St. Paul’s Anglican Church (Gitwangak, BC) — first fire (minor damage)

In the early hours of Saturday, 26 June 2021, a fire broke out at St. Paul's Anglican Church on Gitwangak Indian Band land near the village of Gitwangak (also spelled Kitwanga) in northwestern British Columbia, between Terrace and New Hazelton. New Hazelton RCMP responded to a report of a fire in the church entrance at around 1:15 a.m. on Church Road. The historic, century-old church, built in the late 1800s and no longer in active use by the community, was vacant at the time, and no injuries were reported.

Local firefighters with the New Hazelton Fire Department extinguished the blaze before it could consume the building, and volunteers stayed overnight to monitor the site. The church sustained only minimal damage; the front steps and entrance were burned, while the main structure and its historic tower remained standing and intact. RCMP described the fire as suspicious and opened an investigation, also examining whether it might be linked to a series of church fires elsewhere in B.C.'s southern interior. Gitwangak Chief Sandra Larin said the fire appeared to be intentional but urged calm and peaceful healing within the community, which was grieving amid the wider reckoning over unmarked graves at former residential school sites.

The fire is consistent with a domestic act of suspected arson rather than any organized or foreign-directed campaign. It occurred during a summer-2021 wave of church fires across Canada coinciding with public anguish over residential-school grave discoveries, and RCMP treated it as suspicious while checking for connections to other B.C. incidents. Notably, this was the first and least-damaging fire at St. Paul's: community and emergency responders saved the building, leaving only minor damage. No cause was confirmed and no arrests were publicly reported in the cited coverage; details should be treated as preliminary.