Blazing Trails: Six Nations Training Firefighters From All Over Ontario in New State-of-the-art Faci

She's sweating under her heavy bunker gear, but smiling - an eager student, and a proud one as one of only two women to make it through the training being offered to firefighters from northern Ontario.

Boshkaykin is among about a dozen left from the initial 20 who participated in the program the Six Nations Fire Department is running. The group, who will graduate April 6, are being put through the same rigorous six-week course undertaken by firefighters working on Six Nations - a department that, under the leadership of Chief Matthew Miller, has transformed from one lacking in everything (firefighters, stations, trucks, equipment, training) into a professionalized unit.

"It was kind of a shock at first because a lot of the stuff we are learning, we aren't taught at home," Boshkaykin said of her training.

She's fire chief of a volunteer department at Seine River First Nation, about three-and-a-half hours northwest of Thunder Bay, which has nine volunteers.

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"Usually, when we join the fire department back home, it's like, put that water on the fire, put it out, wet stuff on the hot stuff, you know, and that's about as far as the training goes."

Boshkaykin said she jumped at the chance to train with Six Nations - the largest reserve in Canada - and will be bringing her new skills back home.

The training began with theoretical classes in early February in Thunder Bay and then moved to the Six Nations' new training facility for practical lessons.

The 50,000-square-foot facility is a retrofitted building originally planned to be a thermal plant on Fourth Line in Ohsweken. It's complete with an open- concept classroom and interior training house where trainees can simulate searches, hose advances and work with ladders.

The building sat vacant for about four years before Miller went to the Six Nations Elected Council and asked to turn it into a training facility with the aim of eventually turning it into a revenue stream.

"If we took our experience in firefighting, because we have a whole lot of fires ... to generate revenue, I figured we could start to offer training," he said.

It's also a remedy to the "fly-by-night consulting companies" that Miller said typically offer lacklustre firefighting training to First Nations communities.

With a $50,000 budget from the elected council and a lot of labour from the community's firefighters, the facility opened in August. The department is seeking private career college designation, with the possibility of Six Nations becoming one of three designated First Nations firefighting training centres in the province.

When Miller took over as fire chief in April 2015, his headquarters was a trailer while the new fire station was under construction. He had a pool of just 11 regular volunteer firefighters and just four pumper fire trucks.

Flash forward to present day. The $2.6-million fire department headquarters opened last April (largely thanks to a $2 million private donation from tobacco manufacturer Grand River Enterprise). The department is hiring a deputy chief, two district chiefs, two captains, eight full-time and 12 part-time firefighters, on top of a roster of 48 volunteers. They have 16 apparatuses, including a new aerial ladder truck.

The fire department has about a $1.4-million annual budget with about one-third coming from the federal government.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) has funded two structures that sit on the training facility grounds. A new live burn unit that cost about $400,000 just opened - it allows firefighters to work with actual fire inside the mock residence. The government also funded a flashover container for about $15,000 that allows firefighters to study how fire moves.

Yet Miller, who left a career with Ornge air ambulance to return to his home community, says there is still a long way to go toward making Six Nations and all First Nations communities safer.

Six Nations is still dealing with two or three major fires a month, he said. There have been fewer arsons, but deliberately set fires remain a serious problem.

A lack of building code regulation also makes fires rage out of control very quickly. Those living on First Nations have a 10.4 per cent greater chance of dying in a house fire than those living off reserves, according to a 2007 Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. report.

Six Nations firefighters assisted in December at a house fire that killed a man and four children in Oneida Nation of the Thames, southwest of London.

More worrying, Miller says, is the fact that nobody is tracking fires on First Nations, so the scope of the problem is just not known.

A Toronto Star investigation into fires on reserves found at least 172 people have died in First Nations fires across Canada since 2010.

"I know in my heart that before we see greater change we will see more people passing away," Miller said.

The northern Ontario firefighter training is part of the work Miller is doing to lobby for better fire training and standards in all First Nations communities.

Last April, Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada and the Aboriginal Firefighters Association of Canada published an updated Joint First Nations Fire Protection Strategy. Miller is also part of an Ontario First Nations firefighting strategy that will be released in May. It will include calls for legislative change, including to building codes and a recommendation to establish a First Nations fire marshal office.

Miller believes it's important to better understand the individual issues First Nations communities face instead of just throwing money at them for new equipment. He pointed to examples of communities getting fire trucks when they didn't have a station to prevent the truck from freezing overnight, or getting bunker gear that's not sized right.

As part of the Be Fire Safe program, he will be visit 21 remote Northern Ontario fly-in First Nations to offer community training around fire prevention. "This is the first time in 17 years I feel positive," Miller said.

Back inside the training facility, Matthew Hillier, a member of Caldwell First Nation from Leamington, Ont., said he was shocked over how much he had to learn from the training program.

One day he dreams of taking the skills he's learned and going to remote First Nations to offer training.

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