Something is unsettling about watching a land burn from afar. In images from British Columbia, Canada, mountains disappear behind smoke, the sky turns orange, and families leave their homes carrying what they can. At the same time, firefighters confront flames that move faster than people and emergency systems can respond.

In the summer of 2026, wildfires led to the evacuation of thousands of people, and Indigenous communities suffered significant losses. We can count the hectares burned, the homes destroyed, and the people evacuated. But these numbers tell us far less about what happens to a child who loses not only a home, but also the place through which they learned what it means to belong.

A reader might wonder why a child protection specialist who has spent years working on violence prevention would write about wildfires in Canada. Perhaps I wondered the same thing as I followed the images and the news. Yet something in these scenes brought me back to a question that has accompanied my work for a long time: What do we really mean when we say that we protect children?

We think, rightly, about physical safety, shelter, keeping families together, returning to school, and access to essential services. But what about the web of relationships that gives meaning to a child’s life: their relationship with extended family, community, memory, culture, and place?

As I followed the wildfires in British Columbia, I found myself thinking about an idea that perhaps our protection systems have perhaps not given enough attention to: displacement has an ecology.

Belonging to a family does not happen in a vacuum. A family belongs to a community, a community lives in a place, and a place carries language, memory, stories, relationships, ways of life, trees, and waters through which people come to know themselves. For this reason, a child’s uprooting does not always begin with separation from family. It can also begin with separation from the land that gives family, community, and memory their meaning.

No Land Is Without History

We cannot think about Indigenous children in Canada outside the long history of forced separation. Indigenous children were taken from their families and sent to residential schools. Other practices followed, including what became known as the Sixties Scoop, during which thousands of Indigenous children were removed and adopted into non-Indigenous families.

These policies intersected with broader processes of land dispossession, restrictions on Indigenous languages and cultural practices, and the weakening of communities’ ability to determine their own relationships with their lands. When we speak today about the evacuation of an Indigenous community because of a wildfire, therefore, we cannot treat it as though it were happening on land without history.

Of course, a wildfire evacuation is not a residential school, and different historical and political experiences should not be equated. But history inhabits how we experience the present.

Canadian public health reviews have noted that some evacuations triggered memories associated with residential schools and the removal of Indigenous children, particularly when people were transported by bus, family members were separated from one another, or Elders were evacuated without their caregivers.

In such situations, evacuation is no longer simply a movement from a threatened home to a safer place. It may also mean separation from relatives, language, animals, rivers, forests, and the places that constitute the map of everyday life.

There is another history to fire itself.

Long before British Columbia existed as a Canadian province, Indigenous Peoples lived with fire and managed their relationship with it in ways very different from the model of fire suppression later imposed by colonial authorities. Cultural and prescribed burning formed part of caring for the land, renewing certain plants, sustaining ecosystems and food sources, and reducing the accumulation of combustible materials.

Colonialism did not only dispossess people of their land. It also marginalized their knowledge and practices for caring for it.

Research conducted in the traditional territory of T’exelc (Williams Lake First Nation) indicates that a historical pattern of frequent, low-intensity fires changed substantially following colonial epidemics, displacement onto reserves, and the suppression of traditional burning practices.

Today, British Columbia authorities themselves acknowledge that decades of fire suppression contributed to increased forest density and the accumulation of combustible vegetation. They are also returning to recognition of the importance of burning practices that Indigenous Peoples have known and practiced for generations.

The paradox lies not only in the fact that knowledge once marginalized in the name of “progress” is now being sought by institutions as part of the solution. It also raises another question: Will the holders of this knowledge be recognized as partners in power and decision-making, or will their knowledge simply be extracted while existing power relations remain unchanged?

This unequal relationship continues even in moments of danger.

During the recent wildfires, Indigenous children’s rights advocate Cindy Blackstock spoke about helping her brother leave an area threatened by fire in British Columbia. According to her account, firefighters had already placed hoses around the house and on its roof while an official evacuation order had yet to be issued. She also recounted meeting an Elder who did not know that a wildfire alert had been issued.

These details complicate the question of emergency response. The existence of an alert on an app or website does not mean that people actually received it. What matters is not simply whether a warning was issued, but who was able to access it, when they received it, how much time they had to act, and whether they had the means to leave in the first place.

This becomes particularly important for Elders, people with disabilities, families with young children, and remote communities with limited communications and infrastructure.

Canadian public health data indicate that First Nations communities account for approximately 42 percent of wildfire-related evacuations, despite Indigenous Peoples making up only around five percent of Canada’s population.

These figures remind us that vulnerability is not always an inherent characteristic of a person or community. It can be produced through an unequal relationship between risk, resources, and the capacity to respond.

Fire may not ask who you are. Its consequences, however, are not equally distributed.

What Do We Count When We Count Loss?

Amid the discussions about wildfires, I kept thinking about how members of affected communities described what they had lost.

Others may measure a disaster in hectares and buildings. Within a community, however, loss may also be measured through memories that disappeared: old family photographs and possessions passed down through generations.

A house can perhaps be rebuilt. A memory cannot always be reconstructed.

And a place that holds stories, medicinal plants, burial grounds, hunting routes, and gathering places cannot be reduced to its material value.

We are good at counting what burned.

We are less able to count what was severed.

At this point, it becomes difficult for me to remain in Canada.

Writing about Indigenous children watching their lands burn brings me back to the children of our own countries, to places where children have learned what it means for home suddenly to become somewhere they must flee, and for the land they know to become somewhere they can no longer reach.

I am not saying these experiences are the same.

A wildfire shaped by climatic and environmental conditions is not bombardment. Colonialism in Canada has its own particular history, just as Palestine and Lebanon have their own distinct political, colonial, and wartime contexts.

But acknowledging difference does not prevent us from placing these experiences in conversation with one another and asking what happens to a child when the land through which they learned what belonging means becomes uninhabitable or inaccessible.

For many of us, land is not simply an abstract environmental concept.

It is home, the village, the place and land we say we are from even if we were born somewhere else. It is the olive tree planted by a grandfather, the orchard tended by the family, the road to a grandmother’s house, the mountain visible from the window, and the cemetery where generations of the family are buried.

Children inherit this geography before they understand the politics surrounding it.

In southern Lebanon, human rights organizations have documented Israel’s use of white phosphorus in several towns since October 2023, including over populated areas. The effects of incendiary weapons are not limited to direct injuries. They can affect vegetation, agricultural land, and homes and contribute to displacement.

In March 2026, Human Rights Watch again documented the use of white phosphorus over a residential area in the southern Lebanese town of Yohmor.

But the language of reports does not always tell us what a child sees at that moment.

What reports describe as “agricultural damage” may be, for a child, the orchard where they played. “Damaged civilian property” may be their grandmother’s house.

When places of memory burn, children lose something that the conventional language of protection does not quite know how to name.

And here, two profoundly different experiences; an Indigenous child evacuated from their community in British Columbia and a child who fled a village in southern Lebanon under bombardment, can reveal the same limitation in our understanding of protection without requiring us to equate the two.

These Are Not Extremist Questions

A child who watches their land burn or their home be destroyed does not simply witness an event. They also try to understand why it happened, who is responsible, why no one could protect them, why they have to leave, and why they cannot return.

These are not extremist questions. They are human questions about grief and justice, dignity, identity, and belonging.

Grief is not extremism.

Anger at injustice is not extremism.

Protesting oppression or demanding justice is not an indicator of extremism.

But the search for meaning does not disappear simply because we fail to provide a space in which it can be acknowledged.

Extremist narratives do not always need to invent pain. They may encounter a wound that is already real: a destroyed home, burned land, a displaced family, a sense of injustice, and a loss of trust in institutions.

They can then reduce all this complexity to a single explanation: “They did this to you.”

In this way, a real experience of loss and injustice can be transformed into an identity built around hostility and, potentially, into a justification for violence.

Prevention, then, does not mean silencing anger or asking young people to abandon it. Perhaps it means the opposite: creating spaces in which anger can become language, critical awareness, demands for justice, and civic and political action, rather than leaving it to those who present violence as the only path toward reclaiming dignity.

What We Do Not Know How to Measure

In our countries, war remains in the land long after the bombardment stops.

It remains in unexploded ordnance, in soil and water, in fields that are no longer safe to enter, in burned trees and destroyed homes, and in roads that children can no longer safely walk.

This leads me to wonder whether our understanding of violence affecting children remains too centred on the body.

We count those who have been killed, injured, and displaced. We document destroyed schools and hospitals. This is necessary.

But we do not yet know how to adequately document the destruction of the world to which a child belongs: the burned orchard, the soil that is no longer safe, the animals left behind during displacement, the village transformed so profoundly that returning no longer means returning to the same place, or the tree beneath which three generations of a family once gathered.

These are not sentimental details at the margins of loss.

They are part of the loss itself.

How do we measure the impact of growing up while watching one’s land burn again and again?

How do we measure the severing of the relationship between a generation and a land?

And how do we understand what happens when the place through which a child learned to answer the question, “Where am I from?”, becomes a place they can no longer reach?

Perhaps, then, we should not ask only how we protect children from a world that is burning.

We should also ask:

What must we protect around them so that belonging remains possible?