It’s especially notable then, that Fraser-Monroe’s new full-length ballet, “Cikilaxʷm: Controlled Burn,” does feature Indigenous characters. It can do so because Ballet Kelowna, where Fraser-Monroe made his first-ever professional ballet back in 2021, employs two Indigenous dancers.

In “Controlled Burn,” one of these dancers, MacKye White, will portray a character inspired by Fraser-Monroe’s real-life younger brother, a BC firefighter who has served as “a young Indigenous man fighting fires in a colonial context,” Fraser-Monroe said. Ballet Kelowna’s other Indigenous company member, McKeely Borger, will play Mothkʷ, a keeper of ancestral knowledge who practices controlled burns, an ancient method of careful land stewardship.

The story is timely and deeply relevant to Fraser-Monroe’s own people. The Tla’amin nation, which counts about 1200 members, regained sovereignty over their lands only 10 years ago, when a treaty was ratified in 2016. Elders Betty Wilson and Elsie Paul have since passed the startling backstory of this treaty—and the tragic loss of ancestral stewardship—onto Fraser-Monroe. In 1918, “six years after the provincial government took over the wildfire management of our province, along with the ownership of all the lands, the village burned to the ground,” Fraser-Monroe recounts. “This is lush, wet land on the coast of BC.”

But while Fraser-Monroe could have drawn on just that personal connection to the subject, he was also mindful that he was making this work outside the Tla’amin’s lands. Ballet Kelowna is located on the ancestral home of the Syilx Okanagan. Fraser-Monroe reached out to their knowledge keepers Tara Montgomery and Elliott Tonasket to learn their burn practices, and attended a cultural controlled burn conducted by the Syilx First Nation. He talked with fire scientist Dr. Amy Cardinal Christanson, who is Métis—a distinct group of people with both Indigenous and European ancestry—as well as with conventional firefighters trying to put Indigenous knowledge into action. 

These extended conversations, Fraser-Monroe said, were essential. “There’s as many reasons to burn as there are First Nations,” he said, “but we’re telling a story rooted here.”

“Controlled Burn” makes this story visceral and cinematic, drawing on the trench-digging, hose-hauling labor of firefighting for the ensemble choreography, and incorporating video footage of recent devastating fires from the BC Wildfire Service projected onto 12-foot high scaffoldings. The music is by Cris Derksen, a classically trained Cree composer and frequent Fraser-Monroe collaborator who debuted in Carnegie Hall in 2024. Just as important as all these elements, though, is Fraser-Monroe’s core choreographic ability, which Ballet Kelowna artistic director Simone Orlando said she saw clearly in his first commissioned work. “It was based on the traditional Tla’amin story ‘Raven Returns to the Water’,” Orlando recalled. “And in that 20-minute work, I could see that Cameron could easily describe narrative through dance, a skill that usually takes years to develop as a choreographer.”