Marlene Dumas and her family normally gather traditional medicine and food, including wild meat, fish and berries, around this time of year to prepare for the cold and barren winter months.

Instead, the resident of Mathias Colomb Cree Nation is in a Winnipeg hotel — where she’s been all summer — because a wildfire-related evacuation is stretching into its fourth month.

“It brings me down. I feel kind of lost because I’m not on the ground,” Dumas said about the disruption to normal life. “We’ve been on concrete for three, four months, and not touching the earth. That affects my mind, body and spirit.”

Dumas hasn’t been able to see much of her family because residents of the First Nation, also known as Pukatawagan, are scattered in Manitoba. Hundreds are in hotels in Niagara Falls, Ont.

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