing extreme weather events and the responsibility of the media to centre the voices of Indigenous peoples when reporting on the topic.
Last week, Media Indigena released the first episode of its series on the event. I sat with Callison and Harp to discuss the conversations that transpired at the gathering to understand why it’s necessary to include Indigenous voices in climate reporting, and uncover their informed perspectives on what Canadian journalism can do better in reporting on environmental issues.
Breanna Milton (BM) : To my knowledge, the Beyond Fires and Floods event was attended and hosted by Indigenous people. In what way did that design present opportunities for discussion and intimacy that might otherwise have been difficult?
Candis Callison
It was really designed to focus on Indigenous narratives as they relate to climate change and in so doing, serve Indigenous people, Indigenous communities, and really advance the conversation about climate change when it comes to Indigenous experiences…. Right now, the biggest question marks are around how we do adaptation planning, how we prepare for impacts, how we deal with ongoing impacts, and I think Indigenous communities have been at the forefront of that whole conversation really for the last several decades. So, we also wanted to learn from that and bring people together who would exchange knowledge and narratives, and ways of thinking about climate change and how to respond to it.
Rick Harp
Yeah, I would just add, you know, as an Indigenous only space by and for Indigenous people, I think we knew we all had a baseline of knowledge and familiarity with things that didn’t have to be explained or defined. And we could go deeper, we could be richer. That said, we had two different types of what we call “narrators.” Those who do so in a scholarly — like explicitly scholarly — context, and those who do so journalistically. So, in some ways, it was trying to bring those two cohorts, those two sectors together, and maybe develop an appreciation of what each other has to do and draw on each other. I mean, in some ways, we see this as not a one-off or a self-contained conversation, but hopefully the beginning of future conversations, ongoing conversations.
BM: In the pamphlet, I saw a mention of this concept of “extraction”, and there was a quote in the pamphlet where it it referred to the country as being “wrought by centuries of extraction in colonialism, the deeply globalized structures and systems we now live in, and our consequence of competing empires efforts to terraform indigenous territories”. I was wondering if you, Candis, could explain what kind of conversations this statement inspired?
Candis Callison
We’re at a really interesting moment, even more so now than when we had the conversation, because we have this huge emphasis on Canada as a place of resources and the critical mineral rush, and, you know, all of the things that are available for sale in Canada’s lands and waters. The missing pieces to that whole conversation are both climate change that is upon us. When we’re talking about the Boreal forest in the Arctic and the Subarctic part of this country, that’s where a lot of the critical mineral infrastructure is being imagined, and yet that is also the site of enormous wildfires and real climatic change impacts that are even outside of the the wildfires.
That’s one part of it, but then you think about all of the Indigenous people also in that region and the ways in which Indigenous people are excluded from those conversations to a great extent — the extractive conversations I mean — is really problematic. Because, not only is their consent required for that kind of development, but Indigenous people are often holding all of these factors together. They’re already dealing with climate change. They may have already faced evacuation orders due to wildfires, and they have communities who have already been impacted by resource development and existing mines and other sorts of extractive processes.
So, you can’t really think about these things separately, and for us, it was important to bring that part of things into the conversation, because that’s what we’re already hearing from Indigenous communities. If you look at the people we had on those panels, they were already in the midst of those conversations, because you can’t talk about resource extraction without Indigenous people, and without climate change being a part of the conversation.
BM: Rick, I saw that you moderated a panel about how Indigenous narratives “reframe and resist mainstream media’s preoccupation with climate change events” and are “bringing to the forefront the role of colonialism” in these events and the institutions responsible for the events. Can you explain a little bit about what role colonialism plays in the extreme weather events due to climate change?
Rick Harp
Uh, in 100 words or less? *laughs* I mean something we tried to do was stretch the boundaries of storytelling that tries to account for how we got here. Not only back across time, but across the planet as a whole. Colonialism was a global event. Well, see, I’m trying to be careful with these words “event” and “structure” because we use them in very particular ways, like “event” is acute. Where “systems” are chronic and pervasive. Events are just flares, if you know what I mean….
Colonialism decided to expand across the planet from one part of that planet to acquire resources, to push people off the land, and bring them back to the metropole. I mean, that’s really the first wave of globalization and that was working intertwined with capitalist imperatives to get raw materials, to commodify them, and sell them, to feed and to furnish peoples of Europe using goods and sometimes a labour of peoples ripped from other parts of the world. So, that attitude towards — to lands to waters — has reached a point where it’s become so pervasive and so efficient, and so, totalizing that we find ourselves where we are now.
Now, people have tried to do the carbon accounting of how imperial forces of Europe, kind of produced all this carbon. Carbon has this bedevilling quality that once it’s in the air, it takes a very long time for it to come out. Like, so long, some people say it might as well be there forever. And so that carbon debt — the bill’s coming due, so to speak. And it’s usually coming due on the people who’ve had the least amount to do with it, the most exploited.
That’s how we tried to connect it. When we’re having conversations here in Toronto, or Winnipeg, or Vancouver, we’re simultaneously having a conversation whose tentacles and precedence reach back in time and reach across history and reach across the planet…if you misapprehend the problem, that will predetermine your solutions — your sense of what the solutions are. And so, it is a tall order to try and bring history to bear — living history. But it has to be done, otherwise you won’t know how we got here, and you need to know how you got somewhere in order to know where to go next.
BM: To what extent was it discussed at the event what Indigenous communities are doing to draw attention [to] the need [for] accountability from institutions and people and infrastructures in the country?
Candis Callison
I would say that’s like a front and centre concern and part of the conversation…journalists are in the business of holding the powers that be accountable, so it’s absolutely a part of the mix of how people were talking about it. But also, a lot of the scholars are recording how institutions and systems are not serving Indigenous communities and the kind of suffering that should be alleviated by systems and institutions and are not being alleviated.
So, I think that those sorts of conversations end up being pretty productive because you have journalists who are interested in accountability, you have scholars who are actively tracking the ways in which accountability is not happening. But it’s part of the chemistry that we hoped would happen when we brought together journalists and scholars. That sort of conversation about: how do we address this? How do we amplify Indigenous narratives? What do Indigenous narratives add to the conversation in terms of thinking about what systems and institutions can do — could do, for communities?
BM: About the importance of including Indigenous narratives and the climate conversations that we have…What would you say that is lacking [due to] the exclusion or the lack of inclusion of Indigenous narratives? Or, I guess on the flip side, what would you hope to be gained by including them?
Candis Callison
So, in my research life — and the research lives of like several other people who were participating as scholars — we’ve seen how Indigenous knowledge has been thought of as a resource or something to be added to science, or maybe to extend the record of observations. And what myself and almost every other Indigenous scholar in the climate change scholarship world have been saying is that Indigenous knowledge actually provides us with a path forward.
Indigenous communities have wisdom that should be driving our planning for adaptation and responding to impacts. I think that the way that Indigenous communities think about care and about relations should inform how we think about responding. In part, because so much of the climate conversation has depended on this notion that there was a stable past. Indigenous communities don’t operate that way.
Most Indigenous communities, though they’re very diverse, have some sense of “things could change.” So, how do we make sure that things don’t change in a bad way while we stay in good relations with our non-human kin, with the lands and waters that we are in close relation with? I think that sort of mentality should be a guiding principle to how we respond to this moment of extreme environmental change. I mean, we are moving into a world in which, 10 years ago, scientists were describing as “possible catastrophes,” confronting us in multiple regions around the world. How we navigate through this next period of instability, potential catastrophes, storms that are wreaking havoc, summers of wildfires — that really has to be guided by a certain kind of mentality and set of principles that I think Indigenous communities really have been developing and working on as a community since time immemorial, right? How to be in good relations with the lands and waters that you are in.
BM: And just as far as the conversations that are being had around climate change and environmental issues — for both of you, what communities or institutions or people do you think the current climate reporting is serving?
Candis Callison
I’ve often said that climate change should be in every section of the news…because if we took climate change seriously, it should change how we report on economics, how we report on governance, how we report on sports. How we report on basically every sector of our lives.
BM: I agree, because it affects everything. Like every aspect of existence, it’s not just the environmental section.
Rick Harp
Well, there are those who would argue that even the word “environment” or “climate” creates a distance between us. When it’s just the space we inhabit, the air we breathe….
Our views, our interests, our stories have [not been] taken up as seriously as they could be. Except insofar as they provide tomorrow’s event driven, flare-up of a fire, or a flood. It’s just fodder for spectacle. And I think the message that came out for me from this discussion that we had — this three-day discussion — is [that] we need journalism that’s no longer about spectacle, but survival, because that’s what we need.
BM: Candis, you’ve done a lot of research on Indigenous journalism and climate reporting and climate change, and how this is being talked about in the public [eye]. What do you, or also Rick, think institutions like journalism can do better in the way that we frame climate stories and the voices that we choose to include in telling these stories?
Candis Callison
I have been thinking about this idea of “systems journalism” that my coauthor, Mary Lynn Young and I talk about at the end of the Reckoning book, in part, because I have been thinking about and with climate change and Indigenous journalism for so long. And it’s really what animated the idea for this event as well. So often, we’re focused on events, and they are compelling. My gosh, when you see a typhoon hit the coast of Arctic Alaska, and you see those images, and you know that people are displaced — that is news; we should be reporting on that. In fact, we probably should be reporting on that more. But how you begin to understand those events as sites for understanding larger processes, larger systems, larger failures of institutions becomes really important.
It took me a while to find sources that quoted scientists that helped me understand that yes, these typhoons hit this area all the time, but normally the ice has formed, and so it forms a barrier and therefore you don’t have this kind of flooding. It took me even longer to find — way after the fact — people reporting on how institutions had failed some of these communities, and you know, the systems weren’t set up to prepare for this kind of chaos and catastrophe. I think…how we have to… think about these events is [to ask]: What is really happening here? How is it connected to the larger forces that are climate change? How are systems and institutions helping communities to prepare, or how are they hindering them? How are they making it very difficult to adapt to these changing circumstances, and you know what they are confronted with in both responding to and recovering from catastrophes? And for me, that’s the larger picture that has to be part of how we report on climate change. Such that we’re also following up on these stories.
Rick Harp
Talking about the future of journalism and how to integrate Indigenous history and Indigenous perspectives…I think we need to stop approaching stories as the sole preserve of journalists and find ways to connect to the people — the ostensible audience — and be more collaborative….
Our failure to tell the story of climate change properly is an indictment, I think. And so we have to take a long, hard look at that — and sober look at that — as journalists.
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