The death of Chief Donny Morris’s three-year-old grandson in a house fire Monday has led to renewed calls for Ottawa to take quick action to address the lack of firefighting resources in Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI).

KI, a remote Oji-Cree community of about 1,200 people in northwestern Ontario, is also known as Big Trout Lake. It’s about 580 kilometres north of Thunder Bay and is only accessible by plane or seasonal winter road.

“Our communities have been raising concerns about fire safety and lack of resources for years, and those concerns have not been meaningfully addressed. The conditions we are seeing today are the result of that ongoing neglect,” Vernon Morris, chief executive officer with the Independent First Nations Alliance (IFNA), said in a release Wednesday.