How Indigenous leaders are teaching youth on reserves to help their communities cope with disasters

In the face of Canada's worst wildfire season on record, a national program that teaches Indigenous youth to become emergency preparedness leaders is more important than ever, say its founders. 

The Preparing Our Home program aims to improve disaster management on reserve by sharing practices geared towards Indigenous communities – communities that are increasingly and disproportionately affected by the impacts of climate change. 

"With Preparing Our Home, there's been a real awareness and education [about] disasters and evacuations, how to work with your community when those incidents happen," program co-founder and mentor Darlene Yellow Old Woman-Munro told CBC's What On Earth. 

As part of the program, Yellow Old Woman-Munro shares lessons learned during the climate-linked disaster that struck her own nation: the 2013 flood that hit the Siksika Nation and other parts of southern Alberta. 

In its aftermath, Yellow Old Woman-Munro developed the Dancing Deer Disaster Recovery Centre to support evacuees spread out around the large reserve. 

Evacuees were usually expected to travel to a central location for support, but Yellow Old Woman-Munro said she knew her community needed a different approach. She put together a team of health-care workers and youth to visit evacuees in the temporary sites where they were living instead.

"For evacuees, to travel was an issue," Yellow Old Woman-Munro said. "So it was easier for us … to go out and meet with the evacuees, find out what they needed, bring food, bring water, blankets, tents to them." 

The Preparing Our Home Program, which has been running for seven years, shares these kinds of community-focused practices with Indigenous youth across Canada. 

Program co-founder and director Lilia Yumagulova said conventional disaster response is inappropriate for many living on reserve. For example, being taken on a bus and housed in evacuation centres, such as gymnasiums with rows of cots and bright lights, can be a "traumatic triggering event," for residential school survivors, she said. 

"There is a lot … that needs to be changed to make it much more culturally safe," she said.

When it comes to emergency preparedness, Yumagulova said, conventional messaging is aimed at middle class, able-bodied people who can afford an emergency preparedness kit and a vehicle. 

"There is this silent majority that actually falls outside of those spaces and that's where a lot of preparedness efforts should be directed," she said.

Preparing Our Home holds an annual gathering in Osoyoos, B.C. in the fall, during which youth learn from elders and emergency management professionals. 

"We really begin with understanding why communities are at such a disproportionate amount of risk," said Yumagulova. "So you begin with the Indian Act and the forced displacement that many communities went through."