![\"\"](\"http:\/\/live-hakamagwp.pantheonsite.io\/wp-content\/uploads\/measuring-hypermaritime-fire.jpg\")
<\/a>By examining tree rings, Kira Hoffman calculated the dates of historical wildfires. Photo courtesy of Kira Hoffman<\/p><\/div>\n
Drawing on archaeological evidence, she also identified 20 former villages across the study area, and found signs that the locations and sizes of the fires were related to where people lived.<\/p>\n
Hoffman also drew on testimonies by First Nations elders around Bella Bella, who remembered older generations burning hills and mountainsides to increase future berry harvests. On Haida Gwaii, another very wet place, there are also stories of people setting entire small islands alight. These accounts echoed stories from Patagonia and Tasmania, where indigenous peoples burned similarly moist tracts of coastal temperate rainforest.<\/p>\n
In all, Hoffman discovered that between 1376 and 1893, at least 16 fires had burned on Hecate Island\u2014roughly one fire every 40 years.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no way lightning can explain the amount of fires we found, because it doesn\u2019t happen enough,\u201d she says. \u201cI feel that the fires were intentional, but I\u2019m sure some were accidental too. A majority of the fires, based on the patterns of the flora, would suggest that they knew exactly what they were doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The expertise required to set and manage such fires has since been lost in the area. But as to why they would have been set, University of Victoria ethnobotanist and author Nancy Turner believes First Nations peoples used fire to open up forest areas to grasses for deer and other game. Fire would also be used to make the landscape more suitable for growing berry bushes. \u201cBlueberries would have really been increased, not just in numbers but in quality, size, and overall productivity, about three or four years after the fire,\u201d Turner says.<\/p>\n
Harvey Humchitt, a hereditary chief who works for the resource management department of the Heiltsuk Nation, says local people still harvest berries in the region, although deliberate burning is a distant memory. The last time fire swept Hecate Island was in 1893, according to Hoffman\u2019s research, which corresponds with the devastation of smallpox that Humchitt says caused the depopulation of local villages, and the end of fire use in the region.<\/p>\n