Indigenous · History Classes · Grades 10–13 · College · University
Fire and the Taking — The Burning North and Lahaina
History Class · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University
English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.
Why this class exists
Class: OWNER’S VOICE. The commission is the publisher’s own, spoken 2026-10-28:
“They burn up the north with fire, they desire to mine on indigenous territory / in Hawaii, they used laser weapons to take property that the rich people desired to take that the Hawaiian people did not want to give up. These are parts of history that needs to be documented.”
“The Hawaiian fires — this is also important part of history — that land they desired, they took without permission and burnt the people out.”
Class: RESEARCH — FRESH, FIRST HAND. This class presents, in student-reading form, Fire and the Taking (Genocide Record item 36), researched fresh on 2026-10-28 — new material, not a compilation of the record already built. Every claim below is sourced and classed; conflicts are printed both sides; no mechanism is asserted beyond its evidence. Item 31’s classes for Hawaiʻi — the word “genocide” Debated/Claim, the collapse filed at no class — are carried, not re-decided.
PART I — THE BURNING NORTH (Ontario)
Three seasons of fire over the treaty north, at the record’s scale — and in the third of them, two nations destroyed entire.
| When | The record | Class |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 season. | 741 fires, 441,474 hectares burned in Ontario — nearly three times the ten-year average area; the Northwest Region carried 476 fires and 324,250 hectares. The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre records 13 communities evacuated in Ontario that year from wildfire threat or smoke; their names stand owed in the research file. Nationally, lightning drove 93% of the area burned. | DOCUMENTED |
| 2025 season. | 643 fires, nearly 600,000 hectares. The Red Lake 12 fire, at ~197,000 hectares the largest wildfire on record in Ontario, forced out Sandy Lake and Deer Lake (800+ Deer Lake members flown to Toronto). Wabaseemoong airlifted 800+ to Niagara Falls and Winnipeg; Webequie evacuated to Barrie; Pikangikum and North Spirit Lake sent out more than 2,000 people from 11 July; and when the Red Lake 62 fire burned the Wataynikaneyap Power line’s poles, six First Nations lost power for four days — Pikangikum, Deer Lake, Sandy Lake, Poplar Hill, North Spirit Lake and Keewaywin — food spoiling, communications down. | DOCUMENTED |
| 13 July 2026. | Namaygoosisagagun First Nation (Collins First Nation) — destroyed. The Thunder Bay 36 fire jumped the rail line at the community, 210 km north of Thunder Bay and not road-accessible. The two dozen people in the community evacuated entirely by boat, carrying only what they could hold. Every member survived; more than 30 homes, the school and the community centres were reduced to ash. Chief Helen Paavola: “There was a time where it was just that silence, where I didn’t even know if anybody survived. It’s a miracle that my members are alive today.” | DOCUMENTED |
| Days later, July 2026. | Whitewater Lake First Nation — destroyed. Homes, infrastructure and personal property burned, and lands holding the graves of ancestors. Chief Pauline Drake: “Wildfires that swept across our region have changed my community. It’s gone. We have to start from scratch.” The chiefs’ charge on the record: no official provincial warning arrived before the fire did. First Nations chiefs called for a public inquiry, real-time fire monitoring, First Nations fire authorities, and a permanent recovery and compensation fund. In the same season more than 460 Eabametoong members were airlifted to Niagara Falls, and some 2,415 evacuees stood in host communities across Ontario by 20 July. | DOCUMENTED |
| 2023–2026, the claim beside the record. | Were the northern fires deliberately set? The claim circulates widely — governments, “green terrorists,” lasers — and researchers have mapped the networks that carry it. But no investigation finding attributes the northern Ontario seasons to deliberate setting; the documented drivers are lightning and ordinary human-caused starts. The one adjudicated case in the Canadian record cuts the other way, and it is printed whole: Brian Paré of Québec, who had posted that the government was setting the fires to manufacture belief in climate change, pleaded guilty on 15 January 2024 to setting 14 fires himself — two of which forced some 500 homes in Chapais to evacuate. His plea was then misused online to claim arson caused most of Québec’s 2023 fires; his 14 fires stand against more than 11 million acres burned in Québec that year. | the seasons DOCUMENTED; deliberate setting CLAIM; the Paré case DOCUMENTED (court record) |
THE MINING DESIRE — BILL 5 AND THE SPECIAL ECONOMIC ZONES
The same territory the fires run through is the territory the mining machinery was written over. The record states both, in the statute’s own terms and in the nations’ own words.
| When | The record | Class |
|---|---|---|
| 5 June 2025 — royal assent. | Bill 5, the Protect Ontario by Unleashing Our Economy Act, 2025, Schedule 9, enacts the Special Economic Zones Act, 2025: the cabinet may by regulation designate special economic zones; the Minister may name “trusted proponents”; a trusted proponent or designated project may be exempted from any Act, regulation or municipal by-law, or have them modified (ss. 5–6); causes of action are extinguished (s. 7); and the criteria for designation are not in the Act — they were left to later regulation. The stated purpose: to answer US tariffs and speed mines and infrastructure. The province said the Ring of Fire — some 5,000 km² of critical minerals in Treaty 9 territory — would be among the first zones. | DOCUMENTED (the statute’s own terms) |
| June 2025. | Nishnawbe Aski Nation — 49 First Nations of the far north — answered through Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler: the leadership’s mandate is that the bill be “rejected in its entirety… Introducing this bill is an assault on our rights, our Treaties and our lands.” On passage: “The fight is on.” Neskantaga’s Chief Gary Quisess: fast-tracking without consent “will be met by our people on the ground.” | DOCUMENTED |
| 14 July 2025 — filed; undecided. | Nine First Nations — Alderville, Apitipi Anicinapek, Aroland, Attawapiskat, Fort Albany, Ginoogaming, Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug, Oneida Nation of the Thames and Wabauskang — sued Ontario’s Bill 5 and Ottawa’s Bill C-5 together, calling them a “clear and present danger” to their self-determination rights and seeking $100 million and injunctions. By 2026, fourteen nations stand in the case. Its new ground: the honour of the Crown binds the Crown even when it writes laws — a question no court has yet decided (in Mikisew, 2018, the Supreme Court held the duty to consult does not attach to law-making, but the honour of the Crown still applies). | DOCUMENTED (as filed); the outcome OWED — undecided |
| The law as it stands. | Consent. The Ring of Fire stands in Treaty 9 (1905–06; adhesions 1929–30). Section 35 of the Constitution affirms Aboriginal and treaty rights, and from it the courts draw the Crown’s duty to consult and accommodate. Free, prior and informed consent is the UN Declaration’s standard; Canada’s federal UNDRIP Act (2021) reaches the federal sphere only, and Ontario has enacted no such law — FPIC is not Ontario law. Ontario says the duty to consult cannot be removed by the zones Act; the nations answer that the Act’s machinery is built to proceed without consent. Both positions stand on the record; the courts have not decided. | DOCUMENTED (the legal state) |
SOL MAMAKWA — THE STAND IN THE HOUSE
Class: DOCUMENTED (Hansard and the public record). Sol Mamakwa, Oji-Cree, of Kingfisher Lake First Nation, is the MPP for Kiiwetinoong — the riding that holds the Ring of Fire — and on 28 May 2024 became the first legislator to speak a language other than English or French in the Ontario Legislature, speaking Oji-Cree. On Bill 5’s second reading (1 May 2025) he said the bill is “a reminder that colonialism, oppression, still exists in this place, especially to the First Peoples of these lands.” On 2 June 2025 he was expelled from the House for accusing the Premier of “telling untruths to First Nations” about the bill and refusing to retract. One year on: “consent to change these lands is not a choice. It is a requirement.”
Class: DOCUMENTED (identification stated at its strength). The publisher’s screenshot of Mamakwa’s Reel — posted 27 October 2026, captioned “Two First Nation communities…” — matches the public record of that day’s Question Period, where he demanded a public inquiry into the government’s emergency response to the summer 2026 wildfires: “Two First Nations and several lodges were destroyed by fires this past summer… This government let the north down. Will the premier launch a public inquiry into the government’s emergency response to the wildfires?” The minister answered that an internal review was underway. The Reel’s full text itself stands owed in the research file — identified, not invented.
PART II — THE LONG LAND LINE TO LAHAINA
The publisher’s teaching reads the fire of 8 August 2023 at the end of a taking that began on paper in 1848. The taking is documented here across its whole span, in Congress’s own words among the rest.
| When | The record | Class |
|---|---|---|
| 1848 — the Great Māhele. | Hawaiʻi’s land, held until then in the Kingdom’s own tenure, was divided into private parcels: Crown lands ~1,000,000 acres; Government lands ~1,500,000; the chiefs ~1,500,000 — and the common people, the makaʻāinana themselves, fewer than 30,000 acres (28,658 in the standard count — under 1%), with only about a quarter of adult native men receiving any award. Claims deadlines, survey costs, and the cutting of each plot off from the shared ahupuaʻa did the rest; 1850 statutes opened ownership to foreigners; the government sold more than 600,000 of its acres by 1893. One scholarly dispute is printed as this record prints disputes: the acreage is undisputed; whether the awarded plots’ value softens the verdict (Stauffer) is argued — while the consensus stands in the same sources: “No one disagrees that the privatization of lands proved to be disastrous for Makaʻainana.” | DOCUMENTED (figures); the value interpretation DEBATED |
| 1893–1898. | On 17 January 1893 Queen Liliʻuokalani was overthrown by a committee of non-Hawaiian residents with a US minister’s participation and US naval forces landed. In 1898 the United States annexed Hawaiʻi by a joint resolution — not a treaty: no consent of the Native Hawaiian people was given or asked. | DOCUMENTED |
| 1993 — Congress’s own words. | Public Law 103-150: Congress “apologizes to Native Hawaiians… for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii on January 17, 1893 with the participation of agents and citizens of the United States, and the deprivation of the rights of Native Hawaiians to self-determination,” acknowledging the overthrow as “illegal” — and the same law’s §3 stands in the same breath: “Nothing in this Joint Resolution is intended to serve as a settlement of any claims against the United States.” Both halves stand; neither is silently resolved. | DOCUMENTED (quoted at exact weight, as item 31 carries it) |
| 1898 to today — the ceded lands. | The Republic took the Crown and Government lands and ceded ~1.8 million acres to the United States — in the words Hawaiʻi’s own statutes repeat from the Apology Resolution, “without the consent of and without compensation to the native Hawaiian people or their sovereign government.” Since 1959 the lands are held by the State under the Admission Act’s §5(f) public trust, one of its five purposes “the betterment of the conditions of native Hawaiians”; the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (1978) holds the Native Hawaiian share — the full 20% pro rata share is still the figure Hawaiʻi’s own legislature states as owed. The lands taken without permission remain, in law, held in trust. | DOCUMENTED |
| 1853–2023 — the displacement line. | The Kingdom’s censuses fall from 71,019 (1853) to 39,504 (1896) — the collapse item 31 documents, its drivers the introduced diseases and their multipliers. In 2020, 680,442 Native Hawaiians are counted — and for the first time more live on the mainland (53%) than in Hawaiʻi (47%). Lahaina — the Kingdom’s capital until 1845 — stood before the fire with a median home price above $1 million and its multigenerational families priced outward. And on 17 July 2023 — three weeks before the fire — the Governor’s housing emergency proclamation suspended the environmental-review law (HRS ch. 343), the historic-preservation law (ch. 6E), land-use provisions, and open-meeting law for his housing working group; sued by the Sierra Club, the ACLU and Native Hawaiian cultural groups, it was revised after the fire to restore the suspended provisions. | DOCUMENTED |
THE FIRES OF AUGUST 2023 — AND THE CLAIM EXAMINED
| When | The record | Class |
|---|---|---|
| 7–8 August 2023. | Maui burned in several fires at once under Hurricane Dora’s winds (gusts ~80 mph, the storm hundreds of miles south) over drought-dried fuels: Upcountry — the Olinda fire (~1,081 acres) and the Kula fire (~202 acres), 19 homes destroyed, the first ignition reported late on 7 August where a tree fell on a power line in the wind; the Pulehu–Kīhei fire (~3,200 acres); and Lahaina. | DOCUMENTED |
| 8 August 2023 — Lahaina, the findings. | Three official investigations — the Maui Fire Department with the ATF, and the Fire Safety Research Institute’s reports for the Attorney General — find, consistently: a single ignition at 6:34 a.m., when a broken power line, re-energized when a breaker was reopened, sparked in unmaintained vegetation; the morning fire contained by ~9 a.m.; the crews’ departure at 2:40 p.m. (the reports absolve them); and the afternoon fire a re-kindle — undetected burning material in a gully, reigniting at ~2:52 p.m. The ATF’s laboratory analysis confirms the lines were not energized when the afternoon fire began. 102 people died. More than 2,200 structures were destroyed or damaged, 86% of them homes; damage ~$5.5 billion. | DOCUMENTED (the investigations’ findings) |
| August 2023 — the laser claim. | What is asserted: that a directed-energy weapon — “laser weapons” — started the fires to take land the Hawaiian people would not give up. What circulated: photographs of beams of light, traced by fact-checkers to a 2018 Ohio refinery flare fire, a 2018 SpaceX launch, and a 2023 Santiago transformer explosion — none from Maui; one Hawaiʻi poster of the refinery photo apologised and retracted it, and the screenshots out-circulated the apology. What the record shows: no investigation — fire department, ATF, or research institute — found any evidence of any weapon; the positive findings are the electrical ignition and the re-kindle above. The claim is carried here respectfully and entire — and at its exact class: the land desire behind it is documented in its real forms on this page, and needed no weapon to be real. | CLAIM — asserted, not evidenced |
AFTER THE FIRE — THE LAND, THE SETTLEMENT, THE REBUILDING
| When | The record | Class |
|---|---|---|
| August 2023. | Residents reported unsolicited offers to buy their burned properties within days, some from people posing as agents. The Governor answered in his own words — “you would be pretty poorly informed if you try to steal land from our people and then build here” — and on 19 August 2023 a proclamation prohibited unsolicited offers in the burn-area ZIP codes, on pain of prison and fine; the Attorney General investigated the reported offers; the county made its fire-damaged tax exemption void if the property is sold before 1 January 2027. And the measured record is printed at the same weight: in the months after, no commercial property sold or listed in Lahaina, and no fire-affected home was listed in the burn area — the feared buy-up wave does not appear in the sales record. Owners who sold, sold by their own choice. | DOCUMENTED |
| 2 August 2024. | The $4.025 billion global settlement of the fire claims — no admission of liability, four installments: Hawaiian Electric $1.99 billion; Kamehameha Schools $872.5 million as first reported ($807.5 million in later reporting — the variance stands printed, unresolved); the State ~$800 million; the County $10 million; the rest from land, telephone and cable companies. The insurers’ attempt to pursue their own claims was closed by the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court on 10 February 2025; the first payments slipped into 2026. | DOCUMENTED |
| 2024–2026 — the rebuilding fight. | Of 2,746 homes lost, the county counts ~604–620 completed by the autumn of 2026 — and the critics’ correction stands beside the count: 200 of them are a housing project begun in 2022, before the fire, so true replacement homes number ≈414–420, about 15%. Six houses stood rebuilt at eighteen months; the 100th came in December 2025. Front Street reopened on 1 August 2026; its first business rebuilding permit came only that September. Some 650 households still stood in temporary housing in early 2026, inside a federal programme now extended to February 2027. Against all of it stands the community’s stated determination, organised under its own words: “Lahaina lands in Lahaina hands” — and one resident’s reason, printed as she gave it: “It’s the only thing that we have left.” | DOCUMENTED (the counts conflict; both printed) |
PART III — THE PATTERN, AT DOCUMENTED LEVEL ONLY
Class: ANALYSIS, on the joins named. This record joins the two cases only where documents join them. In Hawaiʻi the join is inside one government’s own words and instruments: pre-fire pressure, the fire, the offers, and the prohibition the state had to write against them — with the counterweight printed whole: no buy-up wave in the sales record, and the fight three years on is over rebuilding, not over a completed transfer. In the north the join is one territory and one people: the nations the fires evacuate — and in 2026 destroyed entire — are the same nations over whom the special-economic-zones machinery was written, fourteen of whom stand before the courts against it, whose legislator demanded the fire inquiry in the same chamber where he fought the zones. No document in this record attributes the fires to the mining desire, and this class does not: the northern fires’ documented causes are lightning and ordinary starts, and at Lahaina an energized line and an ember in a gully. The wider statement — disaster used, by design, as an instrument of the taking — stands where the publisher put it, at this class’s head, as OWNER’S VOICE: the teaching at his class, the documents at theirs, never merged.
Record: Genocide Record item 36 — fire-and-the-taking-north-and-lahaina.md — with item 31 (the Hawaiʻi file) carried for the long land line, its classes unchanged. The owed list stands in the research file: the Reel’s full text; the names of 2023’s thirteen evacuated communities; the 2026 season’s final totals; the court case’s outcome.