Kakisa's Fire Fit: Tiny Town Yeets Wildfires with a Community Garden 🧑‍🌾🔥

The Tea

Okay, so boom. There's this tiny town called Kakisa way up north, Northwest Territories to be exact. These guys been through it, like, major L after major L with these wildfires. 2014, fire almost pulled up to their doorstep, forcing everyone to dip. Then, in 2023, another fire cut them off from the whole damn territory. Talk about a stressful sitch!

But peep this, instead of just taking the L, Kakisa decided to level up. They're building a whole entire community garden, fam! The goal? To grow their own food so they don't starve if another fire tryna cancel them. They're planting all sorts of veggies and berries – like they're prepping for the apocalypse but making it healthy.

This whole glow-up started after that 2014 fire when they scored some cash from a climate change fund. Some smarties from Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU) jumped in to help, which is kinda cool. But keeping the garden going isn't always sunshine and rainbows. They gotta deal with running out of money, keeping everyone interested, learning about new plants, and finding people who know how to garden, for real.

Word is, it's also a bit sus having these non-Indigenous peeps running the garden. They low-key gotta make sure they're not colonizing the land again, ya know? It's about more than just growing food, it's about respecting the land and the history and healing from all the residential school trauma. They're all about "food security" over just "agriculture" cause it's more about taking back what's theirs after the past colonial Ls.