Siksika Nation Catholic Church (Gleichen, AB) deliberately set

In the early hours of Monday, 28 June 2021, first responders were called to a fire at a Catholic church on the Siksika Nation, near Gleichen, Alberta, roughly 95 kilometres east of Calgary. The call came in at about 12:30 a.m. The Siksika Fire Department extinguished the blaze before it caused significant structural damage. The church was unoccupied at the time and no one was injured. CTV News, which described the damage as minimal, reported that an arson investigation was underway.

According to Gleichen RCMP, a preliminary investigation indicated that one or more people had deliberately started the fire. The provincial fire investigator and the RCMP took up the case, and police appealed to the public for any information about the suspect or suspects, directing tips to Gleichen RCMP or Crime Stoppers. Global News reported the incident as a church fire being investigated as arson, and Lethbridge News Now likewise reported RCMP investigating the suspicious fire. The fire occurred during a broader wave of fires and vandalism at churches across Canada in mid-2021, amid the national reckoning over unmarked graves discovered at former residential school sites, though authorities did not publicly confirm a specific motive in this case.

This is a domestic Canadian incident, not connected to foreign or hybrid-warfare activity. It falls within a documented summer-2021 pattern of fires and vandalism at churches, several on First Nation lands, that coincided with the discovery of unmarked graves at former residential schools. RCMP characterised the Siksika church fire as deliberately set and investigated it as arson, but no public attribution of motive or named suspect was reported for this specific fire, and reporting notes it was not linked to separate grass fires charged on the reserve days later.